Maternal peripheral insulin resistance and increased inflammation are two features of pregnancies, complicated by gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). The nucleotide-binding oligomerisation domain (NOD) intracellular molecules recognise a wide range of microbial products, as well as other intracellular danger signals, thereby initiating inflammation through activation of nuclear factor κB (NFκB...

In clinical trials, aldosterone antagonists decrease cardiovascular mortality and ischemia by unknown mechanisms. The steroid hormone aldosterone acts by binding to the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR), a ligand-activated transcription factor. In humans, aldosterone causes MR-dependent endothelial cell (EC) dysfunction and in animal models, aldosterone increases vascular macrophage infiltration ...

In a recent case-control study which examined >25,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), the intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM) locus was proposed as a susceptibility locus for breast and prostate cancer (1). The genes ICAM1, ICAM4 , and ICAM5 are all located within a 20 kb region of high linkage disequilibrium of chromosome 19p13.2. We examined the association of three previously impli...

While the role of cytokines in causing pro- and anti-inflammatory cascades in the brain and that of chemokines in promoting chemotaxis is well recognized, the immunomodulatory actions of neurotrophins released during brain injury remains largely undetermined. This knowledge gap affects basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF2), which in the brain is mainly produced by astrocytes and characteristica...

BACKGROUND A recent study reported that an 18-analyte multiplexed plasma panel of signaling proteins differentiated Alzheimer's disease (AD) from controls. This study measured mRNA expression for nine of these promising bio-markers in 23 AD patients and 23 age- and sex-matched controls. METHODS Total RNA was isolated from PaxGene RNA tubes. Relative mRNA expression levels of CCL5 [RANTES], CS...

The LFA-1 integrin plays a pivotal role in sustained leukocyte adhesion to the endothelial surface, which is a precondition for leukocyte recruitment into inflammation sites. Strong correlative evidence implicates LFA-1 clustering as being essential for sustained adhesion, and it may also facilitate rebinding events with its ligand ICAM-1. We cannot challenge those hypotheses directly because i...

Lymphocytes emigrate from the circulation to target tissues through the microvascular endothelial cell (EC) barrier. During paracellular transmigration cell-cell junctions have been proposed to disengage and provide homophilic and heterophilic interaction surfaces in a zip-like process. However, it is not known whether ECs modulate junction proteins during this process. Here we show that tyrosi...

Vascular aging is accompanied by increases in circulatory proinflammatory cytokines leading to inflammatory endothelial response implicated in early atherogenesis. To study the possible role of mitochondria-derived reactive oxygen species (ROS) in this phenomenon, we applied the effective mitochondria-targeted antioxidant SkQ1, the conjugate of plastoquinone with dodecyltriphenylphosphonium. Ei...

objective(s): fluvoxamine is a well-known selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (ssri); despite its anti-inflammatory effect, little is known about the precise mechanisms involved. in our previous work, we found that ip administration of fluvoxamine produced a noticeable anti-inflammatory effect in carrageenan-induced paw edema in rats. in this study, we aimed to evaluate the effect of fluvoxa...