Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

Department of Medicine

Football metabolomics

Following on the recent announcement of the Atlanta Hawks training center, here’s a Nov. 2015 research paper from Emory’s sports cardiologist Jonathan Kim, published in Annals of Sports Medicine and Research.

Jonathan Kim, MD

Kim and colleagues from Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute studied blood samples from 15 freshman football players at Georgia Tech before and after their first competitive season. The researchers had the help of metabolomics expert Dean Jones. Kim has also previously studied blood pressure risk factors in college football players.

On average, football players’ resting heart rate went down significantly (72 to 61 beats per minute), but there were no significant changes in body mass index or blood pressure. The research team observed changes in players’ amino acid metabolism, which they attribute to muscle buildup.

This finding may seem obvious, but imagine what a larger, more detailed analysis could do: start to replace locker room myths and marketing aimed at bodybuilders with science. This was a small, preliminary study, and the authors note they were not able to assess diet or nutritional supplementation. Read more

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Food deserts and cardiovascular risk

Heval Mohamed Kelli, MD got some attention at the American College of Cardiology meeting over the weekend with his work on food deserts — low-income areas distant from access to healthy food.

As Medscape summarized the results: “Atlantans living in disadvantaged areas where the nearest supermarket was a mile or more away were more likely to have hypertension or hyperlipidemia, smoke, be obese, and have higher levels of systemic inflammatory markers and stiffer arteries.”

Kelli_cover

Kelli at Clarkston Health Clinic, which Emory doctors helped establish in 2015. Clarkston is considered a “food desert”.

For more on Kelli’s journey from Syrian refugee to Clarkston, GA teenager to Emory cardiology researcher, check out this feature in Emory Magazine.

His research was conducted through the Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute, using information on 712 community participants from the META-Health study and 709 Emory/Georgia Tech employees from the Predictive Health study.

Three possibilities for further investigation:

*Income, education, race and geography are intertwined. “Whether lack of access to healthy foods, low income, or low education is driving these processes needs to be further studied,” Kelli and colleagues concluded.

*For detailed maps of food deserts, not just in Atlanta and/or determined using different criteria, the U.S. Department of Agriculture makes it possible.

*This Atlantic article makes the point that “when it comes to nutrition access, the focus should be on poverty, not grocery-store location.” You can lead people to the supermarket (or build one close to where they live), but you can’t make them eat a Mediterranean diet. Studies from Los Angeles showed that obesity increased more in some neighborhoods, even despite a ban on new fast food restaurants.

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ACC 2016: Stem cell study sees improved heart failure outcomes

Patients with heart failure who received an experimental stem cell therapy experienced a reduced rate of death, hospitalization and unplanned clinic visits over the next year compared to a placebo group, according to results presented Monday at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago.

The results of the ixCELL-DCM study were published online Monday by The Lancet. It was reportedly the largest cell therapy study done in patients with heart failure so far (58 treated vs 51 placebo).

Emory University School of Medicine investigators led by Arshed Quyyumi, MD, and their patients participated in the study, and Emory was one of the largest enrolling sites. Lead authors were Timothy Henry, MD of Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles and Amit Patel, MD of the University of Utah.

“For the first time, a clinical trial has shown that administration of a cellular therapeutic results in an improvement in cardiac outcomes based on a prespecified analysis,” an editorial accompanying the paper in The Lancet says.

This study, which was sponsored by Vericel Corporation, was phase II, meaning that a larger phase III study will be needed before FDA approval. Read more

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ACC 2016: Elevated troponin linked to mental stress ischemia

Some people with heart disease experience a restriction of blood flow to the heart in response to psychological stress. Usually silent (not painful), the temporary restriction in blood flow, called ischemia, is an indicator of greater mortality risk.

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Cardiologists at Emory University School of Medicine have discovered that people in this group tend to have higher levels of troponin — a protein whose increased presence in the blood that is a sign of recent damage or stress to the heart muscle– all the time, independently of whether they are experiencing stress or chest pain at that moment.

The results were presented Sunday by cardiology research fellow Muhammad Hammadah, MD at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago, as part of the Young Investigator Awards competition. Hammadah works with Arshed Quyyumi, MD, and Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute.

“Elevated troponin levels in patients with coronary artery disease may be a sign that they are experiencing repeated ischemic events in everyday life, with either psychological or physical triggers,” Hammadah says.

Doctors test for troponin in the blood to tell whether someone has recently had a heart attack. But the levels seen in this study were lower than those used to diagnose a heart attack: less than a standard cutoff of 26 picograms per milliliter, in a range that only a high-sensitivity test for troponin could detect.

In a separate study, Emory investigators have shown that elevated troponin levels (especially: more than 10 pg/mL)  predict mortality risk over the next few years in patients undergoing cardiac catheterization, even in those without apparent coronary artery disease.

There is already a lot of information available for doctors about the significance of elevated troponin. It has even been detected at elevated levels after strenuous exercise in healthy individuals. One recent study suggested that low levels of troponin could be used to rule out heart attack for patients in the emergency department.

More information about the mental stress ischemia study: Read more

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Measuring microbiome disruption

How should doctors measure how messed up someone’s intestinal microbiome is?

This is the topic of a recent paper in American Journal of Infection Control from Colleen Kraft and colleagues from Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The corresponding author is epidemiologist Alison Laufer Halpin at the CDC.

A “microbiome disruption index” could inform decisions on antibiotic stewardship, where a patient should be treated or interventions such as fecal microbial transplant (link to 2014 Emory Medicine article) or oral probiotic capsules.

What the authors are moving towards is similar to Shannon’s index, which ecologists use to measure diversity of species. Another way to think about it is like the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality in a country. If there are many kinds of bacteria living in someone’s body, the disruption index should be low. If there is just one dominant type of bacteria, the disruption index should be high.

In the paper, the authors examined samples from eight patients in a long-term acute care hospital (Wesley Woods) who had recently developed diarrhea. Using DNA sequencing, they determined what types of bacteria were present in patients’ stool. The patients’ samples were compared with those from two fecal microbial transplant donors. Read more

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An effective alternative to fecal transplant for C. difficile?

Bacterial spores in capsules taken by mouth can prevent recurrent C. difficile infection, results from a preliminary study suggest.

Clostridium difficile is the most common hospital-acquired infection in the United States and can cause persistent, sometimes life-threatening diarrhea. Fecal microbiota transplant has shown promise in many clinical studies as a treatment for C. difficile, but uncertainty has surrounded how such transplants should be regulated and standardized. Also, the still-investigational procedure is often performed by colonoscopy, which may be difficult for some patients to tolerate.

The capsule study, published Monday in Journal of Infectious Diseases, represents an important step in moving away from fecal microbiota transplant as a treatment for C. difficile, says Colleen Kraft, MD, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and medicine (infectious diseases) at Emory University School of Medicine.

Kraft and Tanvi Dhere, MD, assistant professor of medicine (digestive diseases) have led development of the fecal microbiota transplant program at Emory. They are authors on the capsule study, along with investigators from Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, Miriam Hospital (Rhode Island), and Seres Therapeutics, the study sponsor.

While this study involving 30 patients did not include a control group, the reported effectiveness of 96.7 percent compares favorably to published results on antibiotic treatment of C. difficile infection or fecal microbial transplant. Read more

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Oxidative stress ain’t about free radicals, it’s about sulfur

This recent paper in Circulation, from Arshed Quyyumi and colleagues at the Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute, can be seen as a culmination of, even vindication for,  Dean Jones’ ideas about redox biology.

Let’s back up a bit. Fruit juices, herbal teas, yogurts, even cookies are advertised as containing antioxidants, which could potentially fight aging. This goes back to Denham Harman and the free radical theory of aging. [I attempted to explain this several years ago in Emory Medicine.]

We now know that free radicals, in the form of reactive oxygen species, can sometimes be good, even essential for life. So antioxidants that soak up free radicals to relieve you of oxidative stress: that doesn’t seem to work.

Dean Jones, who is director of Emory’s Clinical Biomarkers laboratory, has been an advocate for a different way of looking at oxidative stress. That is, instead of seeing cells as big bags of redox-sensitive chemicals, look at cellular compartments. Look at particular antioxidant proteins and sulfur-containing antioxidant molecules such as glutathione and cysteine.

That’s what the Circulation paper does. Mining the Emory Cardiovascular Biobank, Quyyumi’s team shows that patients with coronary artery disease have a risk of mortality that is connected to the ratio of glutathione to cystine (the oxidized form of the amino acid cysteine).

How this ratio might fit in with other biomarkers of cardiovascular risk (such as CRP, suPAR, PCSK9, more complicated combinations and gene expression profiles, even more links here) and be implemented clinically are still unfolding.

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Rescuing existing antibiotics with adjuvants

One of the speakers at Thursday’s Antibiotic Resistance Center symposium, Gerald Wright from McMaster University, made the case for fighting antibiotic resistance by combining known antibiotics with non-antibiotic drugs that are used to treat other conditions, which he called adjuvants.

As an example, he cited this paper, in which his lab showed that loperamide, known commercially as the anti-diarrheal Immodium, can make bacteria sensitive to tetracycline-type antibiotics.

Wright said that other commercial drugs and compounds in pharmaceutical companies’ libraries could have similar synergistic effects when combined with existing antibiotics. Most drug-like compounds aimed at human physiology follow “Lipinski’s rule of five“, but the same rules don’t apply to bacteria, he said. What might be a more rewarding place to look for more anti-bacterial compounds? Natural products from fungi and plants, Wright proposed.

“I made a little fist-pump when he said that,” says Emory ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave, whose laboratory specializing in looking for anti-bacterial activities in medicinal plants.

Medical thnobotanist Cassandra Quave collecting plant specimens in Italy.

Medical ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave collecting plant specimens in Italy

Indeed, many of the points he made on strategies to overcome antibiotic resistance could apply to Quave’s approach. She and her colleagues have been investigating compounds that can disrupt biofilms, thus enhancing antibiotic activity. More at eScienceCommons and at her lab’s site.

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Galectins defend against bacterial wolves in sheeps’ clothing

To prevent auto-immune attack, our bodies avoid making antibodies against molecules found on our own cells. That leaves gaps in our immune defenses bacteria could exploit. Some of those gaps are filled by galectins, a family of proteins whose anti-bacterial properties were identified by Emory scientists.

In the accompanying video, Sean Stowell, MD, PhD and colleagues explain how galectins can be compared to sheep dogs, which are vigilant in protecting our cells (sheep) against bacteria that may try to disguise themselves (wolves).

The video was produced to showcase the breadth of research being conducted within Emory’s Antibiotic Resistance Center. Because of their ability to selectively target some kinds of bacteria, galectins could potentially be used as antibiotics to treat infections without wiping out all the bacteria in the body. Read more

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IgG4-related means mysterious

Emory rheumatologist Arezou Khosroshahi was the lead author on a differential diagnosis case report in New England Journal of Medicine published in October, which describes an example of IgG4-related disease. This autoimmune condition’s name was agreed upon only recently, at an international conference she co-directed in 2011.

This review calls IgG4-related disease an “orphan disease with many faces.” It sounds like each case has the potential to be an episode of House. As Khosroshahi explains:

“Most patients undergo invasive procedures for resection or biopsy of the affected organ to exclude other conditions. Unfortunately, most of those patients get dismissed by the clinicians, given the good news that their disease was not malignancy. Many of them have recurrence of the condition in other organs after a few months or years.”

Arezou Khosroshahi, MD

Rheumatologist Arezou Khosroshahi, MD

In the case report, a woman was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital, because of shoulder and abdominal pain and an accumulation of fluid around her lungs. Surgeons removed a softball-sized mass from her right lung. The mass did not appear to be cancerous, but instead seemed to be the result of some kind of fibrous inflammation, and the patient was treated with antibiotics. Read more

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