Diabetic Muscle Infarction: A Rare End-Organ Vascular Complication of Diabetes

Diabetic muscle infarction (DMI) is a rare microvascular complication of spontaneous ischemic necrosis of skeletal muscle in patients with poorly controlled diabetes. We herein describe the case of a 26-year-old woman with a history of type I diabetes and accompanying diabetic microvascular complications of neuropathy, nephropathy and retinopathy, who presented with sudden onset of swelling and sharp pain in her bilateral thighs. T2-weighted MRI imaging revealed subcutaneous edema and sub-fascial, hyper-intense enhancement of proximal thigh musculature. DMI has a relatively non-specific clinical presentation; therefore, physician awareness is key for early diagnosis, as aggressive management has been associated with poor patient outcomes. With poor long-term prognosis and high reoccurrence, DMI acts as an indicator of vascular end-organ damage

Narrative Skills Predict Peer Adjustment across Elementary School Years

The importance of peer adjustment in middle childhood coincides with developing social cognitive and discursive skills that include the ability to make personal narrative accounts. Authoring personal stories promotes attention to the sequence of events, the causal connections between events, the moral significance of what has happened, and the motives that drive human action: these skills may be critical for the establishment and maintenance of satisfying peer relationships during elementary school. The present study extended previous research by considering whether narrative skills in written stories about peer interactions predicted peer adjustment. As part of an ongoing longitudinal study, 92 children wrote narratives about peer experiences and completed surveys on measures of peer adjustment for two school years. Cross-lagged panel models indicated that chronological and thematic coherence and reports of moral concerns in narratives in the first year of the study contributed to lower peer disliking in the subsequent academic year. Reports of motives in Year 1 narratives contributed to lower levels of loneliness and peer victimization in Year 2. Writing personal narratives that are coherent and attentive to moral concerns and motives may be especially beneficial for children who have difficulty connecting with peers. We discuss implications for classroom practices

Cycles in spatial and temporal chromosomal organization driven by the circadian clock

Dynamic transitions in the epigenome have been associated with regulated patterns of nuclear organization. The accumulating evidence that chromatin remodeling is implicated in circadian function prompted us to explore whether the clock may control nuclear architecture. We applied the 3C-derived 4C technology (Chromosome Conformation Capture on Chip) in mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) to demonstrate the presence of circadian long-range interactions, using the clock-controlled Dbp gene as bait. The circadian genomic interactions with Dbp are highly specific and are absent in MEFs whose clock is disrupted by ablation of the Bmal1 gene. We establish that the Dbp circadian interactome contains a wide variety of genes and clock-related DNA elements. These findings reveal a previously unappreciated circadian and clock-dependent shaping of the nuclear landscape