Age-dependent association of white matter abnormality with cognition after TIA or minor stroke

ObjectiveTo investigate if the association between MRI-detectable white matter hyperintensity (WMH) and cognitive status reported in previous studies persists at older ages (>80 years), when some white matter abnormality is almost universally reported in clinical practice.MethodsConsecutive eligible patients from a population-based cohort of all TIA/nondisabling stroke (Oxford Vascular Study) underwent multimodal MRI, including fluid-Attenuated inversion recovery and diffusion-weighted imaging, allowing automated measurement of WMH volume, mean diffusivity (MD), and fractional anisotropy (FA) in normal-Appearing white matter using FSL tools. These measures were related to cognitive status (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) at age 6480 vs >80 years.ResultsOf 566 patients (mean [range] age 66.7 [20-102] years), 107 were aged >80 years. WMH volumes and MD/FA were strongly associated with cognitive status in patients aged 6480 years (all p < 0.001 for WMH, MD, and FA) but not in patients aged >80 years (not significant for WMH, MD, and FA), with age interactions for WMH volume (pinteraction = 0.016) and MD (pinteraction = 0.037). Voxel-wise analyses also showed that lower Montreal Cognitive Assessment scores were associated with frontal WMH in patients 6480 years, but not >80 years.ConclusionMRI markers of white matter damage are strongly related to cognition in patients with TIA/minor stroke at younger ages, but not at age >80 years. Clinicians and patients should not overinterpret the significance of these abnormalities at older ages

Oxidative Stress and Neurodegenerative Diseases: A Review of Upstream and Downstream Antioxidant Therapeutic Options

Free radicals are common outcome of normal aerobic cellular metabolism. In-built antioxidant system of body plays its decisive role in prevention of any loss due to free radicals. However, imbalanced defense mechanism of antioxidants, overproduction or incorporation of free radicals from environment to living system leads to serious penalty leading to neuro-degeneration. Neural cells suffer functional or sensory loss in neurodegenerative diseases. Apart from several other environmental or genetic factors, oxidative stress (OS) leading to free radical attack on neural cells contributes calamitous role to neuro-degeneration. Though, oxygen is imperative for life, imbalanced metabolism and excess reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation end into a range of disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, aging and many other neural disorders. Toxicity of free radicals contributes to proteins and DNA injury, inflammation, tissue damage and subsequent cellular apoptosis. Antioxidants are now being looked upon as persuasive therapeutic against solemn neuronal loss, as they have capability to combat by neutralizing free radicals. Diet is major source of antioxidants, as well as medicinal herbs are catching attention to be commercial source of antioxidants at present. Recognition of upstream and downstream antioxidant therapy to oxidative stress has been proved an effective tool in alteration of any neuronal damage as well as free radical scavenging. Antioxidants have a wide scope to sequester metal ions involved in neuronal plaque formation to prevent oxidative stress. In addition, antioxidant therapy is vital in scavenging free radicals and ROS preventing neuronal degeneration in post-oxidative stress scenario

A Method for Generation of Bone Marrow-Derived Macrophages from Cryopreserved Mouse Bone Marrow Cells

The broad use of transgenic and gene-targeted mice has established bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDM) as important mammalian host cells for investigation of the macrophages biology. Over the last decade, extensive research has been done to determine how to freeze and store viable hematopoietic human cells; however, there is no information regarding generation of BMDM from frozen murine bone marrow (BM) cells. Here, we establish a highly efficient protocol to freeze murine BM cells and further generate BMDM. Cryopreserved murine BM cells maintain their potential for BMDM differentiation for more than 6 years. We compared BMDM obtained from fresh and frozen BM cells and found that both are similarly able to trigger the expression of CD80 and CD86 in response to LPS or infection with the intracellular bacteria Legionella pneumophila. Additionally, BMDM obtained from fresh or frozen BM cells equally restrict or support the intracellular multiplication of pathogens such as L. pneumophila and the protozoan parasite Leishmania (L.) amazonensis. Although further investigation are required to support the use of the method for generation of dendritic cells, preliminary experiments indicate that bone marrow-derived dendritic cells can also be generated from cryopreserved BM cells. Overall, the method described and validated herein represents a technical advance as it allows ready and easy generation of BMDM from a stock of frozen BM cells

A Fully Differential Digital CMOS Pulse UWB Generator

A new fully-digital CMOS pulse generator for impulse-radio Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) systems is presented. First, the shape of the pulse which best fits the FCC regulation in the 3.1-5 GHz sub-band of the entire 3.1-10.6 GHz UWB bandwidth is derived and approximated using rectangular digital pulses. In particular, the number and width of pulses that approximate an ideal template is found through an ad-hoc optimization methodology. Then a fully differential digital CMOS circuit that synthesizes the pulse sequence is conceived and its functionality demonstrated through post-layout simulations. The results show a very good agreement with the FCC requirements and a low power consumptio

A sensitive high performance liquid chromatography assay for the quantification of doxorubicin associated with DNA in tumor and tissues

A HPLC method was validated to quantify doxorubicin associated to DNA from tissue.Successfully applied to an in vivo mouse-based pharmacokinetic study.Important tool for future studies evaluating intracellular pharmacokinetics.Doxorubicin, a widely used anticancer agent, exhibits antitumor activity against a wide variety of malignancies. The drug exerts its cytotoxic effects by binding to and intercalating within the DNA of tumor and tissue cells. However, current assays are unable to accurately determine the concentration of the intracellular active form of doxorubicin. Thus, the development of a sample processing method and a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methodology was performed in order to quantify doxorubicin that is associated with DNA in tumors and tissues, which provided an intracellular cytotoxic measure of doxorubicin exposure after administration of small molecule and nanoparticle formulations of doxorubicin. The assay uses daunorubicin as an internal standard; liquid–liquid phase extraction to isolate drug associated with DNA; a Shimadzu HPLC with fluorescence detection equipped with a Phenomenex Luna C18 (2 μm, 2.0 × 100 mm) analytical column and a gradient mobile phase of 0.1% formic acid in water or acetonitrile for separation and quantification. The assay has a lower limit of detection (LLOQ) of 10 ng/mL and is shown to be linear up to 3000 ng/mL. The intra- and inter-day precision of the assay expressed as a coefficient of variation (CV%) ranged from 4.01 to 8.81%. Furthermore, the suitability of this assay for measuring doxorubicin associated with DNA in vivo was demonstrated by using it to quantify the doxorubicin concentration within tumor samples from SKOV3 and HEC1A mice obtained 72 h after administration of PEGylated liposomal doxorubicin (Doxil®; PLD) at 6 mg/kg IV x 1. This HPLC assay allows for sensitive intracellular quantification of doxorubicin and will be an important tool for future studies evaluating intracellular pharmacokinetics of doxorubicin and various nanoparticle formulations of doxorubicin

Flagellin-Deficient Legionella Mutants Evade Caspase-1- and Naip5-Mediated Macrophage Immunity

Macrophages from C57BL/6J (B6) mice restrict growth of the intracellular bacterial pathogen Legionella pneumophila. Restriction of bacterial growth requires caspase-1 and the leucine-rich repeat-containing protein Naip5 (Birc1e). We identified mutants of L. pneumophila that evade macrophage innate immunity. All mutants were deficient in expression of flagellin, the primary flagellar subunit, and failed to induce caspase-1-mediated macrophage death. Interestingly, a previously isolated flagellar mutant (fliI) that expresses, but does not assemble, flagellin did not replicate in macrophages, and induced macrophage death. Thus, flagellin itself, not flagella or motility, is required to initiate macrophage innate immunity. Immunity to Legionella did not require MyD88, an essential adaptor for toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5) signaling. Moreover, flagellin of Legionella and Salmonella induced cytotoxicity when delivered to the macrophage cytosol using Escherichia coli as a heterologous host. It thus appears that macrophages sense cytosolic flagellin via a TLR5-independent pathway that leads to rapid caspase-1-dependent cell death and provides defense against intracellular bacterial pathogens

Modelling the distribution of white matter hyperintensities due to ageing on MRI images using Bayesian inference

White matter hyperintensities (WMH), also known as white matter lesions, are localised white matter areas that appear hyperintense on MRI scans. WMH commonly occur in the ageing population, and are often associated with several factors such as cognitive disorders, cardiovascular risk factors, cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Despite the fact that some links between lesion location and parametric factors such as age have already been established, the relationship between voxel-wise spatial distribution of lesions and these factors is not yet well understood. Hence, it would be of clinical importance to model the distribution of lesions at the population-level and quantitatively analyse the effect of various factors on the lesion distribution model. In this work we compare various methods, including our proposed method, to generate voxel-wise distributions of WMH within a population with respect to various factors. Our proposed Bayesian spline method models the spatio-temporal distribution of WMH with respect to a parametric factor of interest, in this case age, within a population. Our probabilistic model takes as input the lesion segmentation binary maps of subjects belonging to various age groups and provides a population-level parametric lesion probability map as output. We used a spline representation to ensure a degree of smoothness in space and the dimension associated with the parameter, and formulated our model using a Bayesian framework. We tested our algorithm output on simulated data and compared our results with those obtained using various existing methods with different levels of algorithmic and computational complexity. We then compared the better performing methods on a real dataset, consisting of 1000 subjects of the UK Biobank, divided in two groups based on hypertension diagnosis. Finally, we applied our method on a clinical dataset of patients with vascular disease. On simulated dataset, the results from our algorithm showed a mean square error (MSE) value of , which was lower than the MSE value reported in the literature, with the advantage of being robust and computationally efficient. In the UK Biobank data, we found that the lesion probabilities are higher for the hypertension group compared to the non-hypertension group and further verified this finding using a statistical t-test. Finally, when applying our method on patients with vascular disease, we observed that the overall probability of lesions is significantly higher in later age groups, which is in line with the current literature

White Matter Imaging Correlates of Early Cognitive Impairment Detected by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment after Transient Ischemic Attack and Minor Stroke

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:  Among screening tools for cognitive impairment in large cohorts, the Montreal Cognitive assessment (MoCA) appears to be more sensitive to early cognitive impairment than the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), particularly after transient ischemic attack (TIA) or minor stroke. We reasoned that if MoCA-detected early cognitive impairment is pathologically significant, then it should be specifically associated with the presence of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) and reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) on MRI. METHODS: Consecutive eligible patients with TIA or minor stroke (Oxford Vascular Study) underwent MRI and cognitive assessment. We correlated MoCA and MMSE scores with WMH and FA, then specifically studied patients with low MoCA and normal MMSE. RESULTS: Among 400 patients, MoCA and MMSE scores were significantly correlated (all p<0.001) with WMH volumes (rMoCA=-0.336, rMMSE=-0.297) and FA (rMoCA=0.409, rMMSE=0.369), and -on voxel-wise analyses- with WMH in frontal white matter and reduced FA in almost all white matter tracts. However, only the MoCA was independently correlated with WMH volumes (r=-0.183, p<0.001), average FA values (r=0.218, p<0.001), and voxel-wise reduced FA in anterior tracts after controlling for the MMSE. In addition, patients with low MoCA but normal MMSE (N=57) had higher WMH volumes (t=3.1,p=0.002), lower average FA (t=-4.0,p<0.001), and lower voxel-wise FA in almost all white matter tracts than those with normal MoCA and MMSE (N=238). CONCLUSIONS: In patients with TIA or minor stroke, early cognitive impairment detected with the MoCA but not with the MMSE was independently associated with white matter damage on MRI, particularly reduced FA