Objective Although depressive symptoms and inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (CRP) have been independently shown to increase the onset of type 2 diabetes (T2DM), whether depressive symptoms ...modify the effect of inflammatory marker CRP on the onset of T2DM is unknown. Methods In a sample of 3447 participants (25 years old to 74 years old) followed for a mean of 16.7 (±6.1) years (57,540 person-years) from the MONICA/KORA German population-based cohort, we investigated the modification effect of depressive symptoms on the association between standardized highly sensitive CRP levels (mg/L; measured from non-fasting venous blood) and the risk of clinically validated T2DM using stratified Cox Proportional Hazards models adjusted for sociodemographic, lifestyle, Results In the total sample, 13.4% participants developed type 2 diabetes during the follow-up period. In the fully adjusted models, depressive symptoms and increasing CRP levels were independently associated with 1.25 (95% CI =1.01–1.54, p = 0.04) and 1.08 (95% CI = 1.01–1.16, p = 0.02) of increased risk of T2DM, respectively. However, following a significant interaction between depressive symptoms and CRP levels (p = 0.02), analyses stratified according to depressive symptoms revealed that participants with depressive symptoms had an 11% (HR 1.11; 95% CI 1.01-1.19; p< 0.001) increased risk of T2DM, whereas participants without depressive symptoms did not reach significance in their risk of T2DM onset (HR 0.99; 0.89-1.07; p = 0.83). Conclusion The risk of increasing CRP levels on incident T2DM are more pronounced in participants who have depressive symptoms.
The fast development of microbial production strains for basic and fine chemicals is increasingly carried out in small scale cultivation systems to allow for higher throughput. Such parallelized ...systems create a need for new rapid online detection systems to quantify the respective target compound. In this regard, biosensors, especially genetically encoded Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based biosensors, offer tremendous opportunities. As a proof-of-concept, we have created a toolbox of FRET-based biosensors for the ratiometric determination of l-lysine in fermentation broth.
: The sensor toolbox was constructed based on a sensor that consists of an optimized central lysine-/arginine-/ornithine-binding protein (LAO-BP) flanked by two fluorescent proteins (enhanced cyan fluorescent protein (ECFP), Citrine). Further sensor variants with altered affinity and sensitivity were obtained by circular permutation of the binding protein as well as the introduction of flexible and rigid linkers between the fluorescent proteins and the LAO-BP, respectively.
The sensor prototype was applied to monitor the extracellular l-lysine concentration of the l-lysine producing
(
) strain DM1933 in a BioLector
microscale cultivation device. The results matched well with data obtained by HPLC analysis and the Ninhydrin assay, demonstrating the high potential of FRET-based biosensors for high-throughput microbial bioprocess optimization.
The purpose of this study was to examine whether physical activity (PA) and muscular strength (MS) are related to polypharmacy. Our cross‐sectional analysis was based on 711 patients with ...multimorbidity (MMB), aged 65‐94 years, who participated in the KORA‐Age study. Participants underwent a face‐to‐face interview and extensive physical examinations including anthropometric measurements, registration of chronic diseases, determination of health‐related behaviors (smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, etc.), collection of blood samples and measurement of hand‐grip strength. PPha was defined as the use of >4 drugs and MMB as having ≥2 of 13 chronic diseases. Prevalence of PPha was 44.6% (n=317), and a significant difference was found in the number of drugs used between participants with and without PPha (7.2±2.1 vs 2.5±1.2, P<.001). Patients in the lower compared to the upper tertile of physical activity had a significantly increased odds to be on PPha (OR: 1.64, 95% CI: 1.05‐2.56, P=.031) after controlling for age, gender, BMI, family status, education, alcohol intake, smoking habits, number of diseases, hs‐CRP, and telomere length. On the contrary, no significant association between muscular strength and PPha was found (OR: 1.04, 95% CI: 0.66‐1.63, P=.873) after multivariable adjustment. Among older persons with MMB, lower levels of physical activity, but not low muscular strength, are associated with higher odds of PPha. Increasing the levels of physical activity appears to be highly recommended in order to potentially reduce the risk of PPha among multimorbid persons aged 65 and older.
Aims/hypothesis
Low-grade inflammation and endothelial dysfunction may play a role in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. We evaluated whether a diet high in fatty fish, ...bilberries and wholegrain products (Healthy Diet) improves biomarkers reflecting inflammation and endothelial dysfunction in individuals with impaired glucose metabolism.
Methods
We recruited individuals with impaired glucose metabolism and features of the metabolic syndrome into a 12 week, parallel design, dietary intervention trial conducted at the Department of Clinical Nutrition, University of Eastern Finland (Kuopio, Finland). Randomisation was performed by matching according to sex and medians of age, BMI and fasting plasma glucose of the study population at screening. The primary endpoint in the present study was the change in plasma inflammatory markers and the measurements were performed blinded to group assignment. High-sensitivity (hs) C-reactive protein (CRP) and E-selectin responses were also analysed separately in participants not using statins (
n
= 76).
Results
Altogether, 131 individuals were assigned to either the Healthy Diet (
n
= 44), a whole-grain-enriched diet (WGED) (
n
= 42) or a control (
n
= 45) diet, and 104 participants (mean ± SD: age 59 ± 7 years; BMI 31.1 ± 3.5 kg/m
2
) who had completed the study, were analysed (Healthy Diet
n
= 36, WGED
n
= 34 and control diet
n
= 34). Plasma E-selectin decreased only in the Healthy Diet group. This occurred in all group participants (
p
< 0.05) and also after excluding participants using statins (
p
< 0.05). Plasma hsCRP levels decreased in the Healthy Diet (median −17%,
p
< 0.05) and WGED (median −27%,
p
< 0.01) groups in participants not using statins. Controlling for confounding factors, including BMI or insulin sensitivity, did not alter the results. A greater increase in plasma concentration of very-long-chain
n
-3 fatty acids and in the intake of fibre during the study was associated with a greater decrease in plasma E-selectin (
p
< 0.05). The intake of test breads consumed during the Healthy Diet and WGED interventions was inversely associated with the change in hsCRP levels (
p
< 0.001).
Conclusions/interpretation
Our results suggest that the combined effect of fatty fish, bilberries and wholegrain products may improve endothelial dysfunction and inflammation in overweight and obese individuals at high risk of developing diabetes.
Trial registration:
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00573781
Funding:
The study was funded by the Academy of Finland (117844 and 118590 to M. Uusitupa; 131460 to K. Poutanen; 130469 to H. Mykkänen and 131593 to V. D. F. de Mello); the Kuopio University Hospital (5106, 5168, 5254 to M. Uusitupa); the Finnish Diabetes Research Foundation; the Sigrid Juselius Foundation; the Nordic Centre of Excellence on ‘Systems biology in controlled dietary interventions and cohort studies’ (SYSDIET; 070014); and the European Commission in the Communities 6th Framework Programme, Project HEALTHGRAIN (FOOD-CT-2005-514008).
The global polarization of Λ hyperons along the total orbital angular momentum of a relativistic heavy-ion collision is presented based on the high statistics data samples collected in Au+Au ...collisions at sNN=2.4 GeV and Ag+Ag at 2.55 GeV with the High-Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer (HADES) at GSI, Darmstadt. This is the first measurement below the strangeness production threshold in nucleon-nucleon collisions. Results are reported as a function of the collision centrality as well as a function of the hyperon's transverse momentum (pT) and rapidity (yCM) for the range of centrality 0–40%. We observe a strong centrality dependence of the polarization with an increasing signal towards peripheral collisions. For mid-central (20 – 40%) collisions the polarization magnitudes are 〈PΛ〉(%)=6.8±1.3(stat.)±2.1(syst.) for Au+Au and 〈PΛ〉(%)=6.2±0.4(stat.)±0.6(syst.) for Ag+Ag, which are the largest values observed so far. This observation thus provides a continuation of the increasing trend previously observed by STAR and contrasts expectations from recent theoretical calculations predicting a maximum in the region of collision energies about 3 GeV. The observed polarization is of a similar magnitude as predicted by 3D-fluid-dynamics and the UrQMD plus thermal vorticity model and significantly above results from the AMPT model.
Phenotypic, genotypic, and toxin gene analyses have not yet been done all in one for the Nigerian Staphylococcus aureus population. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the molecular ...epidemiology and genetic diversity of S. aureus strains at the largest university clinic in Ibadan, Nigeria. From 1,300 patients' clinical samples collected at the University Teaching Hospital in Ibadan, Nigeria, during a 1-year-surveillance in 2007, 346 nonduplicate S. aureus isolates were obtained. All isolates underwent antibiotic susceptibility testing, toxin gene analysis, multilocus sequence typing, agr group typing, and spa typing. For methicillin (meticillin)-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec) typing was also performed. Of the 346 isolates, 20.23% were methicillin resistant. Thirty-three patients' isolates (47.15%) fulfilled the definition criteria for community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA) according to a review of the medical charts. The majority of MRSA strains analyzed were isolated from surgical or pediatric patients. The commonest types of MRSA infection identified were surgical-site infections (>70%), whereas those for CA-MRSA were conjunctivitis and otitis (19 patients 57.6%) and accidental skin and subcutaneous tissue infections (14 patients 42.4%). The methicillin-susceptible S. aureus strains (ST1, ST5, ST15, ST7, ST8, ST25, ST30, ST72, ST80, ST121, and ST508) were heterogeneous by phenotypic and genotypic analyses. The first report of a Panton-Valentine leukocidin-positive ST88 strain (agr III, SCCmec IV) in Nigeria, as well as genetic analyses of this strain, is presented in this study. The ST88 strain was resistant to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole as well as to penicillin and oxacillin. CA-MRSA infections are increasing rapidly among young patients with ophthalmologic and auricular infections. Urban regions with populations of lower socioeconomic status and evidence of overcrowding appear to be at high risk for the emergence of this clone.
Diabet. Med. 27, 1004–1011 (2010)
Aims Adipocyte‐derived hormones seem to be involved in the development of Type 2 diabetes. Therefore, we assessed the association between the proinflammatory ...adipokine leptin and incident Type 2 diabetes, taking into account interactions between leptin and the anti‐inflammatory adipokine adiponectin.
Methods Using a case–cohort design, serum levels of adipokines were measured in 460 cases with incident Type 2 diabetes and 1474 non‐cases selected from a source population of 7936 middle‐aged subjects participating in the population‐based Monitoring of Trends and Determinants in Cardiovascular Disease (MONICA)/Cooperative Health Research in the Region of Augsburg (KORA) Augsburg cohort study between 1984 and 1995 and followed up until 2002 (mean follow‐up 10.9±4.7 years).
Results High leptin and low adiponectin levels were associated with an increased Type 2 diabetes risk. The multivariable adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) comparing tertile extremes were 1.71 (1.12–2.63) for leptin (top vs. bottom tertile) and 2.65 (1.88–3.76) for adiponectin (bottom vs. top tertile), respectively. There was a significant interaction between leptin and adiponectin, with highest diabetes risk being observed in individuals with high leptin and low adiponectin levels (P = 0.029 for interaction).While the addition of adiponectin to a basic risk factor model improved model prediction (Δ area under the curve 0.011), the change in model prediction was only marginal after the addition of leptin (Δ area under the curve 0.002).
Conclusions Our findings indicate that the two adipokines leptin and adiponectin interact in modulating Type 2 diabetes risk, but adiponectin is more strongly associated with Type 2 diabetes risk than leptin.
Species are often classified in discrete categories, such as solitary, subsocial, social and eusocial based on broad qualitative features of their social systems. Often, however, species fall between ...categories or species within a category may differ from one another in ways that beg for a quantitative measure of their sociality level. Here, we propose such a quantitative measure in the form of an index that is based on three fundamental features of a social system: (1) the fraction of the life cycle that individuals remain in their social group, (2) the proportion of nests in a population that contain multiple vs. solitary individuals and (3) the proportion of adult members of a group that do not reproduce, but contribute to communal activities. These are measures that should be quantifiable in most social systems, with the first two reflecting the tendencies of individuals to live in groups as a result of philopatry, grouping tendencies and intraspecific tolerance, and the third potentially reflecting the tendencies of individuals to exhibit reproductive altruism. We argue that this index can serve not only as a way of ranking species along a sociality scale, but also as a means of determining how level of sociality correlates with other aspects of the biology of a group of organisms. We illustrate the calculation of this index for the cooperative social spiders and the African mole‐rats and use it to analyse how sex ratios and interfemale spacing correlate with level of sociality in spider species in the genus Anelosimus.
Thermophoretic behavior of a free protein changes upon ligand binding and gives access to information on the binding constants. The Soret effect has also been proven to be a promising tool to gain ...information on the hydration layer, as the temperature dependence of the thermodiffusion behavior is sensitive to solute-solvent interactions. In this work, we perform systematic thermophoretic measurements of the protein streptavidin (STV) and of the complex STV with biotin (B) using thermal diffusion forced Rayleigh scattering (TDFRS). Our experiments show that the temperature sensitivity of the Soret coefficient is reduced for the complex compared to the free protein. We discuss our data in comparison with recent quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS) measurements. As the QENS measurement has been performed in heavy water, we perform additional measurements in water/heavy water mixtures. Finally, we also elucidate the challenges arising from the quantiative thermophoretic study of complex multicomponent systems such as protein solutions.
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