ABSTRACT
The relationship between autophagy and immunity has been well studied. However, little is known about the role of autophagy in the immune microenvironment during the progression of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). Therefore, this study aims to uncover the effect of autophagy on the immune microenvironment in the context of DCM. By investigating the autophagy gene expression differences between healthy donors and DCM samples, 23 dysregulated autophagy genes were identified. Using a series of bioinformatics methods, 13 DCM-related autophagy genes were screened and used to construct a risk prediction model, which can well distinguish DCM and healthy samples. Then, the connections between autophagy and immune responses including infiltrated immunocytes, immune reaction gene-sets and human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes were systematically evaluated. In addition, two autophagy-mediated expression patterns in DCM were determined via the unsupervised consensus clustering analysis, and the immune characteristics of different patterns were revealed. In conclusion, our study revealed the strong effect of autophagy on the DCM immune microenvironment and provided new insights to understand the pathogenesis and treatment of DCM.