Cytokine expression provides clues to the pathophysiology of Gulf War illness and myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Gulf War illness (GWI) is a chronic disease of unknown etiology characterized by persistent symptoms such as cognitive impairment, unexplained fatigue, pervasive pain, headaches, and gastrointestinal abnormalities. Current reports suggest that as many as 200,000 veterans who served in the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War were afflicted. Several potential triggers of GWI have been proposed including chemical exposure, toxins, vaccines, and unknown infectious agents. However, a definitive cause of GWI has not been identified and a specific biological marker that can consistently delineate the disease has not been defined. Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is a disease with similar and overlapping symptomology, and subjects diagnosed with GWI typically fit the diagnostic criteria for ME. For these reasons, GWI is often considered a subgroup of ME. To explore this possibility and identify immune parameters that may help to understand GWI pathophysiology, we measured 77 serum cytokines in subjects with GWI and compared these data to that of subjects with ME as well as healthy controls. Our analysis identified a group of cytokines that identified ME and GWI cases with sensitivities of 92.5% and 64.9%, respectively. The five most significant cytokines in decreasing order of importance were IL-7, IL-4, TNF-α, IL-13, and IL-17F. When delineating GWI and ME cases from healthy controls, the observed specificity was only 33.3%, suggesting that with respect to cytokine expression, GWI cases resemble control subjects to a greater extent than ME cases across a number of parameters. These results imply that serum cytokines are representative of ME pathology to a greater extent than GWI and further suggest that the two diseases have distinct immune profiles despite their overlapping symptomology.

Human tooth germ stem cells preserve neuro-protective effects after long-term cryo-preservation.

The use of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) has been shown to be promising in chronic disorders such as diabetes, Alzheimer's dementia, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury and brain ischemia. Recent studies revealed that human tooth germs (hTG) contain MSCs which can be easily isolated, expanded and cryo-preserved. In this report, we isolated human tooth germ stem cells (hTGSCs) with MSC characteristics from third molar tooth germs, cryo-preserved them at -80( degrees )C for 6 months, and evaluated for their surface antigens, expression of pluri-potency associated genes, differentiation capacity, karyotype, and proliferation rate. These characteristics were compared to their non-frozen counterparts. In addition, neuro-protective effects of cryo-preserved cells on neuro-blastoma SH-SY5Y cells were also assessed after exposure to stress conditions induced by hydrogen-peroxide (oxidative stress) and paclitaxel (microtubule stabilizing mitotic inhibitor). After long term cryo-preservation hTGSCs expressed surface antigens CD29, CD73, CD90, CD105, and CD166, but not CD34, CD45 or CD133, which was typical for non-frozen hTGSCs. Cryo-preserved hTGSCs were able to differentiate into osteo-, adipo- and neuro-genic cells. They also showed normal karyotype after high number of population doublings and unchanged proliferation rate. On the other hand, cryo-preserved cells demonstrated a tendency for lower level of pluri-potency associated gene expression (nanog, oct4, sox2, klf4, c-myc) than non-frozen hTGSCs. hTGSCs conditioned media increased survival of SH-SY5Y cells exposed to oxidative stress or paclitaxel. These findings confirm that hTGSCs preserve their major characteristics and exert neuro-protection after long-term cryo-preservation, suggesting that hTGSCs, harvested from young individuals and stored for possible use later as they grow old, might be employed in cellular therapy of age-related degenerative disorders.