To date, more than 5000 miRNAs have been identified in animals across the lowest and the highest
species, some 800 of them are found in humans. To have better understanding of how miRNAs function in the
heart, it is necessary to have an idea about which miRNAs exist in the heart. This chapter focuses on
cardiovascular-expressed miRNAs or the miRNA profiles in heart and vessel. Specifically, the miRNAs existing
in the heart will be introduced by categories: cardiac-specific, muscle-specific, cardiac-enriched, and other
cardiac-expressed, in detail on their genomic locations and relative expression levels in normal cardiac tissues.
Alterations of miRNA signature under various diseased states of the heart are succinctly described and the
precautions in interpreting the profiling data are stated
