Unravealing the Relationship Between Traumatic Brain Injury and Parkinson’s Disease by Transcriptome Profiling

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is caused by the disruption in the brain’s normal function due to some external forces like jolt or blow to the head. While, Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder which starts with tremor in one hand and gradually worsens over time. The connection between these two important diseases is not yet fully understood. Thus, we have proposed a transcriptome-based approach to identify the interrelation between TBI and PD. Determining the common over-or under gene expression pattern could reveal common pathobiological pathways that may explain the linkage between these two diseases. A total of 609 differentially expressed genes were discovered as commonly expressed genes for both TBI and PD. Further, the pathway studies reveal that nine genes such as NDUFA6, SLC17A7, EMXI, PLPPR1, FEZF2 and DUSP14, SERF1B, HBB and ABR made a significant impact on the disease progression of TBI and PD. In particular, SERF1B and HBB and ABR were considered as the top-ranked genes based on the pathway analysis and functional enrichment calculations. We believe that in-depth study on the identified biomarkers will provide possible treatments strategies to overcome TBI and PD.