Is There a Relationship Between Psoriasis and Hepatitis C?: a Meta-analysis and Bioinformatics Investigation

Abstract

Background: The relationship between psoriasis and hepatitis C was previously controversial, so our purpose is to investigate this connection.Methods: We conducted a systematic review of the case-control, cross-sectional and cohort studies examining the association between psoriasis and hepatitis C in PubMed, EMBASE and Cochrane library databases and investigated the overlapping genes between psoriasis targets and hepatitis C targets using bioinformatics analysis. Based on overlapping genes and hub nodes, we also constructed the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and module respectively, followed by the pathway enrichment analysis. Results: We included 11 publications that reported a total of 11 studies (8 cross-sectional and 3 case-control). The case–control and cross-sectional studies included 25,047 psoriasis patients and 4,091,631 controls in total. Psoriasis was associated with a significant increase of prevalent hepatitis C (OR 1.72; 95% confidence interval [CI] (1.17-2.52)). A total of 389 significant genes were common to both hepatitis C and psoriasis, which mainly involved IL6, TNF, IL10, ALB, STAT3 and CXCL8. The module and pathway enrichment analyses showed that the common genes had the potential to influence varieties of biological pathways, including the inflammatory response, cytokine activity, cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, Toll-like receptor signaling pathway, which play an important role in the pathogenesis of hepatitis C and psoriasis.Conclusion: Patients with psoriasis display increased prevalence of hepatitis C and the basic related mechanisms between hepatitis C and psoriasis had been preliminarily clarified.

A nationwide population-based cohort study of the incidence of severe and rare infections among adults with psoriasis in Denmark

“…In this patient group, there were higher rates of infections leading to hospitalization. For any rare infections, the association for hepatitis remained significant when infections were limited to only those leading to hospitalization, which supports a recent systematic review showing that patients with psoriasis have an increased prevalence of HVC 31 . The current subanalysis showed a variability of infection risk based on severity of disease; however, this might be a result of the methodology used to screen patients.…”

“…For any rare infections, the association for hepatitis remained significant when infections were limited to only those leading to hospitalization, which supports a recent systematic review showing that patients with psoriasis have an increased prevalence of HVC. 31 The current subanalysis showed a variability of infection risk based on severity of disease; however, this might be a result of the methodology used to screen patients. Similar to the previous findings, the current subanalysis also reported significantly higher rates of any, severe, and rare infections among patients with severe psoriasis.…”