Status of the Parkinson’s disease gene family expression in non-small-cell lung cancer

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study is to detect the Parkinson’s disease gene family mRNA relative expression in the non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tumor tissue and analyze the association between tumor characteristics and the Parkinson’s disease gene family. METHODS: Tumor tissue and tumor-adjacent tissue of 114 NSCLC patients were collected and SYBR quantitative analysis was used to detect the relative expression level of nine Parkinson’s disease gene mRNAs. Then, paired sample test, two-sided Student’s t-test, or two-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test was performed to analyze the mRNA relative expression level of nine Parkinson’s disease gene mRNAs in different gender, tumor histology, and tumor stage. RESULTS: Overexpression in the tumors was detected in 46/114 (40.35 %) PARK1/4, 74/114 (64.91 %) PARK2, 104/114 (91.23 %) PARK5, 95/114 (83.33 %) PARK6, 80/114 (70.18 %) PARK7, 55/114 (48.25 %) PARK8, 100/114 (87.72 %) PARK9, 55/114 (48.25 %) PARK15, and 99/114 (86.84 %) glucocerebrosidase (GBA). Five genes PARK5 (91.23 %), PARK6 (83.33 %), PARK7 (70.18 %), PARK9 (87.72 %), and GBA (86.84 %) were supposed to be overexpressed in the lung tumor tissues compared with tumor-adjacent tissues. There was no significant difference in PARK1/4, PARK2, PARK5, PARK9, and GBA mRNA expression by different tumor stage, whereas, PARK6, PARK7, PARK8, and PARK15 mRNA expression were found to have significant difference in the comparison of different tumor stages. The expression of PARK6 (P = 0.01, P = 0.03) and PARK15 (P < 0.001, P < 0.001) were significantly higher in stages I and II when compared with stage III, respectively. NSCLC patients in stage I showed the higher expression PARK7 compared to the patients in stage II (P = 0.003). CONCLUSIONS: The high expression of PARK6, PARK7, and PARK15 might lead to the occurrence of a primary NSCLC tumor, and the tumor with a decreasing expression of these three genes tends to be stages II and III. The results of our study indicate that the Parkinson’s disease gene family may be a potential marker for the prediction of NSCLC. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12957-015-0646-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.