Huntington disease is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease with no effective treatment. Minocycline is a tetracycline derivative with proven safety. After ischemia, minocycline inhibits caspase-1 and inducible nitric oxide synthetase upregulation, and reduces infarction. As caspase-1 and nitric oxide seem to play a role in Huntington disease, we evaluated the therapeutic efficacy of minocycline in the R6/2 mouse model of Huntington disease. We report that minocycline delays disease progression, inhibits caspase-1 and caspase-3 mRNA upregulation, and decreases inducible nitric oxide synthetase activity. In addition, effective pharmacotherapy in R6/2 mice requires caspase-1 and caspase-3 inhibition. This is the first demonstration of caspase-1 and caspase-3 transcriptional regulation in a Huntington disease model.
Dyslipidemia is an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes, although exactly which of the many plasma lipids contribute to this remains unclear. We therefore investigated whether lipid profiling can inform diabetes prediction by performing liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry-based lipid profiling in 189 individuals who developed type 2 diabetes and 189 matched disease-free individuals, with over 12 years of follow up in the Framingham Heart Study. We found that lipids of lower carbon number and double bond content were associated with an increased risk of diabetes, whereas lipids of higher carbon number and double bond content were associated with decreased risk. This pattern was strongest for triacylglycerols (TAGs) and persisted after multivariable adjustment for age, sex, BMI, fasting glucose, fasting insulin, total triglycerides, and HDL cholesterol. A combination of 2 TAGs further improved diabetes prediction. To explore potential mechanisms that modulate the distribution of plasma lipids, we performed lipid profiling during oral glucose tolerance testing, pharmacologic interventions, and acute exercise testing. Levels of TAGs associated with increased risk for diabetes decreased in response to insulin action and were elevated in the setting of insulin resistance. Conversely, levels of TAGs associated with decreased diabetes risk rose in response to insulin and were poorly correlated with insulin resistance. These studies identify a relationship between lipid acyl chain content and diabetes risk and demonstrate how lipid profiling could aid in clinical risk assessment.
Exercise provides numerous salutary effects, but our understanding of how these occur is limited. To gain a clearer picture of exercise-induced metabolic responses, we have developed comprehensive plasma metabolite signatures by using mass spectrometry to measure over 200 metabolites before and after exercise. We identified plasma indicators of glycogenolysis (glucose-6-phosphate), tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle span 2 expansion (succinate, malate, and * To whom correspondence should be addressed Corresponding authors Robert E. Gerszten, MD Cardiology Division and Center for Immunology & Inflammatory Diseases Massachusetts General Hospital, Room 8307 149 13th Street Charlestown, MA 02129 rgerszten@partners.org Gregory D. Lewis, MD Cardiology Division Massachusetts General Hospital, GRB 800 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114 glewis@partners.org. Authors contributions: G.D.L conceived the study, designed the experiments, performed primary data analysis and wrote the manuscript. M.J.W. led the effort to recruit and phenotype marathon subjects, L.F. and M.M. recruited subjects, processed samples, and assisted with experimental design. Z.A. and G.C.R. designed and performed the gene expression profiling experiments, A.S., E.Y., X.S., A.A., S.A.C. and C.B.C. developed the metabolic profiling platform, performed mass spectrometry experiments, and analyzed the data, S.C., E.L.M, T.W., and R.S.V. designed experiments and analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study cohort, R.D. and F.P.R. assisted with statistical analysis and constructed the metabolite interrelatedness dendrogram, E.P.R. contributed to mass spectrometry data analysis and helped to write the manuscript, D.M.S. and M.J.S. contributed to the cardiopulmonary exercise testing metabolic profiling experiment, M.S.S. helped to conceive and design the exercise treadmill testing studies and assisted in data interpretation and in writing the manuscript, R.E.G. conceived of the study, designed experiments, analyzed data, and wrote the manuscript. Competing interests:The authors declare that they have no competing interests. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptSci Transl Med. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 December 27. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript fumarate), and lipolysis (glycerol), as well as modulators of insulin sensitivity (niacinamide) and fatty acid oxidation (pantothenic acid). Metabolites that were highly correlated with fitness parameters were found in subjects undergoing acute exercise testing, marathon running, and in 302 subjects from a longitudinal cohort study. Exercise-induced increases in glycerol were strongly related to fitness levels in normal individuals and were attenuated in subjects with myocardial ischemia. A combination of metabolites that increased in plasma in response to exercise (glycerol, niacinamide, glucose-6-phosphate, pantothenate, and succinate) upregulated the expression of nur77, a transcriptional regulator of glucose utilization and lipid metabolism genes in skeleta...
Metabolomic approaches have begun to catalog the metabolic disturbances that accompany CKD, but whether metabolite alterations can predict future CKD is unknown. We performed liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry-based metabolite profiling on plasma from 1434 participants in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) who did not have CKD at baseline. During the following 8 years, 123 individuals developed CKD, defined by an estimated GFR of ,60 ml/min per 1.73 m 2 . Numerous metabolites were associated with incident CKD, including 16 that achieved the Bonferroni-adjusted significance threshold of P#0.00023. To explore how the human kidney modulates these metabolites, we profiled arterial and renal venous plasma from nine individuals. Nine metabolites that predicted CKD in the FHS cohort decreased more than creatinine across the renal circulation, suggesting that they may reflect non-GFR-dependent functions, such as renal metabolism and secretion. Urine isotope dilution studies identified citrulline and choline as markers of renal metabolism and kynurenic acid as a marker of renal secretion. In turn, these analytes remained associated with incident CKD in the FHS cohort, even after adjustment for eGFR, age, sex, diabetes, hypertension, and proteinuria at baseline. Addition of a multimarker metabolite panel to clinical variables significantly increased the c-statistic (0.77-0.83, P,0.0001); net reclassification improvement was 0.78 (95% confidence interval, 0.60 to 0.95; P,0.0001). Thus, the addition of metabolite profiling to clinical data may significantly improve the ability to predict whether an individual will develop CKD by identifying predictors of renal risk that are independent of estimated GFR.
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