Spanish researchers manage to define altered genetic pathways in Parkinson's disease

MADRID, February 22 (EUROPA PRESS) –

A research team from Oviedo University managed to define modified genetic pathways in patients with Parkinson's disease from RNA from different brain areas of 114 people. The researchers succeeded in characterizing a series of new genes, new therapeutic targets and simple methods of early diagnosis.

The study, carried out in collaboration with the neurology department of the Central University Hospital of Asturias (HUCA), was carried out by the Group of Inverse Problems, Optimization and Machine Learning of the University of Oviedo, who analyzed the genetic data of 114 frozen brains (59 healthy people and 55 Parkinson's patients) from the Queen Square Neurological Brain Bank (UCL Institute of Neurology, London), obtaining ribonucleic acid (RNA) from different regions of the brain.

In the study published in the "Journal of Medical Informatics and Decision Making", several mathematical models based on artificial intelligence techniques have been developed to perform robust sampling of genetic pathways impaired by the disease because this type of pathology has high degree of indeterminacy. "This means, according to Professor Juan Luis Fernández-Martínez, that" there are multiple combinations of genes that could explain the development of the disease ".

Thus, they managed to predict Parkinson's patients with an accuracy of 89% using a genetic signature containing three genes: "GRHL1", "SBDS" and "RPS4Y1". "GRHL1" regulates lipid metabolism and is linked to progression and metastasis of colorectal cancer. For its part, "SBDS" regulates the mechanisms of stress and cell damage, while "RPS4Y1" does the same with viral replication mechanisms. This gene and others, such as "JARID1D", which are also important, are also linked to the development of Alzheimer's disease.

On the other hand, research links Parkinson's disease by some mechanisms to Alzheimer's disease and to different types of cancer (colon, colorectal cancer and prostate). "It is expected that these results will be clinically confirmed and lead to the design of new treatments," concluded Fernández-Martínez.