Inflammation plays a key role in the pathogenesis of many diseases, including cardiovascular disease and ischemic stroke. However, despite the existence of known inflammatory genes, the question of estimating their total number and the possibility of discovering new ones remains open. This study sought and analyzed genes involved in inflammation among genes related to cardiovascular disease and ischemic stroke. Human genes associated with ischemic stroke (N = 1177) and cardiovascular disease (N = 1756) were retrieved from the DisGeNET platform. Inflammatory and immune response genes were obtained from the Gene Ontology, NCBI, and Reactome databases. An additional list of 140 inflammatory genes was compiled based on our previously obtained data on the differential gene expression in a rat brain under transient middle cerebral artery occlusion. Genes that occurred simultaneously in both the inflammatory gene lists and gene lists of diseases were selected and considered. The resulting combined gene list included 1285 inflammatory genes. The NFKB1 and RELA genes demonstrated the highest frequencies across the various inflammatory gene selection resources we examined. Using a combination of experimental and bioinformatics approaches, a representative list of inflammatory genes important for the pathogenesis of ischemic stroke was compiled. The identified genes may be crucial for the development of anti-inflammatory therapeutic strategies for this disease.
Khvorykh et al. (Fri,) studied this question.