Journal of internal medicine
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Weight loss and improved metabolic outcomes amongst rural African American women in the Deep South: six-month outcomes from a community-based randomized trial.
Obesity is highly prevalent in African American women, especially those in the rural southern USA, resulting in persistent health disparities. ⋯ Trained lay health staff and volunteers from the rural southern USA were able to deliver a translation of a high-intensity behavioural intervention targeted to African American women, resulting in clinically meaningful weight loss and improvement in other metabolic outcomes in a significant proportion of participants.
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Extra-corpuscular haemoglobin is an endogenous factor enhancing inflammatory tissue damage, a process counteracted by the haemoglobin-binding plasma protein haptoglobin composed of alpha and beta subunits connected by disulfide bridges. Recent studies established that haptoglobin also binds and sequesters another pro-inflammatory mediator, HMGB1, via triggering CD163 receptor-mediated anti-inflammatory responses involving heme oxygenase-1 expression and IL-10 release. The molecular mechanism underlying haptoglobin-HMGB1 interaction remains poorly elucidated. ⋯ Haptoglobin β protein offers a novel therapeutic approach to fight against various inflammatory diseases caused by excessive HMGB1 release.