4.7. Statistical Analysis

Differences in the frequencies of miRNA polymorphisms in control and patient groups were assessed using Fisher’s exact test and a logistic regression model. The odds ratios (ORs) adjusted OR (AORs), and 95% confidence intervals were calculated, and the mean and SD and percentages were determined. Data analysis was performed using MedCalc, v. 12.1.4 (MedCalc, Ostend, Belgium) and GraphPad Prism 4.0 (GraphPad, San Diego, CA, USA) software. The HAPSTAT program (v.3.0, www.bios.unc.edu/~lin/hapstat/ (accessed on 16 March 2017)) was used with a strong synergistic effect to estimate the frequency of polymorphic diploidy, with p < 0.05 considered as statistically significant. The false discovery rate (FDR) was used to adjust multiple comparisons, and an FDR-adjusted p value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant [68]. We used StatsDirect (Altrincham, UK) software to perform a regression analysis of miRNA polymorphism genotypes and risk factors. Genetic interaction analysis was performed with the open-source MDR software package (v.2.0) available from www.epistasis.org (accessed on 12 October 2017). The MDR method consists of two main steps [69,70]. We used genetic interaction analysis to predict miRNA target genes using TargetScanHuman (http://www.targetscan.org (accessed on 14 May 2017)).