中国神经再生研究(英文版) ›› 2024, Vol. 19 ›› Issue (on line): 1-7.

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Peripheral blood RNA biomarkers can predict the severity of lesions in degenerative cervical myelopathy

  

  • 出版日期:2024-01-01 发布日期:2023-11-16

Zhenzhong Zheng, Jialin Chen, Jinghong Xu, Bin Jiang, Lei Li, Yawei Li, Yuliang Dai*, Bing Wang*   

  1. Department of Spine Surgery, The Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan Province, China
  • Online:2024-01-01 Published:2023-11-16
  • Contact: Bing Wang, MD, PhD, wbxyeyy@csu.edu.cn; Yuliang Dai, MD, squaer_d@hotmail.com.
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by Hunan Provincial Key Research and Development Program, No. 2021SK2002 (to BW), and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province of China (General Program), No. 2021JJ30938 (to YL).

摘要: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9647-5275 (Bing Wang)

Abstract: Degenerative cervical myelopathy is a common cause of spinal cord injury, with longer symptom duration and higher myelopathy severity indicating a worse prognosis. While numerous studies have investigated serological biomarkers for acute spinal cord injury, the exploration of such biomarkers for diagnosing degenerative cervical myelopathy remains scarce. In this study, we included 30 patients with degenerative cervical myelopathy (51.3 ± 7.3 years old, 12 women and 18 men), 7 healthy controls (25.7 ± 1.7 years old, 1 women and 6 men), as well as 9 patients with cervical spondylotic radiculopathy (51.9 ± 8.6 years old, 3 women and 6 men). Results showed that the blood samples of the three groups showed obvious differences in transcriptomic characteristics. Enrichment analysis identified 128 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) enriched in neurological disabilities. Using LASSO analysis, we constructed a five-gene model (TBCD, TPM2, PNKD, EIF4G2, and AP5Z1) to diagnose degenerative cervical myelopathy with an accuracy of 93.5%. One-gene models (TCAP and SDHA) distinguished mild and severe degenerative cervical myelopathy with accuracies of 83.3% and 76.7%, respectively. Signatures of two immune cell types (memory B cells and memory-activated CD4+ T cells) predicted levels of lesions in degenerative cervical myelopathy with 80% accuracy. Our results suggest that peripheral blood RNA biomarkers can serve as potential tools for predicting the severity of lesions in degenerative cervical myelopathy.

Key words: biomarkers, candidate genes, degenerative cervical myelopathy, gene expression analysis, immune cell types, neurological disabilities, peripheral blood, RNA profiles, spinal cord injury