Dietary Factors Impact Developmental Trajectories in Young Autistic Children

Funding This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Purpose The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of dietary factors on developmental trajectories in young autistic children. Methods A gluten-free and casein-free diets, as well as six types of food (meat and eggs, vegetables, uncooked vegetables, sweets, bread, and “white soft bread that never molds”) were investigated observationally for up to three years in 5,553 children 2 to 5 years of age via parent-report measures completed within a mobile application. Children had a parent-reported diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); 78% were males; the majority of participants resided in the USA. Outcome was monitored on five orthogonal subscales: Language Comprehension, Expressive Language, Sociability, Sensory Awareness, and Health, assessed by the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC) (Rimland & Edelson, 1999) and Mental Synthesis Evaluation Checklist (MSEC) (Arnold & Vyshedskiy, 2022; Braverman et al., 2018). Results Consumption of fast-acting carbohydrates – sweets, bread, and “white soft bread that never molds” – was associated with a significant and a consistent Health subscale score decline. On the contrary, a gluten-free diet, as well as consumption of meat, eggs, and vegetables were associated with a significant and consistent improvement in the Language Comprehension score. Consumption of meat and eggs was also associated with a significant and consistent improvement in the Sensory Awareness score. Conclusion The results of this study demonstrate a strong correlation between a diet and developmental trajectories and suggest possible dietary interventions for young autistic children.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Interleukin-17A blockade with secukinumab results in decreased neutrophil infiltration in psoriasis: minimally-invasive measurement by tape stripping

Psoriasis is a well characterized interleukin (IL)-17A-driven skin disease with neutrophil infiltration and epidermal hyperkeratosis. Several biomarkers, most prominently β-defensin-2 (BD-2), have been identified using local and systemic invasive measurements as responsive markers of IL-17A-driven skin pathology. We sought to determine whether measurements of epidermal proteins by tape stripping could offer a minimally-invasive method to assess treatment responses. We compared the expression of 170 proteins in the epidermis (tape stripping) and dermis (open flow microperfusion) of 8 psoriatic subjects before and after administration of a single dose of subcutaneous (s.c.) antiIL-17A mAb secukinumab. Proteomic analyses of tape strips revealed a >3-fold decrease in 32 epidermal and inflammatory cell proteins in response to secukinumab. The epidermal proteins with the largest (>10-fold) decreases were: matrix metalloproteinase-8 (MMP-8, 15.68-fold, p<0.05); myeloperoxidase (MPO, 14.72-fold, p<0.005); IL-8 (11.93-fold, p<0.05); MMP-9 (10.81-fold, p<0.005); and IL-1β (10.35-fold, p<0.05). For these proteins, greater-fold protein changes were detected in the epidermis compared to dermis. Immunohistochemical analysis confirmed that neutrophils are the predominant cell type in psoriatic skin lesions that express MPO, MMP-8 and MMP-9, and that secukinumab treatment dramatically decreases neutrophil accumulation. Thus, tape stripping may be used to assess epidermal neutrophils, and protein biomarker responses to anti-IL-17A therapy in psoriasis

Tunnel boring machine performance study

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 148).by Edward Khokhlovich.M.S

RAMP: A Bioinformatics Framework for Researching Imaging Agents through Molecular Pathways

Signaling pathways are the fundamental grammar of cellular communication, yet there are few frameworks available to connect signaling pathways and molecular imaging probes. Such a framework would aid in the design and selection of imaging probes to measure specific signaling pathways. Additionally, it would illuminate which pathways are being interrogated by specific probes. RAMP (Researching imaging Agents through Molecular Pathways) is an extensible bioinformatics framework and search tool for relating signaling pathways and imaging probes based on a controlled vocabulary of the imaging targets. RAMP currently contains signaling pathway data from MetaCore, KEGG, and the Gene Ontology project; imaging probe data from the Molecular Imaging and Contrast Agent Database (MICAD); and tissue protein expression data from The Human Protein Atlas. The RAMP search tool is available at http://www.rampsearch.com. Examples are presented to demonstrate the utility of RAMP for pathway-based searching of molecular imaging probes

The use of haplotype-specific transcripts improves sample annotation consistency

Background: Exact sample annotation in expression microarray datasets is essential for any type of pharmacogenomics research. Materials and methods: Candidate markers were explored through the application of Hartigans’ dip test statistics to a publically available human whole genome microarray dataset. The marker performance was tested on 188 serial samples from 53 donors and of variable tissue origin from five public microarray datasets. Results: A qualified transcript marker panel consisting of three probe sets for human leukocyte antigens HLA-DQA1 (2 probe sets) and HLA-DRB4 identified sample donor identifier inconsistencies in about 5% of the test samples. About 3% of the test samples require root-cause analysis due to unresolvable inaccuracies. Conclusions: The transcript marker panel consisting of HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DRB4 represents a robust, tissue-independent composite marker to assist control donor annotation concordance at the transcript level. Allele-selectivity of HLA genes renders them good candidates for “fingerprinting” with donor specific expression pattern

Novel Prefrontal Synthesis Intervention Improves Language in Children with Autism

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is defined as the ability to juxtapose mental visuospatial objects at will. Paralysis of PFS may be responsible for the lack of comprehension of spatial prepositions, semantically-reversible sentences, and recursive sentences observed in 30 to 40% of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this report we present data from a three-year-long clinical trial of 6454 ASD children age 2 to 12 years, which were administered a PFS-targeting intervention. Tablet-based verbal and nonverbal exercises emphasizing mental-juxtaposition-of-objects were organized into an application called Mental Imagery Therapy for Autism (MITA). The test group included participants who completed more than one thousand exercises and made no more than one error per exercise. The control group was selected from the rest of participants by a matching procedure. Each test group participant was matched to the control group participant by age, gender, expressive language, receptive language, sociability, cognitive awareness, and health score at first evaluation using propensity score analysis. The test group showed a 2.2-fold improvement in receptive language score vs. control group (p &lt; 0.0001) and a 1.4-fold improvement in expressive language (p = 0.0144). No statistically significant change was detected in other subscales not targeted by the exercises. These findings show that language acquisition improves after training PFS and that a further investigation of the PFS-targeting intervention in a randomized controlled study is warranted