Previous studies have shown that vagus nerve stimulation can improve the prognosis of traumatic brain injury. The aim of this study was to elucidate the mechanism of the neuroprotective effects of vagus nerve stimulation in rabbits with brain explosive injury. Rabbits with brain explosive injury received continuous stimulation (10 V, 5 Hz, 5 ms, 20 minutes) of the right cervical vagus nerve. Tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-1β and interleukin-10 concentrations were detected in serum and brain tissues, and water content in brain tissues was measured. Results showed that vagus nerve stimulation could reduce the degree of brain edema, decrease tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-1β concentrations, and increase interleukin-10 concentration after brain explosive injury in rabbits. These data suggest that vagus nerve stimulation may exert neuroprotective effects against explosive injury via regulating the expression of tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-1β and interleukin-10 in the serum and brain tissue.
Disease–disease relationships (e.g., disease comorbidities) play crucial roles in pathobiological manifestations of diseases and personalized approaches to managing those conditions. In this study, we develop a network-based methodology, termed meta-path-based Disease Network (mpDisNet) capturing algorithm, to infer disease–disease relationships by assembling four biological networks: disease–miRNA, miRNA–gene, disease–gene, and the human protein–protein interactome. mpDisNet is a meta-path-based random walk to reconstruct the heterogeneous neighbors of a given node. mpDisNet uses a heterogeneous skip-gram model to solve the network representation of the nodes. We find that mpDisNet reveals high performance in inferring clinically reported disease–disease relationships, outperforming that of traditional gene/miRNA-overlap approaches. In addition, mpDisNet identifies network-based comorbidities for pulmonary diseases driven by underlying miRNA-mediated pathobiological pathways (i.e., hsa-let-7a- or hsa-let-7b-mediated airway epithelial apoptosis and pro-inflammatory cytokine pathways) as derived from the human interactome network analysis. The mpDisNet offers a powerful tool for network-based identification of disease–disease relationships with miRNA-mediated pathobiological pathways.
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