Genomics of Human Intracranial Aneurysm Wall

The pathogenesis of intracranial aneurysms (IAs) remains elusive. Most studies have focused on individual genes, or a few interrelated genes or products, at a time in human IA. However, a broad view of pathologic mechanisms has not been investigated by identifying pathogenic genes and their interaction in networks. Our study aimed to analyze global gene expression patterns in the IA wall. To our knowledge, our group was the first to perform Illumina microarray analysis on human IA via comparison of aneurysm wall and superficial temporal artery tissues from 6 consecutive patients. We adopted stringent statistical criteria to the individual genes; genes with a false discovery rate 2-fold change were selected as differentially expressed. To identify the overrepresented biologic pathways with the differentially expressed genes, we performed hypergeometric testing of the genes selected by relaxed criteria of P1.5. There are 326 distinct differentially expressed genes between IA and superficial temporal artery tissues (>2-fold change) with a false discovery rate