236 research outputs found
Non invasive indexes for the assessment of patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
Full text linkNonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) affects about 20%-30% of the general population, and its clinical relevance arises from the fact that 20%-30% of these subjects develop non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a condition at risk of cirrhosis progression. In addition NAFLD, and in particular NASH patients, are also at high risk of cardiovascular alterations, suffering overall from an increased liver and no liver-related events of risk and death. At the moment liver biopsy is the gold standard for a correct evaluation of NASH and fibrosis among NAFLD patients. However, the high and increasing prevalence of NAFLD has triggered an intensive search for alternative and non-invasive methods for evaluating disease severity. Specifically we can distinguish two main groups of non-invasive methodologies, namely 'serum markers' that use clinical and/or biochemical variables, and methodologies derived from elaboration of parameters arising from liver imaging techniques. All these tools showed encouraging results, even though their utility in clinical practice in the individual patients is still under debate. Therefore further efforts are needed in order to generate non-invasive algorithms that correctly assess liver damage in NAFLD patients. In particular, it should be interesting to perform gender-specific analysis, by combining old and new tools, with the aim to generate more accurate scores. Finally we think that non-invasive scores should not only be able to correctly classify the severity of liver disease in NAFLD patients, but also predict liver and non-liver related morbidity and mortality, further acting as time-dependent markers of liver and systemic disease activity. This review summarizes the present knowledge on noninvasive diagnosis in NAFLD patients, and suggest future directions for this complex research area
Arterial stiffness, thickness and association to suitable novel markers of risk at the origin of cardiovascular disease in obese children
No full textAtherosclerosis origins early in childhood. Aim of the study was to investigate vascular signature and phenotypes of cardiovascular disease in obese children and adolescents identifying novel potential circulating markers of risk. Cross-sectional study of intima-media-thickness (IMT), pulse wave velocity (PWV), augmentation index (AIX@75), circulating markers (E-selectin, soluble-intercellular-adhesion-molecule1_ ICAM1, chemerin, fatty-acid-binding protein 4, sCD36, lipopolysaccharides_LPS, oxLDL, fetuin) in 123 obese (body mass index, BMI z-score >1.645 SD) children (N=55, age ≤10 years-old) and adolescents (N=68, age >10 years-old). Adolescents had significantly higher uric acid (p=0.002), non-HDL-cholesterol (p=0.02), fasting glucose (p=0.04), systolic blood pressure (p=0.005) and PWV (p=0.02) than children. Obese adolescent patients with metabolic syndrome (MetS) abnormalities had higher PWV (p<0.05) than peers without. No differences were observed in circulating biomarkers in relationship to age and MetS status. oxLDL, sCD36 and LPS were correlated to AIX@75 and/or IMTM in children and adolescents (p ranging from <0.05 to <0.0001). Total cholesterol, non-HDL-cholesterol, TG/HDL ratio, oxLDL, sCD36, ICAM1, LPS were significantly different across AIX@75 tertiles (p between 0.03 and 0.001). Early phenotypes of cardiovascular alterations in young severely obese patients encompass increased IMT, stiffness of intermediate size and resistance vasculature. Novel biomarkers investigated in the present study were associated to estimates of stiffness and thickness not differently from traditional risk factor such as non-HDL-cholesterol and TG/HDL ratio.</p
Lack of consistency between two commercial ELISAs and against an in-house ELISA for the detection of soluble CD36 in human plasma
No full textLack of consistency between two commercial ELISAs and against an in-house ELISA for the detection of soluble CD36 in human plasma
No full textLipid-based strategies used to identify extracellular vesicles in flow cytometry can be confounded by lipoproteins:Evaluations of annexin V, lactadherin, and detergent lysis
Full text linkFlow cytometry (FCM) is a popular method used in characterisation of extracellular vesicles (EVs). Circulating EVs are often identified by FCM by exploiting the lipid nature of EVs by staining with Annexin V (Anx5) or lactadherin against the membrane phospholipid phosphatidylserine (PS) and evaluating the specificity of the labels by detergent lysis of EVs. Here, we investigate whether PS labelling and detergent lysis approaches are confounded by lipoproteins, another family of lipid-based nanoparticles found in blood, in both frozen and fresh blood plasma. We demonstrated that Anx5 and lactadherin in addition to EVs stained ApoB-containing lipoproteins, identified by the use of fluorophore-labelled polyclonal ApoB-antibody, and that Anx5 had a significantly larger tendency for labelling lipoprotein-bound PS than lactadherin. Furthermore, detergent lysis resulted in a decrease in both EV and lipoprotein events and especially lipoproteins positive for either Anx5 or lactadherin. Taken together, our findings pose concerns to the use of lipid-based strategies in identifying EVs by FCM and support the use of transmembrane proteins such as tetraspannins to distinguish EVs from lipoproteins.</p
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