The occurrence and development of abdominal aortic aneurysm may be related to the energy metabolism disorder and local inflammation.

BACKGROUND: The cellular mechanism of the formation of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is very complicated. A series of sophisticated events eventually led to significant pathological changes in the anatomical structure and function of the arterial wall and they are still not clear nowadays.

METHODS: We pooled publicly available GEO datasets (GSE57691 and GSE47472) to get a comprehensive comparisons between normal tissues and AAA tissues to try to reveal molecular mechanism underlying the disease. Total 63 AAA samples and 18 normal tissue samples were compared and we fond that there were 784 significantly different gene (DEGs, threshold set as adjusted P  < 0.05 and Log FC < 1) were identified. At the same time, we validate the possible signaling factor expression of AAA by comparing the normal tissue of the human body with the AAA tissue.

RESULTS: In the pathway enrichment, we found that FOXP3 related signaling pathways, inflammation-related cytokine signaling pathways, interleukin-8-CXCR1 related signaling pathways and VEGFA and FGFR1 related signal pathway were significantly enrichmented. In Weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), we found that the key hub genes were significantly related to lipid catabolic metabolism, which further verified the possibility that AAA might relate to energy metabolism disorders.

CONCLUSION: Based on the comprehensive analysis of previous high-throughput data and the validation of basic experiments, we found that the occurrence of AAA may be related to energy metabolism disorders and local inflammation.