Immune System in the Brain: A Modulatory Role on Dendritic Spine Morphophysiology?

The central nervous system is closely linked to the immune system at several levels. The brain parenchyma is separated from the periphery by the blood brain barrier, which under normal conditions prevents the entry of mediators such as activated leukocytes, antibodies, complement factors, and cytokines. The myeloid cell lineage plays a crucial role in the development of immune responses at the central level, and it comprises two main subtypes: (1) resident microglia, distributed throughout the brain parenchyma; (2) perivascular macrophages located in the brain capillaries of the basal lamina and the choroid plexus. In addition, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, endothelial cells, and, to a lesser extent, neurons are implicated in the immune response in the central nervous system. By modulating synaptogenesis, microglia are most specifically involved in restoring neuronal connectivity following injury. These cells release immune mediators, such as cytokines, that modulate synaptic transmission and that alter the morphology of dendritic spines during the inflammatory process following injury. Thus, the expression and release of immune mediators in the brain parenchyma are closely linked to plastic morphophysiological changes in neuronal dendritic spines. Based on these observations, it has been proposed that these immune mediators are also implicated in learning and memory processes

Evaluating the effect of age and area of residence in the metal and metalloid contents in human hair and urban topsoils

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Monitoring the levels of trace elements in hair can allow estimating the effects of the geographical location and also can provide a notion of the metal body burden. However, the use of human hair is controversial due to the different confounding factors that could affect the presence of trace elements in hair. As a result, a comprehensive monitoring study was performed in Alcalá de Henares, one of the major cities in the Madrid region, Spain. Trace elements have been monitored in urban topsoils and in human hair of two well-defined and healthy groups of population: children (6–9 years) and adolescents (13–16 years). The city was divided into four areas or zones with different characteristics to assess the possible effect of area of residence and age in the presence of Al, As, Be, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Mn, Pb, Sn, Ti, Tl and Zn in soils and hair. There is no current hypothesis that explains the possible effect of the area of monitoring in the distribution of Be, Cr, Ni, Sn and Ti found in these urban soils, maybe because urban soils receive high disturbance, and there are many factors involved. The presence of most of the trace elements monitored was significantly higher in the hair of the children population, except for Sn and Zn. This could be attributed mainly to dietary habits. Other factors influencing metal content in hair such as environmental factors would have had a minimal effect in the population groups here studied. Finally, none of the levels of trace elements studied in hair were significantly correlated with levels measured in the topsoils of public parks in Alcalá de Henares, with the exception of Pb in adolescent participants

COVID-19 and Sick Leave: An Analysis of the Ibermutua Cohort of Over 1,651,305 Spanish Workers in the First Trimester of 2020

Objectives: The worldwide SARS-COV2 pandemic has impacted the health of workers and companies. The aim is to quantify it according to sick leave. Methods: Using ICD-9 codes, we analyzed Ibermutua records of all sick leaves during the first trimester of 2020, compared to during the same months of 2017, 2018, and 2019. We stratified the analysis by causes, patient sex, activity sectors, and regional data. All sick leaves were adjusted by the number of Ibermutua-affiliated persons in each period. Results: In March 2020, there was an unprecedented (116%) increase in total sick leaves, mainly due to infectious and respiratory diseases. Men and women were equally affected. All activity sectors were impacted, with the highest increase (457%) observed among health-related workers, especially due to contagious disease. The incidences of sick leaves were heterogeneous among different regions. Cost-analysis of sick leaves during the first trimester of 2020 compared with in previous years showed 40.3% increment (mean 2,813 vs. 2,005 euro per 100 affiliated workers). Conclusions: The SARS-COV2 pandemic is having a huge impact on workers' health, as shown by data regarding sick leaves in March 2020. This is associated with greater economic burden for companies, both due to the cost associated with sick leaves and the losses in productivity due to confinement

MAXI J1659-152: the shortest orbital period black-hole binary

Following the detection of a bright new X-ray source, MAXI J1659-152, a series of observations was triggered with almost all currently flying high-energy missions. We report here on XMM-Newton, INTEGRAL and RXTE observations during the early phase of the X-ray outburst of this transient black-hole candidate. We confirm the dipping nature in the X-ray light curves. We find that the dips recur on a period of 2.4139+/-0.0005 hrs, and interpret this as the orbital period of the system. It is thus the shortest period black-hole X-ray binary known to date. Using the various observables, we derive the properties of the source. The inclination of the accretion disk with respect to the line of sight is estimated to be 60-75 degrees. The companion star to the black hole is possibly a M5 dwarf star, with a mass and radius of about 0.15 M_sun and 0.23 R_sun, respectively. The system is rather compact (orbital separation is about 1.35 R_sun) and is located at a distance of roughly 7 kpc. In quiescence, MAXI J1659-152 is expected to be optically faint, about 28 mag in the V-band.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be published in the proceedings of the 4th International MAXI Workshop `The First Year of MAXI: Monitoring variable X-ray sources', 2010 Nov 30 - Dec 2, Tokyo, Japa

The synaptic vesicle protein CSP alpha prevents presynaptic degeneration

Cysteine string protein α (CSPα)—an abundant synaptic vesicle protein that contains a DNA-J domain characteristic of Hsp40 chaperones—is thought to regulate Ca2+ channels and/or synaptic vesicle exocytosis. We now show that, in young mice, deletion of CSPα does not impair survival and causes no significant changes in presynaptic Ca2+ currents or synaptic vesicle exocytosis as measured in the Calyx of Held synapse. At 2–4 weeks of age, however, CSPα-deficient mice develop a progressive, fatal sensorimotor disorder. The neuromuscular junctions and Calyx synapses of CSPα-deficient mice exhibit increasing neurodegenerative changes, synaptic transmission becomes severely impaired, and the mutant mice die at ∼2 months of age. Our data suggest that CSPα is not essential for the normal operation of Ca2+ channels or exocytosis but acts as a presynaptic chaperone that maintains continued synaptic function, raising the possibility that enhanced CSPα function could attenuate neurodegenerative diseases

Silicic Acid and Beer Consumption Reverses the Metal Imbalance and the Prooxidant Status Induced by Aluminum Nitrate in Mouse Brain

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Abstract: Background: Emerging evidence suggests that by affecting mineral balance, aluminum (Al) may enhance some events associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Aim: To examine the effect of Al(NO3)3 exposure on brain Al, cooper (Cu), iron (Fe), magnesium (Mg), manganese (Mn), silicon (Si), and zinc (Zn) levels, and the metal-change implication in brain oxidant and inflammatory status. Methods: Four groups of six-week-old male NMRI mice were treated for three months: i) controls, administrated with deionized water; ii) Al, which received Al(NO3)3; iii) Al+silicic acid, which were given Al(NO3)3 plus silicic acid; and iv) Al+beer, which received Al(NO3)3 plus beer. Results: Brain Al and TBARS levels and TNFα and GPx expressions increased, while Cu, Mn, and Zn levels, and catalase and CuZn-SOD expression decreased (at least, p < 0.05) in Al versus control animals. Al, Si, and TBARS levels and TNFα expression decreased (p < 0.05) in Al+silicic acid and Al+beer specimens while Cu, Mn, and Zn levels and antioxidant expression increased versus the Al group. Brain Al levels correlated negatively with those of Cu, Fe, Mn, and Zn, and catalase, CuZn-SOD, and GPx enzyme expressions but positively with Si and TBARS levels and TNFα expression. Two components of the principal component analysis (PCA) explained 71.2% of total data variance (p < 0.001). PCA connected the pro-oxidant markers with brain Al content, while brain Zn and Cu levels were closer to antioxidant enzyme expression. Conclusion: Administration of Al(NO3)3 induced metal imbalance, inflammation, and antioxidant status impairment in the brain. Those effects were blocked to a significant extent by silicic acid and beer administration

Building Process-Oriented Data Science Solutions for Real-World Healthcare

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted some of the opportunities, problems and barriers facing the application of Artificial Intelligence to the medical domain. It is becoming increasingly important to determine how Artificial Intelligence will help healthcare providers understand and improve the daily practice of medicine. As a part of the Artificial Intelligence research field, the Process-Oriented Data Science community has been active in the analysis of this situation and in identifying current challenges and available solutions. We have identified a need to integrate the best efforts made by the community to ensure that promised improvements to care processes can be achieved in real healthcare. In this paper, we argue that it is necessary to provide appropriate tools to support medical experts and that frequent, interactive communication between medical experts and data miners is needed to co-create solutions. Process-Oriented Data Science, and specifically concrete techniques such as Process Mining, can offer an easy to manage set of tools for developing understandable and explainable Artificial Intelligence solutions. Process Mining offers tools, methods and a data driven approach that can involve medical experts in the process of co-discovering real-world evidence in an interactive way. It is time for Process-Oriented Data scientists to collaborate more closely with healthcare professionals to provide and build useful, understandable solutions that answer practical questions in daily practice. With a shared vision, we should be better prepared to meet the complex challenges that will shape the future of healthcare

Sequential Anisotropic Multichannel Wiener Filtering with Rician Bias Correction Applied to 3D Regularization of DWI Data

It has been shown that the tensor calculation is very sensitive to the presence of noise in the acquired images, yielding to very low-quality Diffusion Tensor Images (DTI) data. Recent investigations have shown that the noise present in the Diffusion Weighted Images (DWI) causes bias effects on the DTI data which cannot be corrected if the noise characteristic is not taken into account. One possible solution is to increase the minimum number of acquired measurements (which is 7) to several tens (or even several hundreds). This has the disadvantage of increasing the acquisition time by one (or two) orders of magnitude, making the process inconvenient for a clinical setting. We here proposed a turn-around procedure for which the number of acquisitions is maintained but, the DWI data are filtered prior to determining the DTI. We show a significant reduction on the DTI bias by means of a simple and fast procedure which is based on linear filtering; well- known drawbacks of such filters are circumvented by means of anisotropic neighborhoods and sequential application of the filter itself. Information of the first order probability density function of the raw data, namely, the Rice distribution, is also included. Results are shown both for synthetic and real datasets. Some error measurements are measured in the synthetic experiments, showing how the proposed scheme is able to reduce them. It is worth noting a 50% increase in the linear component for real DTI data, meaning that the bias in the DTI is considerably reduced. A novel fiber smoothness measure is defined to evaluate the resulting tractography for real DWI data. Our findings show that after filtering fibers are considerably smoother on the average. Execution times are very low as compared to other reported approaches which allows for a real-time implementation

Similar recovery time of microbial functions from fungicide stress across biogeographical regions

Abstract Determining whether the structural and functional stress responses of communities are similar across space and time is paramount for forecasting and extrapolating the consequences of anthropogenic pressures on ecosystems and their services. Stream ecosystems are under high anthropogenic pressure; however, studies have only examined the response of stream communities across large scales over multiple generations. We studied the responses of leaf-associated microbial communities in streams within three European biogeographical regions to chemical stress in a microcosm experiment with multiple cycles of fungicide pollution and resource colonisation. Fungal community composition and the ecosystem function leaf decomposition were measured as response variables. Microbial leaf decomposition showed similar recovery times under environmental levels of fungicide exposure across regions. Initially, the decomposition declined (between 19 and 53%) under fungicide stress and recovered to control levels during the third cycle of pollution and colonisation. Although community composition and its stress response varied between regions, this suggests similar functional community adaptation towards fungicide stress over time. Genetic, epigenetic and physiological adaptations, as well as species turnover, may have contributed to community adaptation but further studies are required to determine if and to which extent these mechanisms are operating. Overall, our findings provide the first evidence of a similar functional response of microbial leaf decomposition to chemical stress across space and time