The prevalence of human endogenous retroviruses in cerebrospinal fluids from patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
BACKGROUND
About 8% of human genome is constituted by retroviral sequences. Some of these have been classified as human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), which have been implicated in both health and disease. Recently, indirect evidence for a possible role of retroviral elements in neurological diseases has been provided by several studies.


OBJECTIVE
In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the relationship between HERVs and sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), one of the human forms of prion diseases.


METHODS
We investigated the prevalence of HERV families by RT-PCR in cell-free cerebrospinal fluids (CSFs) samples from normal controls, patients with sporadic CJD and other neurological diseases (OND).


RESULTS
The incidence rate of some HERV families were significantly different in CSF samples from the group of sporadic CJD compared to samples from normal individuals; HERV-W (P=0.001), T (P=0.039), FRD (P<0.001), L (P=0.003) and ERV-9 (P<0.001) and the incidence rate of HERV-W (P=0.021) and HERV-L (P=0.049) were significantly increased in CSF samples from the group of sporadic CJD compared to samples from OND group. Moreover, our results from combining frequencies of two HERV families indicated that the prevalence of many combination groups was significantly different between sporadic CJD and normal CSF samples and between two patients' CSF samples. In addition, a large number of HERV sequences were newly identified in CSFs from normal and diseased individuals.


CONCLUSIONS
Our study about distinct prevalence patterns of HERVs reflects that some HERVs families may be associated with the development of prion diseases, and considered as a candidate marker for the diagnosis of sporadic CJD.
Jeong
Byung-Hoon
BH
Ilsong Institute of Life Science, Hallym University, Anyang, Kyonggi-do 431-060, South Korea.
Lee
Yun-Jung
YJ
Carp
Richard I
RI
Kim
Yong-Sun
YS
D002555:Cerebrospinal Fluid / Q000821:virology*; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D007562:Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome / Q000821:virology*; D020077:Endogenous Retroviruses / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D006801:Humans; D010802:Phylogeny; D015995:Prevalence; D012367:RNA, Viral / Q000134:cerebrospinal fluid; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
D012367:RNA, Viral