Vitamin D Status in Lean and Obese Mexican American Children

Vitamin D deficiency is a worldwide problem amongst adolescents and adults, particularly in minority populations due to high skin melanin content. Melanin blocks the absorption of UVB photons, which limits natural vitamin D accumulation, requiring more dietary intake of vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is associated with an increased risk for chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes mellitus. Low levels of vitamin D are inversely correlated with systemic inflammation possibly mediating the relationship between vitamin D deficiency and disease. Adequate levels of vitamin D may decrease the risks of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, common cancers, and autoimmune diseases. Obesity is associated with an increased risk of vitamin D deficiency, because vitamin D can become sequestered deep in subcutaneous adipose tissue, where it is biologically inert. In the US, Mexican-Americans are at a higher risk for both obesity and obesity-associate chronic diseases, making them an ideal research population. Objective: Investigate the relationship between serum vitamin-D status and systemic inflammation in Mexican-American children of differing obesity status. Patients and Methods: Serum vitamin D concentration will be measured using a commercially available ELISA kit. Vitamin D status will be determined using norms established by the Institute of Medicine in 2010. Serum TNF-α, IL-6, and IL-8 concentration will be measured using a Luminex Multiplex assay (Millipore Milliplex)

Corticosterone Levels in Sedentary, Wheel, and Treadmill Acclimated Mice following a Bout of Forced Treadmill Running

Murine models have been used to study the immune response to exercise under various diet and training interventions .Our laboratory has previously studied the effect of forced exercise versus voluntary exercise on fasting blood glucose measurements. However, forced exercise may result in increased corticosterone levels. This may affect glucose levels and subsequent weight gain. Male, wild-type CD-1 mice were randomly divided into the following groups: forced exercise, wheel running, and sedentary. After a 8- weeks of the intervention, all mice were placed on a treadmill and forced to run for 30 minutes. Blood was collected from the mice prior to exercise, immediately following exercise, and one hour post exercise. Plasma corticosterone levels were assessed using an ELISA. 3-color flow cytometry was used to assess blood leukocytes. We found that despite treadmill acclimation in the forced exercise group, there was no significant difference between groups in corticosterone or leukocyte levels when forced to run on a treadmill. All groups showed a spike in corticosterone levels immediately following exercise which returned to baseline at one-hour post

Exercise Attenuates Weight Gain and Fat Accumulation in CD1- Mice Consuming a High-fat Diet

Background: Exercise training, in combination with a healthful diet, is a reliable method of weight loss or weight maintenance. It is unknown whether an exercise training program would sufficiently attenuate weight gain during chronic consumption of a high-fat diet. Purpose: Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability of an aerobic exercise training program to prevent excessive weight gain both before and during consumption of a high-fat diet in CD-1 male mice. Methods: Mice were divided into four groups (N=10 mice/group): 4-weeks of treadmill running followed by 6-weeks sedentary (EX-SD), 4-weeks sedentary followed by 6 weeks of treadmill running (SD-EX), 10 weeks of treadmill running (EX), and 10 weeks sedentary (SD). After the first four weeks of the study, all groups began consumption of a high-fat diet to elicit a weight gain response. The exercise program consisted of 1 hour of treadmill running 5 days/wk at ~15m/min. Body weight and body composition we measured bi-weekly. Results: EX-SD, EX, and SD gained a significant amount of both body weight and body fat after only 4 weeks of high-fat feeding (P\u3c0.05). SD-EX was the only group that did not gain a significant amount of body weight or body fat during the 6-week high-fat feeding period. Conclusions: The present study demonstrates the importance of exercise training in counteracting concurrent diet-induced weight gain, as seen in SED-EX. EX approximately matched SD in body weight gain and body fat accumulation, suggesting that exercise interventions must be progressive in order to prevent an adaptation to the training program than minimizes exercise benefits. Future research will evaluate progressive exercise training programs and their implications in various mouse models

Mental health, physical symptoms and biomarkers of stress during prolonged exposure to Antarctica’s extreme environment

The Antarctic environment is characterized by many of the same extreme stressors as long-duration space flight (LDSE), thereby providing a useful earth-based analog for examining changes in and predictors of mental health over time. At coastal (n = 88) and inland (n = 22) Antarctic stations we tracked mental health symptoms across a nine-month period including winter-over using the Mental Health Checklist (MHCL; Bower et al., 2019). Our monthly assessment battery also examined changes in physical complaints, biomarkers of stress, and the use of different emotion regulation strategies. MHCL positive adaptation scores showed linear decreases whereas MHCL poor self-regulation scores and severity of physical symptoms increased across the study period. During-mission use of emotion regulation strategies and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) levels predicted end-of-study MHCL scores, whereas trait-based psychological measures collected at the start of the mission showed little predictive utility. Results suggest that interventions and counter measures aimed at enhancing positive affect/emotion during prolonged exposure to extreme environments may be useful in reducing psychological risk

Erratum: Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 84 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Interpretation: By quantifying levels and trends in exposures to risk factors and the resulting disease burden, this assessment offers insight into where past policy and programme efforts might have been successful and highlights current priorities for public health action. Decreases in behavioural, environmental, and occupational risks have largely offset the effects of population growth and ageing, in relation to trends in absolute burden. Conversely, the combination of increasing metabolic risks and population ageing will probably continue to drive the increasing trends in non-communicable diseases at the global level, which presents both a public health challenge and opportunity. We see considerable spatiotemporal heterogeneity in levels of risk exposure and risk-attributable burden. Although levels of development underlie some of this heterogeneity, O/E ratios show risks for which countries are overperforming or underperforming relative to their level of development. As such, these ratios provide a benchmarking tool to help to focus local decision making. Our findings reinforce the importance of both risk exposure monitoring and epidemiological research to assess causal connections between risks and health outcomes, and they highlight the usefulness of the GBD study in synthesising data to draw comprehensive and robust conclusions that help to inform good policy and strategic health planning

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

The interstitium in cardiac repair: role of the immune-stromal cell interplay

Cardiac regeneration, that is, restoration of the original structure and function in a damaged heart, differs from tissue repair, in which collagen deposition and scar formation often lead to functional impairment. In both scenarios, the early-onset inflammatory response is essential to clear damaged cardiac cells and initiate organ repair, but the quality and extent of the immune response vary. Immune cells embedded in the damaged heart tissue sense and modulate inflammation through a dynamic interplay with stromal cells in the cardiac interstitium, which either leads to recapitulation of cardiac morphology by rebuilding functional scaffolds to support muscle regrowth in regenerative organisms or fails to resolve the inflammatory response and produces fibrotic scar tissue in adult mammals. Current investigation into the mechanistic basis of homeostasis and restoration of cardiac function has increasingly shifted focus away from stem cell-mediated cardiac repair towards a dynamic interplay of cells composing the less-studied interstitial compartment of the heart, offering unexpected insights into the immunoregulatory functions of cardiac interstitial components and the complex network of cell interactions that must be considered for clinical intervention in heart diseases

An Energy Efficient Local Popularity Based Cooperative Caching for Mobile Information Centric Networks

The usage of social media applications such as Youtube, Facebook, and other applications is rapidly increasing with each passing day. These applications are used for uploading informational content such as images, videos, and voices, which results in exponential traffic overhead. Due to these overheads (high bandwidth consumption), the service providers fail to provide high-speed and low latency internet to users around the globe. The current internet cannot cope with such high data traffic due to its fixed infrastructure (host centric-network) degrading the network performance. A new internet paradigm known as Information Centric Networks (ICN) was introduced based on content-oriented addressing. The concept of ICN is to entertain the request locally by neighbor nodes without accessing the source, which will help offload the network’s data traffic. ICN can mitigate traffic overhead and meet future Internet requirements. In this work, we propose a novel decentralized placement scheme named self-organized cooperative caching (SOCC) for mobile ICN to improve the overall network performance through efficient bandwidth utilization and less traffic overhead. The proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of energy consumption by 55%, average latency, and cache hit rate by a minimum of 35%

An Energy Efficient Local Popularity Based Cooperative Caching for Mobile Information Centric Networks

The usage of social media applications such as Youtube, Facebook, and other applications is rapidly increasing with each passing day. These applications are used for uploading informational content such as images, videos, and voices, which results in exponential traffic overhead. Due to these overheads (high bandwidth consumption), the service providers fail to provide high-speed and low latency internet to users around the globe. The current internet cannot cope with such high data traffic due to its fixed infrastructure (host centric-network) degrading the network performance. A new internet paradigm known as Information Centric Networks (ICN) was introduced based on content-oriented addressing. The concept of ICN is to entertain the request locally by neighbor nodes without accessing the source, which will help offload the network&rsquo;s data traffic. ICN can mitigate traffic overhead and meet future Internet requirements. In this work, we propose a novel decentralized placement scheme named self-organized cooperative caching (SOCC) for mobile ICN to improve the overall network performance through efficient bandwidth utilization and less traffic overhead. The proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of energy consumption by 55%, average latency, and cache hit rate by a minimum of 35%