Cardiac immune cell infiltration associates with abnormal lipid metabolism.

CD36 mediates the uptake of long-chain fatty acids (FAs), a major energy substrate for the myocardium. Under excessive FA supply, CD36 can cause cardiac lipid accumulation and inflammation while its deletion reduces heart FA uptake and lipid content and increases glucose utilization. As a result, CD36 was proposed as a therapeutic target for obesity-associated heart disease. However, more recent reports have shown that CD36 deficiency suppresses myocardial flexibility in fuel preference between glucose and FAs, impairing tissue energy balance, while CD36 absence in tissue macrophages reduces efferocytosis and myocardial repair after injury. In line with the latter homeostatic functions, we had previously reported that CD36-/- mice have chronic subclinical inflammation. Lipids are important for the maintenance of tissue homeostasis and there is limited information on heart lipid metabolism in CD36 deficiency. Here, we document in the hearts of unchallenged CD36-/- mice abnormalities in the metabolism of triglycerides, plasmalogens, cardiolipins, acylcarnitines, and arachidonic acid, and the altered remodeling of these lipids in response to an overnight fast. The hearts were examined for evidence of inflammation by monitoring the presence of neutrophils and pro-inflammatory monocytes/macrophages using the respective positron emission tomography (PET) tracers, 64Cu-AMD3100 and 68Ga-DOTA-ECL1i. We detected significant immune cell infiltration in unchallenged CD36-/- hearts as compared with controls and immune infiltration was also observed in hearts of mice with cardiomyocyte-specific CD36 deficiency. Together, the data show that the CD36-/- heart is in a non-homeostatic state that could compromise its stress response. Non-invasive immune cell monitoring in humans with partial or total CD36 deficiency could help evaluate the risk of impaired heart remodeling and disease.

Modeling Access Across the Digital Divide for Intersectional Groups Seeking Web-Based Health Information: National Survey.

BACKGROUND: The digital divide refers to technological disparities based on demographic characteristics (eg, race and ethnicity). Lack of physical access to the internet inhibits online health information seeking (OHIS) and exacerbates health disparities. Research on the digital divide examines where and how people access the internet, whereas research on OHIS investigates how intersectional identities influence OHIS. We combine these perspectives to explicate how unique context-device access pairings operate differently across intersectional identities-particularly racial and ethnic groups-in the domain of OHIS. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine how different types of internet access relate to OHIS for different racial and ethnic groups. We investigate relationships among predisposing characteristics (ie, age, sex, education, and income), internet access (home computer, public computer, work computer, and mobile), health needs, and OHIS. METHODS: Analysis was conducted using data from the 2019 Health Information National Trends Survey. Our theoretical model of OHIS explicates the roles of internet access and health needs for racial and ethnic minority groups' OHIS. Participant responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Three separate group structural equation modeling models were specified based on Black, Latine, and White self-categorizations. RESULTS: Overall, predisposing characteristics (ie, age, sex, education, and income) were associated with internet access, health needs, and OHIS; internet access was associated with OHIS; and health needs were associated with OHIS. Home computer and mobile access were most consistently associated with OHIS. Several notable linkages between predisposing characteristics and internet access differed for Black and Latine individuals. Older racial and ethnic minorities tended to access the internet on home and public computers less frequently; home computer access was a stronger predictor of OHIS for White individuals, and mobile access was a stronger predictor of OHIS for non-White individuals. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings necessitate a deeper unpacking of how physical internet access, the foundational and multifaceted level of the digital divide, affects specific racial and ethnic groups and their OHIS. We not only find support for prior work on the digital divide but also surface new insights, including distinct impacts of context-device access pairings for OHIS and several relationships that differ between racial and ethnic groups. As such, we propose interventions with an intersectional approach to access to ameliorate the impact of the digital divide.

Overclaiming responsibility in fictitious countries: Unpacking the role of availability in support theory predictions of overclaiming.

Prior research has demonstrated that Americans massively overestimate how much their home state has contributed to US history. Why does such collective overclaiming occur? We argue that although self-serving biases undoubtedly influence overclaiming, non-motivated factors, such as a failure to consider the contributions of other states, also play a large role in overclaiming effects. In the current studies, subjects read descriptions of territories within a fictitious country and evaluated how much a territory within that country contributed to its history. Experiment 1 showed that overclaiming of responsibility increased as more territories were added to the country. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that requiring subjects to explicitly consider all territories reduced estimations of responsibility. Experiment 4 showed that people provided higher ratings of responsibility when more details were provided about the territory. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that retrieval fluency did not affect overclaiming. We conclude that support theory - based on the availability of content - provides a strong explanation for why the collective overclaiming of responsibility occurs, with both theoretical and practical implications.

Collective Narcissism: Americans Exaggerate the Role of Their Home State in Appraising U.S. History.

Collective narcissism-a phenomenon in which individuals show excessively high regard for their own group-is ubiquitous in studies of small groups. We examined how Americans from the 50 U.S. states ( N = 2,898) remembered U.S. history by asking them, "In terms of percentage, what do you think was your home state's contribution to the history of the United States?" The mean state estimates ranged from 9% (Iowa) to 41% (Virginia), with the total contribution for all states equaling 907%, indicating strong collective narcissism. In comparison, ratings provided by nonresidents for states were much lower (but still high). Surprisingly, asking people questions about U.S. history before they made their judgment did not lower estimates. We argue that this ethnocentric bias is due to ego protection, selective memory retrieval processes involving the availability heuristic, and poor statistical reasoning. This study shows that biases that influence individual remembering also influence collective remembering.