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

Reversing liver fibrosis via adiponectin

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the most common liver conditions in the United States, affecting 30 percent of the population, and increasing — and likely to catch up in prevalence with obesity and diabetes. In NAFLD, fat content of the liver is elevated to 6 percent or more in people who drink in moderation or not at all. Patients will first present with elevated liver enzyme values in blood tests, but then an imaging test or tissue biopsy may be ordered to evaluate the extent of the damage. NAFLD is mostly asymptomatic and is variable in severity; a majority of those afflicted do not need drug treatments. However, NAFLD is thought to be a preliminary condition that can eventually progress to severe manifestations, such as cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and end stage liver failure.

Progression of liver disease, from NIDDK.  This article is a guest post from Kristina Bargeron Clark, a graduate student at Emory and communications chair for Women in Bio-Atlanta. Her website is www.inkcetera.org.

Progression of liver disease, from NIDDK.
This is a guest post from Kristina Bargeron Clark, a MMG graduate student at Emory and communications chair for Women in Bio-Atlanta. Her website is www.inkcetera.org.

At Emory, Frank Anania, director of the Department of Medicine’s Division of Digestive Diseases, and his colleagues are developing a tool to treat liver disease. A recent publication in the FASEB Journal describes their investigation into the potential for the hormone adiponectin to modulate liver fibrosis.

Adiponectin is produced by adipose tissue, but is known to decrease in overweight people with metabolic disease. Research by others indicates that it may prevent heart and kidney fibrosis. The Emory team’s studies were conducted to determine if adiponectin could also reduce liver fibrosis.

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Bone-strengthening particles stimulate autophagy

Neale Weitzmann and George Beck have been publishing a series of papers describing how silica nanoparticles can increase bone mineral density in animals. Their findings could someday form the basis for a treatment for osteoporosis.

In 2012, we posted an article and video on this topic. We wanted to call attention to a few of the team’s recent papers, one of which probes the mechanism for a remarkable phenomenon: how can very fine silica particles stimulate bone formation?

The particles’ properties seem to depend on their size: 50 nanometers wide – smaller than a HIV or influenza vision. In a 2014 ACS Nano paper, Beck, Weitzmann and postdoc Shin-Woo Ha show that the particles interact with particular proteins involved in the process of autophagy, a process of “self digestion” induced by stress.

“These studies suggest that it is not the material per se that stimulates autophagy but rather size or shape,” they write. Read more

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Pre-hospital recognition of severe sepsis

Severe sepsis, a consequence of the body’s response to infection, is a major cause of death in hospitals. The earlier that doctors recognize that a patient has sepsis, the earlier the patient can be treated with antibiotics, fluids and other measures, and the better the chance of survival.

That’s why critical care and emergency medicine researchers have been looking for ways to spot whether someone coming to the hospital might have sepsis, even before arrival.

At Emory, Carmen Polito, Jonathan Sevransky and colleagues recently published a paper in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine on an emergency medical services screening tool for severe sepsis. Polito and Sevransky are in the division of pulmonary, allergy, critical care and sleep medicine in the Department of Medicine. The tool was evaluated based on Grady emergency medical services data from 2011 and 2012.

“Sepsis is largely a face without a name in the EMS setting,” Polito says. “The goal of our study was to create a tool to assist EMS providers in naming this deadly condition at the point of first medical contact. Similar to other life-threatening, time-sensitive conditions like stroke and heart attack, naming sepsis is the first step in developing coordinated care pathways that focus on delivering rapid, life-saving treatment once the patient arrives at the hospital.”

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Really? I had a heart attack?

A recent Harvard study, published in Circulation, found a surprising level of inconsistency between what medical records say about whether people had a heart attack and what they report themselves in surveys.

About a quarter of Medicare patients who said in a survey that they previously had a heart attack have no record of having any heart-related hospital admission. Conversely, about one-third of patients who, according to Medicare, experienced a heart attack said they hadn’t.

This finding is consistent with an Emory study from cardiologists Neal Dickert and Habib Samady, in which participants in a clinical trial were interviewed just a couple days after the initial procedure. The trial was testing a “post-conditioning” modification of angioplasty+stenting performed during treatment for a heart attack. Just over half (55 percent) of the participants initially remembered being asked to participate when asked. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment

Plaque erosion: heart attacks triggered by a whimper, not a bang

Cardiologist Bob Taylor and colleagues have a new paper in PLOS One this week, looking at the biomechanical forces behind plaque erosion.

Plaque erosion is a mechanism for blood clots formation in coronary arteries that is not as well-understood as its more explosive counterpart, plaque rupture. Plaque erosion disproportionally affects women more than men and is thought to account for most heart attacks in younger women (women younger than 50).

“We believe that this work has implications for our better understanding of the underlying biology of coronary artery disease in women,” Taylor says. The first author of the paper is biomedical engineering graduate student Ian Campbell, who now has his PhD. The team collaborated with cardiovascular pathologist Renu Virmani in Maryland.

Cardiologists have well-developed ideas for how plaque rupture works*; see the concept of vulnerable plaque. Cholesterol and inflammatory cells build up in the coronary arteries over several years. At one point in a particular artery, the plaque has a core of dying inflammatory cells, covered by a fibrous cap. If the cap is thin (the patterns of blood flows near the cap influence this), there is a risk that the cap will break and the contents of the core will spill out, triggering a blood clot nearby.

Plaque erosion is more mysterious and can occur more gradually, the researchers have found. Read more

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