Expression data between human degenerative and non-degenerative intervertebral discs

Disc Degeneration is a multifactorial disease which cause severe constant chronic pain. The development of disc degeneration could involve both genetic and environmental factors, so it's important to elucidate the difference in gene expression profiles between degenerative and non-degenerative discs from elderly patients and younger patients, respectively. Affymetrix GeneChip Human Genome U133A Array was used to derive gene expression profiles and identified genes that would express at significantly different levels between degenerative and non-degenerative samples. Human intervertebral disc tissues were harvested from elderly and younger patients with degenerative disc disease and adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, respectively, for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix microarrays. One degenerative sample was compared to one non-degenerative sample in the same microarray run, and comparative analyses were performed in triplicate. Gene whose expression levels varied across the samples with a log ratio >0.5 or <-0.5 were selected as the genes related to disc degeneration.