Dysregulation of Circulatory Levels of lncRNAs in Parkinson's disease

Abstract Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common progressive neurodegenerative disorder. The emerging evidence suggests that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are involved in the pathogenesis of PD. In this study, we used gene expression profiles from GEO database to construct a PD-specific lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA ceRNA network. Functional enrichment analysis suggested that ceRNA network might participate in the development of PD. The PPI network was constructed to identify these interactions between proteins translated by the screened differentially expressed genes, and the ceRNA subnetwork based on five hub genes was set up. In a cohort of 32 PD patients and 31 healthy controls, the expression of 10 DElncRNAs (TTC3-AS1, LINC01259, ZMYND10-AS1, CHRM3-AS1, MYO16-AS1, AGBL5-IT1, HOTAIRM1, RABGAP1L-IT1, HLCS-IT1, and LINC00393) were further verified. Consistent with the microarray data, expression of LINC01259 was lower in total patients compared with total controls (P = 0.008), and other lncRNAs expression levels were not significantly different in the two groups. Intriguingly, such difference was only observed between male patients and male controls when dividing study participants based on their gender (P = 0.016). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that LINC01259 has diagnostic power of 0.694. Moreover, expression of LINC01259 was not correlated with age of patients, disease duration, disease stage, MDS-UPDRS and MMSE. The current study provides further evidence for dysregulation of lncRNAs in the circulation of PD patients and revealed LINC01259 has clinical potential as a biomarker for PD diagnosis.