The authors wrote, “Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection poses a significant public health challenge and often leads to long-term health complications and even death. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder with a proposed viral etiology. HCV infection and PD have been previously suggested to be related.”
This study aimed to explore the potential correlation between HCV infections and the risk of developing PD by examining gene expression variations and identifying pathways common between PD and HCV infection using control-case microarray and RNA sequencing studies.
The researchers also aimed to gain more insight into how this correlation might differ between males and females and utilized a BioOptimatics meta-analysis, which integrates multiple datasets and stratifies the analysis by gender to detect any differential impacts that incorporate biological information with optimization techniques.
The authors indicated that most PD patients are males with an estimated male-to-female ratio of 1.5 to 2:1. However, research shows that women clear the HCV infection quicker, and its prevalence is higher in males. Moreover, variances in gene expression changes may partly explain the observed variances in PD incidence and HCV infection clearance by gender.
“It must be understood that the work presented here is bioinformatics-based in nature. Experimental validation of the suggested biological explanations should be pursued in the future,” the authors wrote.
The authors concluded, “Our results revealed that 19 genes, including MT1H, MYOM2, and RPL18, exhibited significant changes in expression in both diseases. Pathway and network analyses stratified by sex indicated that these gene expression changes were enriched in processes related to immune response regulation in females and immune cell activation in males.”
The authors noted that their findings suggest a possible correlation between HCV infections and PD, accentuating the significance of additional research to explore the underlying mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets involved.
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