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. 2016 Sep 15:4:e2470.
doi: 10.7717/peerj.2470. eCollection 2016.

Integrated analysis of ischemic stroke datasets revealed sex and age difference in anti-stroke targets

Wen-Xing Li #  1   2 , Shao-Xing Dai #  2   3 , Qian Wang #  2   3 , Yi-Cheng Guo  2 , Yi Hong  4 , Jun-Juan Zheng  2   3 , Jia-Qian Liu  2   3 , Dahai Liu  4 , Gong-Hua Li  2   3 , Jing-Fei Huang  2   3   5   6
Affiliations

Integrated analysis of ischemic stroke datasets revealed sex and age difference in anti-stroke targets

Wen-Xing Li et al. PeerJ. .

Abstract

Ischemic stroke is a common neurological disorder and the burden in the world is growing. This study aims to explore the effect of sex and age difference on ischemic stroke using integrated microarray datasets. The results showed a dramatic difference in whole gene expression profiles and influenced pathways between males and females, and also in the old and young individuals. Furthermore, compared with old males, old female patients showed more serious biological function damage. However, females showed less affected pathways than males in young subjects. Functional interaction networks showed these differential expression genes were mostly related to immune and inflammation-related functions. In addition, we found ARG1 and MMP9 were up-regulated in total and all subgroups. Importantly, IL1A, ILAB, IL6 and TNF and other anti-stroke target genes were up-regulated in males. However, these anti-stroke target genes showed low expression in females. This study found huge sex and age differences in ischemic stroke especially the opposite expression of anti-stroke target genes. Future studies are needed to uncover these pathological mechanisms, and to take appropriate pre-prevention, treatment and rehabilitation measures.

Keywords: Anti-stroke target; Ischemic stroke; Sex and age difference.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Venn diagram of the differentially expressed genes grouped by sex and age.
(A) Up- and down-regulated genes in male and female groups (red and blue cycle). (B) Up- and down-regulated genes in old and young groups (yellow and green cycle). The junction of the circle shows the overlapped genes in the two groups.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Gene expression profiles of enrichment pathways.
(A) Gene expression profiles in male and female groups. (B) Gene expression profiles in old and young groups. Pathways are represented by different colors. The length of the first layer of lines outside the circle represents the expression value in ischemic stroke patients and the length of the second layer of lines within the circle represents the expression value in controls. The up- and down-regulated genes are marked as red and green lines in the third layer.
Figure 3
Figure 3. LogFC barplot of mapped anti-stroke target genes.
(A) LogFC in total group. (B) LogFC in male and female groups. (C) LogFC in old and young group. The horizontal dashed lines represent the logFC cutoff of the up- and down-regulated genes.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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