Endovascular treatment is a safe, effective, and very minimally invasive technique that provides good long-term patency rates for patients with NCS, and under the premise morphologic measurements, 14-mm-diameter, 60-mm-long self-expanding stents should be first considered for Chinese patients with NCS.
The α subunit (ATP1) is a vital component of mitochondrial complex V which counts for the majority of cellular ATP production in a living organism. Nevertheless, how the α subunit influences other cellular processes such as pathogenicity in Candida albicans remains poorly understood. To address this question, ATP1 mutant (atp1Δ/Δ) and the gene-reconstituted strain (atp1Δ/ATP1) have been constructed in this study and their pathogenicity-related traits are compared to those of wild type (WT). In a murine model of disseminated candidiasis, atp1Δ/Δ infected mice have a significantly higher survival rate and experience a lower fungal burden in tissues. In in vitro studies atp1Δ/Δ lose a capability to damage or destroy macrophages and endothelial cells. Furthermore, atp1Δ/Δ is not able to grow under either glucose-denial conditions or high H2O2 conditions, both of which are associated with the potency of the macrophages to kill C. albicans. Defects in filamentation and biofilm formation may impair the ability of atp1Δ/Δ to penetrate host cells and establish robust colonies in the host tissues. In concert with these pathogenic features, intracellular ATP levels of atp1Δ/Δ can drop to 1/3 of WT level. These results indicate that the α subunit of Complex V play important roles in C. albicans pathogenicity.
As a typical chronic kidney disease (CKD), hypertensive nephrosclerosis (HN) is a common syndrome of hypertension, characterized by chronic kidney microvascular damage. Early diagnosis of microvascular damage using conventional ultrasound imaging encounters challenges in sensitivity and specificity owing to the inherent diffraction limit. Ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM) has been developed to obtain microvasculature and microvascular hemodynamics within the kidney, and would be a promising tool for the early diagnosis of CKD. Methods: In this study, the advantage of quantitative indexes obtained by using ULM (mean arterial blood flow speeds of different segments of interlobular arteries) over indexes obtained using conventional clinical serum (β2microglobulin,serum urea nitrogen,and creatinine) and urine ( 24-h urine volume and urine protein) tests and ultrasound Doppler imaging (peak systolic velocity [PSV], end-diastolic velocity [EDV], and resistance index [RI]) and contrastenhanced ultrasound imaging (CEUS; rise time [RT], peak intensity [IMAX], mean transit time [mTT], and area under the time-intensity curve [AUC]) for early diagnosis of HN were investigated. Examinations were carried out on six spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) and five normal Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats at the age of 10 weeks.
Results:The experimental results show that the indicators derived from conventional clinical inspections (serum and urine tests) and ultrasound imaging (PSV, EDV, RI, RT, IMAX, mTT, and AUC) do not show significant difference between hypertensive and healthy rats (p > 0.05), while the TTP of the SHR group (28.52 ± 5.52 s) derived from CEUS is significantly higher than that of the WKY group (18.68 ± 7.32 s; p < 0.05). The mean blood flow speed in interlobular artery of SHR (12.47 ± 1.06 mm/s) derived from ULM is significantly higher than that of WKY rats (10.13 ± 1.17 mm/s; p < 0.01).
Conclusion:The advantages of ULM over conventional clinical inspections and ultrasound imaging methods for early diagnosis of HN were validated. The quantitative results show that ULM can effectively diagnose HN at the early stage by detecting the blood flow speed changes of interlobular arteries. ULM may promise a reliable technique for early diagnosis of HN in the future.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.