Early Warning Value of ASL-MRI to Estimate Premorbid Variations in Patients With Early Postoperative Cognitive Dysfunctions.

Background: Postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) is a general complication following cardiac and major non-cardiac surgery amongst the elderly, yet its causes and mechanisms are still unknown. The present study aimed to detect whether regional cerebral blood flow (CBF) is altered in the brain before surgery in POCD patients compared with non-POCD (NPOCD) patients, thus, CBF variation may potentially predict the occurrence of early POCD. Methods: Fifty patients scheduled for spinal stenosis surgery were enrolled in the study. All study participants completed a battery of neuropsychological tests (NPTs) by a well-trained neuropsychologist before the surgery and 1 week after the surgery. POCD was defined when the preoperative to postoperative difference of at least two of the NPTs' |Z|-scores with reference to a control group exceeded 1.96. Pulsed arterial spin-labeling (ASL) MRI was scanned at least 1 day before surgery. The ASLtbx toolkit and SPM12 were applied to preprocess and correct the images, which were then normalized to the MNI brain template space to obtain standardized cerebral perfusion images. Results: POCD was identified in 11 out of 50 patients (22%). The CBF of the right superior temporal lobe, right and left middle cingulate gyrus, and the right hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus in POCD group was lower than that in NPOCD group (P < 0.001). The CBF of the pars triangularis of inferior frontal gyrus in POCD group was higher than that in NPOCD group (P < 0.001). Conclusions: These preliminary findings suggest that CBF premorbid alterations may happen in cognitively intact elderly patients that develop early POCD. Alterations of preoperative CBF might be a bio-marker for early POCD that can be detected by noninvasive MRI scans.

Genetic Diversity of Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae Strains from Different Geographic Regions in China.

Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae causes kiwifruit bacterial canker, with severe infection of the kiwifruit plant resulting in heavy economic losses. Little is known regarding the biodiversity and genetic variation of populations of P. syringae pv. actinidiae in China. A collection of 269 strains of P. syringae pv. actinidiae was identified from 300 isolates obtained from eight sampling sites in five provinces in China. The profiles of 50 strains of P. syringae pv. actinidiae and one strain of P. syringae pv. actinidifoliorum were characterized by Rep-, insertion sequences 50, and randomly amplified polymorphic DNA polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Discriminant analysis of principal coordinates, principal component analysis, and hierarchical cluster analysis were used to analyze the combined fingerprints of the different PCR assays. The results revealed that all isolates belonged to the Psa3 group, that strains of P. syringae pv. actinidiae from China have broad genetic variability that was related to source geographic region, and that Chinese strains can be readily differentiated from strains from France but are very similar to those from Italy. Multilocus sequence typing of 24 representative isolates using the concatenated sequences of five housekeeping genes (cts, gapA, gyrB, pfk, and rpoD) demonstrated that strain Jzhy2 from China formed an independent clade compared with the other biovars, which possessed the hopH1 effector gene but lacked the hopA1 effector gene. A constellation analysis based on the presence or absence of the four loci coding for phytotoxins and a cluster analysis based on the 11 effector genes showed that strains from China formed two distinct clades. All of the strains, including K3 isolated in 1997 from Jeju, Korea, lacked the cfl gene coding for coronatine. In contrast, the tox-argK gene cluster coding for phaseolotoxin was detected in K3 and in the biovar 1 strains (K3, Kw30, and Psa92), and produced a false-positive amplicon for the hopAM1-like gene in this study. To date, only one biovar (biovar 3) is represented by the strains of P. syringae pv. actinidiae from China, despite China being the center of origin for kiwifruit.

Circulating "LncPPARδ" From Monocytes as a Novel Biomarker for Coronary Artery Diseases.

To investigate long noncoding RNA NONHSAT112178 (LncPPARδ) as a biomarker for coronary artery disease (CAD) in peripheral blood monocyte cells, RT-qPCR was performed to validate the microarray results, receiver operating characteristic curve was applied to study the potential of LncPPARδ as a biomarker. Diagnostic models from LncPPARδ alone or combination of risk factors were constructed by Fisher criteria. The expression of genes neighboring the LncPPARδ gene was examined with RT-qPCR in THP-1 cell line treated with LncPPARδ siRNA. Using a diagnostic model by Fisher criteria, the consideration of risk factors increased the optimal sensitivity from 70.00% to 82.00% and decreased the specificity from 94.00% to 78.00%. The consideration of risk factors also increased area under the receiver operating characteristic curve from 0.727 to 0.785 (P = 0.001), from 0.712 to 0.768 (P = 0.01), and from 0.769 to 0.835 (P = 0.07), in the original, training, and test sets, respectively. Finally, we found that the expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor δ (PPARδ), Adipose Differentiation-Related Protein (ADRP), and Angiopoietin-like 4 (ANGPTL4) were affected by LncPPARδ silencing.Our present study indicated that LncPPARδ, especially combined with risk factors, can be a good biomarker for CAD. LncPPARδ regulates the expression of neighboring protein-coding genes, PPARδ and its direct target genes ADRP and ANGPTL4.