BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Inflammation
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1571074
This article is part of the Research TopicEmerging Insights into Immunological Mechanisms in Neurodegenerative, Neurogenetic, and Neurometabolic DiseasesView all 4 articles
Peripheral Monocyte Transcriptional Signatures of Inflammation and Oxidative Stress in Parkinson's Disease
Provisionally accepted
Aaron D. Thome1,2
Jinghong Wang1,2Farah Atassi1Jason R. Thonhoff1,2
Alireza Faridar1,2
WEIHUA ZHAO1,2
David R. Beers1,2Eugene Lai1,2
Stanley Hersh Appel1,2*- 1Houston Methodist Neurological Institute, Houston, Texas, United States
- 2Houston Methodist Research Institute, Houston, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by dopaminergic neuron loss in the substantia nigra, which is accompanied by immune dysfunction and chronic inflammation. Peripheral monocytes, key players in systemic inflammation, cross the blood-brain barrier and alter PD etiology and progression. To define the role of peripheral monocytes, cross-sectional studies of RNA transcripts isolated from PD monocytes were compared with age- and sex-matched control monocytes. After stratification by Hoehn & Yahr (H&Y) stage, inflammatory transcripts IL-6, IL-1β, ARG1, CD163, and CCR2 were upregulated in PD monocytes and increased with disease burden. Furthermore, PPARGC1A (PGC-1α), GPX4, NFE2L2 (NRF2), and SIRT3 decreased with increasing disease burden, while only SIRT1 expression increased, reflecting oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysregulation. Overall, the PD monocyte transcripts correlated with PD disease burden as monitored by H&Y, UPDRS total, UPDRS Part 3, ADL, and disease duration. This study demonstrated that dysregulation of inflammation and oxidative stress pathways contributed to disease progression in PD. Monocytes may serve as biomarkers for tracking clinical symptoms and could be leveraged as targets for therapeutic intervention.
Keywords: Parkinson's disease, Monocytes, Inflammation, Neuroinflammation, Oxidative Stress, peripheral biomarkers, neurodegeneration, neuroimmunology
Received: 04 Feb 2025; Accepted: 02 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Thome, Wang, Atassi, Thonhoff, Faridar, ZHAO, Beers, Lai and Appel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Stanley Hersh Appel, Houston Methodist Research Institute, Houston, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.