Periodontitis association with diabetes and heart ischemia: a data-mining study

OBJECTIVES: The leader gene (LG) approach is a data mining method based on the systematic search for genes involved in a specific process and their ranking according to the number of interactions with the other genes identified. Genes in the highest rank are termed LGs, since they may be supposed to play an important role in the process, and they can become targets of focused experimentation. Application of this method to human periodontitis gave promising results, confirmed experimentally. Periodontitis is associated with diabetes and heart ischemia. However, molecular basis of these relationships are not clear. In this study, the LG approach is applied to investigate molecular mechanisms underlying associations between periodontitis and diabetes, and between periodontitis and heart ischemia.

METHODS: Genes involved in each single disease were identified by systematic queries to dedicated databases. Interactions among genes involved in each single disease were calculated using STRING database. LGs were calculated with K-means clustering. Resulting LGs were compared and interactions among them were calculated. Sinusitis was chosen as negative control being a inflammatory infectious disease like periodontitis.

RESULTS:

CONCLUSIONS: These theoretical results might suggest that identified LGs could have an important role in the associations between periodontitis and diabetes or heart ischemia, because of their high number of interactions with the other genes involved.  The role of LGs may be further investigated with targeted RT-PCR.