Ameliorative effects of aqueous seed-extract of Dacryodes edulis on doxorubicin-induced cardiac tissue damage in albino rats

Ameliorative effects of aqueous seed extract of D acryodes edulis on doxorubicininduced cardiac tissue damage in albino rats were investigated. The animals were divided into groups and fed for 14 days to acclimatize. A single dose of 15 mg/kg body weight doxorubicin was given intraperitoneally to each group except the control group. After 48 hours, two animals were randomly selected from each group and sacrificed under ethylether anesthesia, to harvest their hearts for histological studies. Subsequently, groups 1 and 2 were given normal saline, while groups 3 and 4 were treated with 25 and 100 mg/kg body weight of aspirin and vitamin C respectively. Groups 5-8 received different doses of aqueous seed extract (200, 400, 600, and 800 mg/kg body weight). Treatments lasted for 21 days and the rats were sacrificed under anesthesia, and their hearts harvested and fixed in 10% formol saline for examination. The photomicrograph revealed severe and focal loss of cardiac fiber, intra-myocardial hemorrhages, fragmentation of cardiac muscle, and disorganization of histoarchitecture in the induced but untreated animal groups. Micrographs showed significant ameliorative effects of the extract in a dose-dependent way and healing effects of the standard drugs. These results showed that aqueous seed extract of Dacryodes edulis exhibits therapeutic potentials for cardiac disorders.

Small Rab GTPases in Intracellular Vesicle Trafficking: The Case of Rab3A/Raphillin-3A Complex in the Kidney

Small Rab GTPases, the largest group of small monomeric GTPases, regulate vesicle trafficking in cells, which are integral to many cellular processes. Their role in neurological diseases, such as cancer and inflammation have been extensively studied, but their implication in kidney disease has not been researched in depth. Rab3a and its effector Rabphillin-3A (Rph3A) expression have been demonstrated to be present in the podocytes of normal kidneys of mice rats and humans, around vesicles contained in the foot processes, and they are overexpressed in diseases with proteinuria. In addition, the Rab3A knockout mice model induced profound cytoskeletal changes in podocytes of high glucose fed animals. Likewise, RphA interference in the Drosophila model produced structural and functional damage in nephrocytes with reduction in filtration capacities and nephrocyte number. Changes in the structure of cardiac fiber in the same RphA-interference model, open the question if Rab3A dysfunction would produce simultaneous damage in the heart and kidney cells, an attractive field that will require attention in the future.

Investigation of Human Cardiac Fiber Architecture with Multiple diffusion MRI schemes at Multi-Scales based on Simulation Data

Background Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) and Q-ball imaging (QBI) are currently three main diffusion MRI (dMRI) schemes available for non-invasive investigation of cardiac fiber architecture. Although DSI and QBI have undoubtedly greater potential to reveal complex cardiac fiber structures than DTI, it however remains unclear to which level and at which scale they provide more gain for investigating cardiac fiber structure.Method This work attends to provide a quantitative description of cardiac fiber architecture derived from different schemes at various scales. Due to the limit of the spatial resolution of clinical MRI scanner and with the absence of the ground-truth, it is difficult to give the accurate description. To deal with this issue, we simulate firstly DTI, DSI and QBI of a cardiac fiber model with the structure a priori known at different scales, and then the estimation accuracy, the diffusion metrics and the helix and transverse angles of cardiac fiber obtained by different schemes at different scales are calculated. Results The results show that although DSI and QBI can distinguish multiple fiber orientations, they are readily to generate false positive and false negative fibers which influence therefore the estimation accuracy. When there are multiple fiber orientations in one voxel, the diffusion anisotropy detected by DTI is higher than DSI and QBI, the range of helix and transverse angle decreases with increasing of the scales, and that detected by DSI is larger than DTI and QBI. Conclusion The results showed that the proposed dMRI simulator provides a valuable tool for simulating realistic DW images of whole human hearts, which can be used as the gold standard to study the fiber structures of the heart.