Lower synaptic density and its association with cognitive dysfunction in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Background: Understanding synaptic alteration in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is crucial for elucidating its pathological mechanisms, but in vivo research on this topic remains limited. Aims: This study aimed to identify the synaptic density indicators in OCD and explore the relationship between cognitive dysfunction and synaptic density changes in OCD. Methods: This study enrolled 28 drug-naive adults with OCD aged 18-40 years and 16 healthy controls (HCs). Three-dimensional T1-weighted structural magnetic resonance imaging and 18F-SynVesT-1 positron emission tomography were conducted. Cognitive function was assessed using the Wisconsin Cart Sorting Test (WCST) in patients with OCD and HCs. Correlative analysis was performed to examine the association between synaptic density reduction and cognitive dysfunction. Results: Compared with HCs, patients with OCD showed reduced synaptic density in regions of the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuit such as the bilateral putamen, left caudate, left parahippocampal gyrus, left insula, left parahippocampal gyrus and left middle occipital lobe (voxel p<0.001, uncorrected, with cluster level above 50 contiguous voxels). The per cent conceptual-level responses of WCST were positively associated with the synaptic density reduction in the left middle occipital gyrus (R2=0.1690, p=0.030), left parahippocampal gyrus (R2=0.1464, p=0.045) and left putamen (R2=0.1967, p=0.018) in patients with OCD. Conclusions: Adults with OCD demonstrated lower 18F-labelled difluoro analogue of 18F-SynVesT-1 compared with HCs, indicating potentially lower synaptic density. This is the first study to explore the synaptic density in patients with OCD and provides insights into potential biological targets for cognitive dysfunctions in OCD.

Synaptic Loss in Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 3 Revealed by SV2A Positron Emission Tomography.

BACKGROUND: Severe reduced synaptic density was observed in spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) in postmortem neuropathology, but in vivo assessment of synaptic loss remains challenging. OBJECTIVE SPINOCEREBELLAR ATAXIA TYPE 3: The objective of this study was to assess in vivo synaptic loss and its clinical correlates in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) patients by synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A (SV2A)-positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. METHODS: We recruited 74 SCA3 individuals including preataxic and ataxic stages and divided into two cohorts. All participants received SV2A-PET imaging using 18 F-SynVesT-1 for synaptic density assessment. Specifically, cohort 1 received standard PET procedure and quantified neurofilament light chain (NfL), and cohort 2 received simplified PET procedure for exploratory purpose. Bivariate correlation was performed between synaptic loss and clinical as well as genetic assessments. RESULTS: In cohort 1, significant reductions of synaptic density were observed in cerebellum and brainstem in SCA3 ataxia stage compared to preataxic stage and controls. Vermis was found significantly involved in preataxic stage compared to controls. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves highlighted SV2A of vermis, pons, and medulla differentiating preataxic stage from ataxic stage, and SV2A combined with NfL improved the performance. Synaptic density was significantly negatively correlated with disease severity in cerebellum and brainstem (International Co-operative Ataxia Rating Scale: ρ ranging from -0.467 to -0.667, P ≤ 0.002; Scale of Assessment and Rating of Ataxia: ρ ranging from -0.465 to -0.586, P ≤ 0.002). SV2A reduction tendency of cerebellum and brainstem identified in cohort 1 was observed in cohort 2 with simplified PET procedure. CONCLUSIONS: We first identified in vivo synaptic loss was related to disease severity of SCA3, suggesting SV2A PET could be a promising clinical biomarker for disease progression of SCA3. © 2023 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

ADSCs enhance VEGFR3-mediated lymphangiogenesis via METTL3-mediated VEGF-C m6A modification to improve wound healing of diabetic foot ulcers.

BACKGROUND: Adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (ADSCs) are an important focus in regenerative medicine. However, the biological function of ADSCs in the wound repair of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) remains unclear. This study aimed to determine the underlying mechanisms of ADSCs involved in the wound healing of DFUs. METHODS: The cell surface markers cluster of differentiation 34 (CD34), stromal cell antigen 1 (Stro-1), cluster of differentiation 90 (CD90) and cluster of differentiation 105 (CD105) on ADSCs were identified by flow cytometry. Oil Red O staining and Alizarin Red S staining were performed to identify the multipotential differentiation of ADSCs into adipocytes and bone. The levels of Methyltransferase-like 3 (METTL3), vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGF-C) and insulin-like growth factor 2 binding protein 2 (IGF2BP2) were assessed by RT-qPCR. CCK-8, Transwell and tubule formation assays were conducted to assess lymphatic endothelial cell (LEC) viability, migration and tubule formation ability, respectively. RIP and RNA pulldown assays were conducted to assess the interaction between IGF2BP2 and VEGF-C. The levels of VEGF-C, VEGFR3, LYVE-1 and IGF2BP2 proteins were assessed by Western blotting. The levels of VEGF-C in LECs were measured by ELISA. RESULTS: Our findings illustrated that ADSCs accelerate LEC proliferation, migration and lymphangiogenesis via the METTL3 pathway and regulate VEGF-C expression via the METTL3/IGF2BP2-m6A pathway VEGF-C-mediated lymphangiogenesis via the METTL3/IGF2BP2-m6A pathway in DFU mice. CONCLUSION: ADSCs enhance VEGFR3-mediated lymphangiogenesis via METTL3-mediated VEGF-C m6A modification to improve wound healing in DFUs, indicating that ADSCs may be regarded as a promising therapeutic strategy to promote wound healing in DFUs.

Evaluation of 18F-AlF-NOTA-octreotide for imaging neuroendocrine neoplasms: comparison with 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of 18F-AlF-NOTA-octreotide (18F-OC) PET/CT compared with that of 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty patients (mean age: 52.65 years, range: 24-70 years) with biopsy-proven neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs) were enrolled in this prospective study. We compared the biodistribution profiles in normal organs based on the maximum standard uptake value (SUVmax) and mean standard uptake value (SUVmean), and uptake in NEN lesions by measuring the SUVmax on 18F-OC and 68Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT images. The tumor-to-liver ratio (TLR) and tumor-to-spleen ratio were calculated by dividing the SUVmax of different tumor lesions by the SUVmean of the liver and spleen, respectively. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare nonparametric data. Data were expressed as the median (interquartile range). RESULTS: In most organs, there were no significant differences in the biodistribution of 68Ga-DOTATATE and 18F-OC. 18F-OC had significantly lower uptake in the salivary glands and liver than 68Ga-DOTATATE. 18F-OC detected more lesions than 68Ga-DOTATATE. The uptake of 18F-OC in the tumors was higher in most patients, but the difference was not statistically significant relative to that of 68Ga-DOTATATE. However, the TLRs of 18F-OC were higher in most patients, including for lesions in the liver (p = 0.02) and lymph nodes (p = 0.02). CONCLUSION: Relative to 68Ga-DOTATATE, 18F-OC possesses favorable characteristics with similar image quality and satisfactory NEN lesion detection rates, especially in the liver due to its low background uptake. 18F-OC therefore offers a promising clinical alternative for 68Ga-DOTATATE.

Ultrasound-Mediated Microbubble Destruction Inhibits Skin Melanoma Growth by Affecting YAP1 Translation Using Ribosome Imprinting Sequencing.

Cutaneous melanoma (CMM) is a skin tumor with a high degree of malignancy. BRAF resistance imposes great difficulty to the treatment of CMM, and partially contributes to the poor prognosis of CMM. YAP is involved in the growth and drug resistance of a variety of tumors, and mechanical signals may affect the activation of YAP1. As a novel ultrasound treatment technology, ultrasound-mediated microbubble destruction (UMMD) has been reported to have a killing effect on isolated CMM cells. In this study, the tumor tissue samples were collected from 64 CMM patients. We found that YAP1 mRNA expression was irrelevant to the clinicopathological characteristics and prognostic survival of the CMM patients. The drug-resistant cell line was constructed and subcutaneously implanted into nude mice, which were further separately treated with UMMD, ultrasound (US), and microbubbles (MB). The result showed that UMMD significantly inhibited the growth of tumor tissues. Ribosome imprinting sequencing (Ribo-seq) is a genetic technology for studying protein translation at genetic level. Ribo-seq, RNA-seq, and RT-qPCR were applied to detect YAP1 expression in CMM mouse tumor tissues. Ribo-seq data revealed that UMMD greatly up-regulated the expression of YAP1, interestingly, the up-regulated YAP1 was found to be negatively correlated with the weight of tumor tissues, while no significant change in YAP1 expression was detected by RNA-seq or RT-qPCR assay. These results indicated that UMMD could inhibit the tumor growth of drug-resistant CMM by affecting the translation efficiency of YAP1, providing a strong basis for the clinical treatment of UMMD in CMM.

Long noncoding RNA GAS5 accelerates diabetic wound healing and promotes lymphangiogenesis via miR-217/Prox1 axis.

BACKGROUND: Diabetes is usually the leading cause of chronic non-healing wounds. LncRNA-GAS5 has been verified to be involved in the regulation of diabetes or high glucose (HG)-stimulated cells. However, its regulatory roles in diabetic wound healing need further investigation. METHOD: GAS5, miR-217 and Prox1 were identified by qRT-PCR. MTT, flow cytometry assay, wound-healing assay and tube formation were used to analyze cell viability, apoptosis, migration and tube formation capacity. Western blotting was carried out to detect the protein expression of c-Myc, CyclinD1, CDK4, Bcl-2, Prox1, VEGFR-3 and LYVE-1. Bioinformatics and luciferase assay were performed to predict and validate the binding sites of miR-217 on GAS5 and Prox1. Immunofluorescence staining detected the expression and distribution of Prox1. The wound healing rate was also assessed by setting up the diabetic mouse model. H&E staining assessed the distribution of inflammatory cells and fibroblasts in the wound tissues. RESULTS: GAS5 was significantly down-regulated whereas miR-217 was obviously up-regulated in diabetic skin, HG-induced lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs) and diabetic mouse model. GAS5 sponged miR-217 to up-regulate Prox1. GAS5 overexpression or miR-217 inhibition rescued the impairments of cell viability, migration and lymphatic vessel formation and the facilitation of apoptosis of LECs caused by HG. Similar impacts were observed on the protein level of VEGFR-3, LYVE-1, and Prox1. GAS5 promoted wound healing and lymphangiogenesis in the diabetic mouse model. CONCLUSION: GAS5 sponged miR-217 to up-regulate Prox1 and promote lymphangiogenesis and diabetic wound healing. This might provide novel therapeutic strategy to improve the efficacy of diabetic wound healing.

Recent advances in polyphenols improving vascular endothelial dysfunction induced by endogenous toxicity.

Endothelial dysfunction is the early marker and precursor for the development of a series of vascular disease. Epidemiologic and experimental evidences have suggested that regular consumptions of polyphenol rich extracts or individual phenolic compounds both improve endothelial function. The present review concludes the recent advances in the protective effects of polyphenol-rich extracts and individual phenolic compounds on the endothelial function. The vascular protective benefits of polyphenol have been well established with so many in vitro and in vivo studies. The mechanisms underlying the protection actions have also been elucidated much. Further studies may lay efforts on understanding the controversies among results from different assays, exploring deeper and more comprehensive mechanisms, elaborating the structure-activity relationship, and improving the safety evaluation research.

Real-time burn depth assessment using artificial networks: a large-scale, multicentre study.

INTRODUCTION: Early judgment of the depth of burns is very important for the accurate formulation of treatment plans. In medical imaging the application of Artificial Intelligence has the potential for serving as a very experienced assistant to improve early clinical diagnosis. Due to lack of large volume of a particular feature, there has been almost no progress in burn field. METHODS: 484 early wound images are collected on patients who discharged home after a burn injury in 48 h, from five different levels of hospitals in Hunan Province China. According to actual healing time, all images are manually annotated by five professional burn surgeons and divided into three sets which are shallow(0-10 days), moderate(11-20 days) and deep(more than 21 days or skin graft healing). These ROIs were further divided into 5637 patches sizes 224 × 224 pixels, of which 1733 shallow, 1804 moderate, and 2100 deep. We used transfer learning suing a Pre-trained ResNet50 model and the ratio of all images is 7:1.5:1.5 for training:validation:test. RESULTS: A novel artificial burn depth recognition model based on convolutional neural network was established and the diagnostic accuracy of the three types of burns is about 80%. DISCUSSION: The actual healing time can be used to deduce the depth of burn involvement. The artificial burn depth recognition model can accurately infer healing time and burn depth of the patient, which is expected to be used for auxiliary diagnosis improvement.

Clinical Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Glaucoma Diagnosis.

Despite the potential to revolutionise disease diagnosis by performing data-driven classification, clinical interpretability of ConvNet remains challenging. In this paper, a novel clinical interpretable ConvNet architecture is proposed not only for accurate glaucoma diagnosis but also for the more transparent interpretation by highlighting the distinct regions recognised by the network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of providing the interpretable diagnosis of glaucoma with the popular deep learning model. We propose a novel scheme for aggregating features from different scales to promote the performance of glaucoma diagnosis, which we refer to as M-LAP. Moreover, by modelling the correspondence from binary diagnosis information to the spatial pixels, the proposed scheme generates glaucoma activations, which bridge the gap between global semantical diagnosis and precise location. In contrast to previous works, it can discover the distinguish local regions in fundus images as evidence for clinical interpretable glaucoma diagnosis. Experimental results, performed on the challenging ORIGA datasets, show that our method on glaucoma diagnosis outperforms state-of-the-art methods with the highest AUC (0.88). Remarkably, the extensive results, optic disc segmentation (dice of 0.9) and local disease focus localization based on the evidence map, demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on clinical interpretability.

Long noncoding RNA-antisense noncoding RNA in the INK4 locus accelerates wound healing in diabetes by promoting lymphangiogenesis via regulating miR-181a/Prox1 axis.

BACKGROUND: Slow lymphangiogenesis is one crucial reason for the impaired wound healing process in diabetes. Accumulative evidence showed that long noncoding RNA-antisense noncoding RNA in the INK4 locus (ANRIL) could influence lymphangiogenesis. Besides, miR-181a has been reported to regulate Prox1 that is essential for lymphangiogenesis. However, the relationship between ANRIL and miR-181a as well as the definitive function of ANRIL in lymphangiogenesis is not clear. METHODS: The diabetic mouse model was set up to assess the wound healing rate in vivo. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction was performed to measure the expressions of ANRIL, miR-181a, and Prox1. Western blot analysis was used to assess the expressions of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-3, lymphatic vessel hyaluronan receptor-1, Prox1, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-related proteins. Flow cytometry was used to assess the cell apoptosis. Wound healing assay was used to determine the effect of ANRIL on cell migration. Tube-formation assay and immunofluorescence staining were performed to determine tube-formation capacity of human dermal lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs). RESULTS: ANRIL and Prox1 were downregulated, whereas miR-181a was upregulated in the diabetic wound healing mouse model and high glucose (HG)-induced LECs. The wound healing rate and EMT were inhibited during the diabetic wound healing process. Dual-luciferase assay proved that miR-181a could bind Prox1 to repress its expression, whereas ANRIL could sponge miR-181a to recover Prox1 expression. Overexpression of ANRIL or inhibition of miR-181a rescued the impairments of survival, migration, EMT formation, and tube formation of LECs caused by HG. CONCLUSION: ANRIL could promote lymphangiogenesis during the diabetic wound healing process via sponging miR-181a to enhance Prox1 expression, which might help design new therapy to improve the wound healing efficacy for diabetes.

MiR-128-3p directly targets VEGFC/VEGFR3 to modulate the proliferation of lymphatic endothelial cells through Ca2+ signaling.

Lymphangiogenesis has been regarded as a physiological response to pathologic stimuli. The abnormal proliferation of lymphatic endothelial cell (LECs) and lymphangiogenesis is involved in the development of lymphatic disorders. Reportedly, VEGFC/VEGFR3 plays a key role in lymphangiogenesis; moreover, VEGFC/VEGFR3 exerts their cellular effects through activation of Ca2+ signaling in several cell types. Herein, we demonstrated that VEGFC significantly up-regulated LEC proliferation through VEGFR3; moreover, VEGFC/VEGFR3 induced Ca2+ signaling activation. By using online tools, miR-128 and miR-3916 were predicted as candidate upstream miRNAs which might target VEGFC/VEGFR3. As verified using Immunoblotting assays, miR-128 significantly regulated the protein levels of VEGFC/VEGFR3, whereas miR-3916 only slightly modulated VEGFC and VEGFR3 proteins. Contrary to VEGFC, miR-128 overexpression remarkably suppressed LEC proliferation, Ca2+ release and ERK1/2-Akt signaling; moreover, the effect of VEGFC could be partially attenuated by miR-128. In summary, miR-128 interacts with the 3'-UTR of VEGFC and VEGFR3 to inhibit their expression, thus suppressing LEC proliferation through Ca2+ and ERK1/2-Akt signaling. Taken together, we provided novel experimental basis for miRNA-regulated LEC proliferation through Ca2+ signaling.

Muscular proteomic profiling of deep pressure ulcers reveals myoprotective role of JAK2 in ischemia and reperfusion injury.

Pressure ulcers (PUs) are a complex and serious clinical problem. Deep tissue injury (DTI) is either the outcome or the trigger of deep PUs. However, the cellular and molecular mechanisms that contribute to the pathogenesis of deep PUs remain unclear. In this study, the degeneration characteristics and increased autophagy and apoptosis were observed in deep PU muscle tissues. Muscular proteome of deep PU revealed that a total of 520 proteins were differentially expressed, particularly, JAK2 was down-regulated. Intriguingly, expression of JAK2 in C2C12 myoblasts exposed to oxygen-glucose deprivation and reoxygenation (OGD/R) insult was also distinctly reduced. Ex vivo, we transfected C2C12 myoblasts with lentivirus carrying the JAK2 plasmid and found that JAK2-overexpressed myoblasts exhibited a decrease in autophagy and apoptosis after OGD/R treatment, as well as less cell death. Finally, Western blot analysis determined that p-JAK2, p-AKT, p-mTOR and p-ERK1/2 levels were significantly elevated, accompanied by JAK2 overexpression but without p-STAT3, and inhibition of the AKT and ERK1/2 pathway resulted in elevated apoptosis and/or autophagy. These results demonstrated that JAK2 may play an important protective role in muscular ischemia and reperfusion injury during DTI development by inhibition of autophagy and apoptosis through the AKT and ERK1/2 pathways.