Objective：This study aims to screen and verify microRNA in neonatal acute respiratory distress syndrome （ARDS），preliminary study on miR-6833-3p level and its diagnostic effect in serum of ARDS neonate. Methods：Twenty-five infants with ARDS and 32 controls were investigated in this study. The miRNA microarray was utilized to explore the expression of miRNA in serum. Real-time PCR was used to verify the reproducibility of diagnostic chips and the miRNA target prediction on miRNAs that were over five folds differences between groups. Furthermore，correlation was conducted between levels of miR-6833-3p and APACHE Ⅱ scores. The diagnostic effect，sensitivity，and specificity were analyzed according to receiver operating characteristic（ROC） curve. Results：Twenty-four aberrant miRNAs were screened out as highly expressed，and among these miRNAs there were 8 miRNAs with over five folds differences of expression：miR-31-5p，miR-4754，miR-6833-3p and miR-192-3p were up-regulation；miR-362-3p，miR-11a，miR-7a-2-3p and miR-1382 were down-regulation. Through verification，it was found that the expression of miR-6833-3p in the plasma of the ARDS group was significantly up-regulated（P < 0.01） and positively correlated with the acute physiological score in APACHE Ⅱ score（r=0.731，P < 0.001）. The miR-6833-3p may be closely related to PI3-K/Akt and MAPK signaling pathways according to target gene prediction analysis. ROC curve showed that area under the curve was 0.848，with optimum threshold was 1.03，Youden’s index was 0.59 with sensitivity of 84.55% and specificity of 75.36%. Conclusion：The miR-6833-3p was significantly raised in neonatal ARDS，and may has certain clinical diagnostic efficacy as a new biomarker of neonatal ARDS.