Construction of a ceRNA immunoregulatory network related to the development of vascular dementia through a weighted gene coexpression network analysis

Email: wangvenbo@126.com; liyujie.11@163.com. Background: To date, vascular dementia (VaD) lacks effective treatment in clinical practice. There is also growing evidence that VaD may be closely related to the immune response. The development of highthroughput technology, and the recently discovered group of new mediators called competitive endogenous RNAs (ceRNA), provides a unique opportunity to study the immunomodulation of VaD. Methods: In this study, we used gene expression profiles in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database to obtain immune-related gene coexpression modules through a weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA) and gene enrichment analysis. We extracted and merged long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) and microRNA (miRNA) expressions from the GEO database and mapped them with related databases. Subsequently, we used Cytoscape to construct a lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA network, and then we performed an enrichment analysis on the mRNAs in the network to determine their regulatory function. Subsequently, we used an ImmuCellAI immune infiltration analysis and constructed a ceRNA sub-network of related immune cells. Finally, we conducted a gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) to determine the potential regulatory pathways of the key factors. Results: As a result, we identified the blue module as the key module of immunity and constructed the related CeRNA network. Immune infiltration analysis showed that natural killer T (NKT) cells may be the key immune cells of VaD. Using a Pearson correlation analysis, we identified that B4GALT1, PPP1R3B,