Deep vein thrombosis inhibitor may play a therapeutic role in post-stroke patients.

Background: Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is associated with stroke. Here, we hypothesize that genes associated with DVT may also play roles in the development of stroke.

Methods: we firstly conducted large-scale literature based disease-gene relationship data analysis to explore the genes implicated with DVT and stroke. Further, a mega-analysis was conducted for each of these genes that were linked to DVT but not stroke, using 11 independent stroke RNA expression datasets (176 stroke cases and 102 healthy controls). Then, a multiple linear regression (MLR) model was employed to study possible influential factors on the gene expression levels in stroke. After that, a functional pathway analysis was performed to identify the potential biological linkage between stroke and the target genes suggested by mega-analysis.

Results: Over 81.10% genes implicated with DVT also suggested an association with stroke. Among the 24 DVT-specific genes, one DVT-inhibiting gene, SP1, presented significantly increased expression in stroke (LFC = 1.34, p-value = 0.0045). Pathway analysis showed that SP1 may play a therapeutic role in post-stroke patients by promoting multiple of stroke-inhibitors. Moreover, geographical region was indicated as an influential factor on the expression levels of SP1 in stroke samples (p-value = 0.037).

Conclusion: Our results suggested that DVT inhibitor SP1 could be a novel therapeutic target gene for post-stroke treatment. Further study of the potential relations between SP1 and stroke was guaranteed.