Inulin Fermentable Fiber Ameliorates Type I Diabetes via IL22 and Short-Chain Fatty Acids in Experimental Models

Nourishment of gut microbiota via consumption of fermentable fiber promotes gut health and guards against metabolic syndrome. In contrast, how dietary fiber impacts type 1 diabetes is less clear

Differential influence of soluble dietary fibres on iIntestinal and hepatic carbohydrate response

Refined foods are commonly depleted in certain bioactive components that are abundant in ‘natural’ (plant) foods. Identification and addition of these ‘missing’ bioactives in the diet is, therefore, necessary to counteract the deleterious impact of convenience food. In this study, multiomics approaches were employed to assess the addition of the popular supplementary soluble dietary fibers inulin and psyllium, both in isolation and in combination with a refined animal feed. A 16S rRNA sequencing and 1H NMR metabolomic investigation revealed that, whilst inulin mediated an increase in Bifidobacteria, psyllium elicited a broader microbial shift, with Parasutterella and Akkermansia being increased and Enterorhabdus and Odoribacter decreased. Interestingly, the combination diet benefited from both inulin and psyllium related microbial changes. Psyllium mediated microbial changes correlated with a reduction of glucose (R −0.67, −0.73, respectively, p < 0.05) and type 2 diabetes associated metabolites: 3-methyl-2-oxovaleric acid (R −0.72, −0.78, respectively, p < 0.05), and citrulline (R −0.77, −0.71, respectively, p < 0.05). This was in line with intestinal and hepatic carbohydrate response (e.g., Slc2a2, Slc2a5, Khk and Fbp1) and hepatic lipogenesis (e.g., Srebf1 and Fasn), which were significantly reduced under psyllium addition. Although established in the liver, the intestinal response associated with psyllium was absent in the combination diet, placing greater significance upon the established microbial, and subsequent metabolomic, shift. Our results therefore highlight the heterogeneity that exists between distinct dietary fibers in the context of carbohydrate uptake and metabolism, and supports psyllium containing combination diets, for their ability to negate the impact of a refined diet

Improving Metabolic Health Through Precision Dietetics in Mice

The incidence of diet-induced metabolic disease has soared over the last half-century, despite national efforts to improve health through universal dietary recommendations. Studies comparing dietary patterns of populations with health outcomes have historically provided the basis for healthy diet recommendations. However, evidence that population-level diet responses are reliable indicators of responses across individuals is lacking. This study investigated how genetic differences influence health responses to several popular diets in mice, which are similar to humans in genetic composition and the propensity to develop metabolic disease, but enable precise genetic and environmental control. We designed four human-comparable mouse diets that are representative of those eaten by historical human populations. Across four genetically distinct inbred mouse strains, we compared the American diet’s impact on metabolic health to three alternative diets (Mediterranean, Japanese, and Maasai/ketogenic). Furthermore, we investigated metabolomic and epigenetic alterations associated with diet response. Health effects of the diets were highly dependent on genetic background, demonstrating that individualized diet strategies improve health outcomes in mice. If similar genetic-dependent diet responses exist in humans, then a personalized, or “precision dietetics,” approach to dietary recommendations may yield better health outcomes than the traditional one-size-fits-all approach

International Conference on Advances in Radiation Oncology (ICARO): Outcomes of an IAEA Meeting

The IAEA held the International Conference on Advances in Radiation Oncology (ICARO) in Vienna on 27-29 April 2009. The Conference dealt with the issues and requirements posed by the transition from conventional radiotherapy to advanced modern technologies, including staffing, training, treatment planning and delivery, quality assurance (QA) and the optimal use of available resources. The current role of advanced technologies (defined as 3-dimensional and/or image guided treatment with photons or particles) in current clinical practice and future scenarios were discussed

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The common use of improper control diets in diet-induced metabolic disease research confounds data interpretation: the fiber factor

Abstract Diets used to induce metabolic disease are generally high in fat and refined carbohydrates and importantly, are usually made with refined, purified ingredients. However, researchers will often use a low fat grain-based (GB) diet containing unrefined ingredients as the control diet. Such a comparison between two completely different diet types makes it impossible to draw conclusions regarding the phenotypic differences driven by diet. While many compositional differences can account for this, one major difference that could have the greatest impact between GB and purified diets is the fiber content, both in terms of the level and composition. We will review recent data showing how fiber differences between GB diets and purified diets can significantly influence gut health and microbiota, which itself can affect metabolic disease development. Researchers need to consider the control diet carefully in order to make the best use of precious experimental resources

Correction to: The common use of improper control diets in diet-induced metabolic disease research confounds data interpretation: the fiber factor

Abstract Following publication of the original article [1] the authors noticed that the pie chart figure contains percentages (41%, 41%, 19%) that are slightly off given they don’t add to 100. They should instead read 40.6%, 40.6%, 18.8%

Salvage Post-Operative Stereotatic Ablative Radiotherapy for Re-Current Squamous Cell Carcinoma of Head and Neck

Background and Objectives: Patients with recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (rHNC) face an aggressive disease. Surgical resection is the gold standard treatment. Immediate adjuvant post-operative stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (PO-SABR) for rHNC is debatable. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively identified patients who were treated with PO-SABR at the AC Camargo Cancer Center, Brazil. Results: Eleven patients were treated between 2018 and 2021. The median time between salvage surgery and PO-SABR was 31 days (range, 25&ndash;42) and the median PO-SABR total dose was 40 Gy (range, 30&ndash;48 Gy). The 2-and 4-year actuarial DFS were 62.3% and 41.6%, while the 2-and 4-year OS probabilities were 80.0% and 53.3%, respectively. Eight (72.7%) patients were alive and six (54.5%) were without disease at the last follow-up. Two (18.1%) patients had local failure in the PO-SABR field. Three (27.3%) patients had distant metastasis, diagnosed in a median time of 9 months (range, 4&ndash;13) after completion of PO-SABR. On univariate analysis, predictive factors related to worse OS were: interval between previous radiotherapy and PO-SABR &le; 24 months (p = 0.033) and location of the salvage target in the oral cavity (p = 0.013). The total dose of PO-SABR given in more than three fractions was marginally statistically significant, favoring the OS (p = 0.051). Conclusions: Our results encourage the use of a more aggressive approach in selected patients with rHNC by combining salvage surgery with immediate PO-SABRT, but this association needs to be further explored