Neutrophil-mediated immune response as a possible mechanism of acute unilateral vestibulopathy

Acute unilateral vestibulopathy (AUV) is the third most common peripheral vestibular disorder after BPPV and Meniere’s disease. Several hypotheses have been proposed for the etiology of AUV including viral infection, vascular occlusion, and autoimmune disease, but the exact pathogenesis still remains unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the underlying pathogenesis of AUV using the gene expression profiling combined with bioinformatic analysis. Total RNAs were extracted from peripheral blood mononuclear cells of 10 AUV patients and 10 normal controls. Using the Affymetrix Human Clariom S Assay, the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between AUV and normal control samples were screened by the cut-off criteria (|fold changes| > 1.5 and p-value < 0.05). Functional enrichment analysis for DEGs was performed using Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis, and the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network was constructed using the STRING database.