Journal of investigative medicine : the official publication of the American Federation for Clinical Research
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Throughout evolution, sunlight-produced vitamin D in the skin has been critically important for health. Vitamin D, known as the sunshine vitamin, is actually a hormone. Once it is produced in the skin or ingested from the diet, it is converted sequentially in the liver and kidneys to its biologically active form 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D. ⋯ Essentially, every tissue and cell in the body has a vitamin D receptor. Therefore, vitamin D deficiency has been linked to increased risk for preeclampsia, requiring a cesarean section for birthing, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, types I and II diabetes, heart disease, dementia, deadly cancers, and infectious diseases. Therefore, sensible sun exposure along with vitamin D supplementation of at least 2000 IU/d for adults and 1000 IU/d for children is essential to maximize their health.
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Serum uric acid (SUA) is associated with microvascular disease that could alter coronary blood flow and prognosis. We evaluated the effects of admission SUA levels on coronary blood flow and prognosis in 185 consecutive patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) who underwent acute primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). ⋯ Elevated SUA level on admission independently predicts impaired myocardial flow and poor prognosis in STEMI patients undergoing primary PCI.
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Today, there is an ever-increasing amount of biological and clinical data available that could be used to enhance a systems-based understanding of disease progression through innovative computational analysis. In this article, we review a selection of published research regarding computational methods, primarily from systems biology, which support translational research from the molecular level to the bedside, with a focus on applications in trauma and critical care. Trauma is the leading cause of mortality in Americans younger than 45 years, and its rapid progression offers both opportunities and challenges for computational analysis of trends in molecular patterns associated with outcomes and therapeutic interventions. This review presents methods and domain-specific examples that may inspire the development of new algorithms and computational methods that use both molecular and clinical data for diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy in disease progression.
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It is now clear that vitamin D has important roles in addition to its classic effects on calcium and bone homeostasis. As the vitamin D receptor is expressed on immune cells (B cells, T cells, and antigen-presenting cells), and these immunologic cells are all capable of synthesizing the active vitamin D metabolite, vitamin D has the capability of acting in an autocrine manner in a local immunologic milieu. ⋯ Deficiency in vitamin D is associated with increased autoimmunity and an increased susceptibility to infection. As immune cells in autoimmune diseases are responsive to the ameliorative effects of vitamin D, the beneficial effects of supplementing vitamin D-deficient individuals with autoimmune disease may extend beyond the effects on bone and calcium homeostasis.
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Low vitamin D levels have been associated with asthma severity in children. Young, urban African Americans (AAs) have high rates of hypovitaminosis D and asthma. Our objective was to determine associations between variants in vitamin D metabolism genes and asthma characteristics in a pilot study of young urban AAs. ⋯ This pilot study demonstrates that variants in vitamin D metabolism genes are associated with quantitative asthma characteristics in young, urban AAs. The collection of these associations provides evidence for the need for a large population-based study of vitamin D-relevant SNPs in this cohort.