Chronic oral diseases are rarely studied together, especially with an emphasis on their common risk factors. This study examined the association of added sugar consumption on “chronic oral disease ...burden” among adolescents, with consideration of obesity and systemic inflammation pathways through structural equation modeling. A cross-sectional study was conducted of a complex random sample of adolescent students enrolled at public schools in São Luís, Brazil (n = 405). The outcome was chronic oral disease burden, a latent variable based on the presence of probing depth ≥4 mm, bleeding on probing, caries, and clinical consequences of untreated caries. The following hypotheses were tested: 1) caries and periodontal diseases among adolescents are correlated with each other; 2) added sugar consumption and obesity are associated with chronic oral disease burden; and 3) chronic oral disease burden is linked to systemic inflammation. Models were adjusted for socioeconomic status, added sugar consumption, oral hygiene behaviors, obesity, and serum levels of interleukin 6 (IL-6). All estimators of the latent variable chronic oral disease burden involved factor loadings ≥0.5 and P values <0.001, indicating good fit. Added sugar consumption (standardized coefficient SC = 0.212, P = 0.005), high IL-6 levels (SC = 0.130, P = 0.036), and low socioeconomic status (SC = −0.279, P = 0.001) were associated with increased chronic oral disease burden values. Obesity was associated with high IL-6 levels (SC = 0.232, P = 0.001). Visible plaque index was correlated with chronic oral disease burden (SC = 0.381, P < 0.001). Our finding that caries and periodontal diseases are associated with each other and with added sugar consumption, obesity, and systemic inflammation reinforces the guidance of the World Health Organization that any approach intended to prevent noncommunicable diseases should be directed toward common risk factors.
Abstract
The electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most commonly used exam for the evaluation of cardiovascular diseases. Here we propose that the age predicted by artificial intelligence (AI) from the raw ...ECG (ECG-age) can be a measure of cardiovascular health. A deep neural network is trained to predict a patient’s age from the 12-lead ECG in the CODE study cohort (
n
= 1,558,415 patients). On a 15% hold-out split, patients with ECG-age more than 8 years greater than the chronological age have a higher mortality rate (hazard ratio (HR) 1.79,
p
< 0.001), whereas those with ECG-age more than 8 years smaller, have a lower mortality rate (HR 0.78,
p
< 0.001). Similar results are obtained in the external cohorts ELSA-Brasil (
n
= 14,236) and SaMi-Trop (
n
= 1,631). Moreover, even for apparent normal ECGs, the predicted ECG-age gap from the chronological age remains a statistically significant risk predictor. These results show that the AI-enabled analysis of the ECG can add prognostic information.
Ticks salivate while feeding on their hosts. Saliva helps blood feeding through host anti-hemostatic and immunomodulatory components. Previous transcriptomic and proteomic studies revealed the ...complexity of tick saliva, comprising hundreds of polypeptides grouped in several multi-genic families such as lipocalins, Kunitz-domain containing peptides, metalloproteases, basic tail secreted proteins, and several other families uniquely found in ticks. These studies also revealed that the composition of saliva changes with time; expression of transcripts from the same family wax and wane as a function of feeding time. Here, we examined whether host immune factors could influence sialome switching by comparing sialomes of ticks fed naturally on a rabbit, to ticks artificially fed on defibrinated blood depleted of immune components. Previous studies were based on transcriptomes derived from pools of several individuals. To get an insight into the uniqueness of tick sialomes, we performed transcriptomic analyses of single salivary glands dissected from individual adult female I. ricinus ticks. Multivariate analysis identified 1,279 contigs differentially expressed as a function of time and/or feeding mode. Cluster analysis of these contigs revealed nine clusters of differentially expressed genes, four of which appeared consistently across several replicates, but five clusters were idiosyncratic, pointing to the uniqueness of sialomes in individual ticks. The disclosure of tick quantum sialomes reveals the unique salivary composition produced by individual ticks as they switch their sialomes throughout the blood meal, a possible mechanism of immune evasion.
Hard ticks feed for several days or weeks on their hosts. Blood feeding is assisted by tick saliva, which is injected in the host skin regularly, alternating with blood ingestion. Tick saliva ...contains hundreds or thousands of different peptides and other bioactive compounds that assist feeding by inhibiting their hosts' blood clotting, platelet aggregation, vasoconstriction, as well as pain and itching. Immunomodulatory and antimicrobial peptides are also found in tick saliva. Molecular characterization of tick salivary compounds, or its sialome (from the Greek sialos = saliva), helps identification of possible antigens that might confer anti-tick immunity, as well as identifying novel pharmacologically active compounds. Amblyomma americanum is a major nuisance tick in Eastern and Southern US, being a vector of Theileria and Ehrlichia bacteria to animals and humans. Presently we report an RNAseq study concerning the salivary glands of adult female A. americanum ticks, which involved sequencing of four libraries collected at different times of feeding. A total of 5,792 coding sequences were deduced from the transcriptome assembly, 3,139 of which were publicly deposited, expanding from the previously available 146 salivary sequences found in GenBank. A remarkable time-dependent transcript expression was found, mostly related to secretory products, supporting the idea that ticks may have several "sialomes" that are expressed at different times during feeding. The molecular nature of this sialome switching remains unknown. The hyperlinked spreadsheet containing the deduced coding sequences can be found at http://exon.niaid.nih.gov/transcriptome/Amb_americanum/Ambame-web.xlsx.
Lymphoma is the most common type of canine hematological malignancy where the multicentric (cMCL) form accounts for 75% of all cases. The standard treatment is the CHOP chemotherapy protocols that ...include cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine and prednisone, where the majority of dogs achieve complete/partial response; however, it is very important to predict non-responsive cases to improve treatment and to develop new targeted therapies. Here we evaluate a liquid biopsy approach based on serum Small Extracellular Vesicles enriched for exosomes (SEVs) to predict cMCL chemotherapy response. Nineteen dogs at the end of the 19-week chemotherapy protocol (8 Complete Response and 11 Progressive Disease) were evaluated for serum SEVs size, concentration and screened for 95 oncomirs. PD patients had higher SEVs concentration at the diagnosis than CR patients (P = 0.034). The ROC curve was significant for SEVs concentration to predict the response to CHOP (AUC = 0.8011, P = 0.0287). A potential molecular signature based on oncomirs from SEVs (caf-miR-205, caf-miR-222, caf-mir-20a and caf-miR-93) is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating the potential of a liquid biopsy based on SEVs and their miRNAs content to predict the outcome of chemotherapy for canine multicentric lymphomas.
Saliva of blood sucking arthropods contains compounds that antagonize their hosts' hemostasis, which include platelet aggregation, vasoconstriction and blood clotting; saliva of these organisms also ...has anti-inflammatory and immunomodullatory properties. Perhaps because hosts mount an active immune response against these compounds, the diversity of these compounds is large even among related blood sucking species. Because of these properties, saliva helps blood feeding as well as help the establishment of pathogens that can be transmitted during blood feeding.
We have obtained 1,626,969 reads by pyrosequencing a salivary gland cDNA library from adult females Amblyomma maculatum ticks at different times of feeding. Assembly of this data produced 72,441 sequences larger than 149 nucleotides from which 15,914 coding sequences were extracted. Of these, 5,353 had >75% coverage to their best match in the non-redundant database from the National Center for Biotechnology information, allowing for the deposition of 4,850 sequences to GenBank. The annotated data sets are available as hyperlinked spreadsheets. Putative secreted proteins were classified in 133 families, most of which have no known function.
This data set of proteins constitutes a mining platform for novel pharmacologically active proteins and for uncovering vaccine targets against A. maculatum and the diseases they carry.
Estimating the proportions of different ancestries in admixed populations is very important in population genetics studies, and it is particularly important for detecting population substructure ...effects in case-control association studies. In this work, a set of 48 ancestry-informative insertion-deletion polymorphisms (INDELs) were selected with the goal of efficiently measuring the proportions of three different ancestries (sub-Saharan African, European, and Native American) in mixed populations. All selected markers can be easily analyzed via multiplex PCR and detected with standard capillary electrophoresis. A total of 593 unrelated individuals representative of European, African, and Native American parental populations were typed, as were 380 individuals from three Brazilian populations with known admixture patterns. As expected, the interethnic admixture estimates show that individuals from southern Brazil present an almost exclusively European ancestry; Afro-descendant communities in the Amazon region, apart from the major African contribution, present some degree of admixture with Europeans and Native Americans; and a sample from Belém, in the northeastern Amazon, shows a significant contribution of the three ethnic groups, although with a greater European proportion. In summary, a panel of ancestry-informative INDELs was optimized and proven to be a valuable tool for estimating individual and global ancestry proportions in admixed populations. The ability to accurately infer interethnic admixtures highlights the usefulness of this marker set for assessing population substructure in association studies, particularly those conducted in Brazilian and other Latin American populations sharing trihybrid ancestry patterns. Hum Mutat 31:184-190, 2010.
Highlights • Short- and long-term spatial memory deficits are present in prediabetic rats. • Memory deficits are concurrent with increases of GluA1 and GLUN1 hippocampal levels. • Prediabetic rats ...display decreased hippocampal IR-β density. • Memory deficits are concurrent with decreased GR hippocampal levels.
The development of nanovehicles for intracellular drug delivery is strongly bound to the understating and control of nanoparticles cellular uptake process, which in turn is governed by surface ...chemistry. In this study, we explored the synthesis, characterization, and cellular uptake of block copolymer assemblies consisting of a pH-responsive poly2-(diisopropylamino)ethyl methacrylate (PDPA) core stabilized by three different biocompatible hydrophilic shells (a zwitterionic type poly(2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine) (PMPC) layer, a highly hydrated poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) layer with stealth effect, and an also proven nontoxic and nonimmunogenic poly(N-(2-hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide) (PHPMA) layer). All particles had a spherical core–shell structure. The largest particles with the thickest hydrophilic stabilizing shell obtained from PMPC40-b-PDPA70 were internalized to a higher level than those smaller in size and stabilized by PEO or PHPMA and produced from PEO122-b-PDPA43 or PHPMA64-b-PDPA72, respectively. Such a behavior was confirmed among different cell lines, with assemblies being internalized to a higher degree in cancer (HeLa) as compared to healthy (Telo-RF) cells. This fact was mainly attributed to the stronger binding of PMPC to cell membranes. Therefore, cellular uptake of nanoparticles at the sub-100 nm size range may be chiefly governed by the chemical nature of the stabilizing layer rather than particles size and/or shell thickness.
PDF
