Gene Expression Profiles Reveal the Potential Link between Parkinson’s Disease and Gastric Cancer

Abstract

Introduction: Gastric cancer (GC) is a cancer that develops from the lining of the stomach. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. Even though these two diseases seem to be distinct from each other, increasing evidences suggest that they might be linked. The objective of this study is two-fold. One is to explore if these two diseases are associated from the perspective of gene expression profiles. The other is to examine if race plays an interaction role on the association between these two diseases. Methods: Moderated t-tests or moderated paired t-tests were carried out to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the diseased people and the normal controls. Upon the overlapped DEGs between PD and GC, biological relevance was investigated using GeneCards database. Results and Discussion: Our analysis results showed that PD and GC are related to each other. Furthermore, our analysis suggest that these two diseases may be associated negatively with each other, and race is unlikely to play an interaction role on this association. Conclusions: This study may serve as a pilot study, and it will stimulate more work to investigate the link between distinct diseases using big omics data.