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Abstract:
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Febrile seizures (FS), the most common neurological event in childhood, affect up to 5% of children ages 6 months to 5 years may occur naturally during the course of bacterial or viral infection or, in some cases, after vaccine administration. Epidemiological studies exploring risk factors for FS have had limited success in identifying genetic components. Some reports identified mutations in genes encoding for ion-channels that presumably lead to neuronal hyper-excitability, and hence lowering the seizure threshold. In this paper, we propose a method that combines data on individual genes obtained from published genetic studies of FS together with the available information for signaling pathways for those same genes into one gene network. We then apply network analysis to identify potentially new candidate genes that are more likely to be associated with FS and/or their symptomology. Given the complexity of the network where nodes are connected using different genetic topologies and correlation structures, we do statistical inference using resampling approaches of the gene signaling pathways to determine the important nodes.
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