October 2019 Discover CircRes Discover CircRes

This month on Episode 5 of the Discover CircRes podcast, host Cindy St. Hilaire highlights five featured articles from the September 27 and October 11, 2019 issues of Circulation Research and talks with Sarvesh Chelvanambi and Matthias Clauss  about their article HIV-Nef Protein Transfer to Endothelial Cells Requires Rac1 Activation and Leads to Endothelial Dysfunction: Implications for Statin Treatment in HIV Patients.
 
Article highlights:
 
Stamatelopoulos, et al. Reactive Vasodilation in AL Amyloidosis
 
Cao, et al. Miro2-Mediated Cardiac Mitochondrial Communication
 
Georgakis, et al. Circulating MCP-1 Levels and Incident Stroke
 
Sun, et al. Body Mass Index and DNA Methylation
 
Tan, et al. Yy1 Suppresses DCM Through Bmp7 and Ctgf
Transcript
Cindy St. H:                       Hi. Welcome to Discover CircRes, the monthly podcast of the American Heart Association's journal, Circulation Research. I'm your host, Dr Cindy St. Hilaire, and I'm an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. My goal as host of this podcast is to share with you highlights from recent articles published in the September 27th and October 11th issues of Circulation Research.
                                           We'll also have an in-depth conversation with Drs Matthias Clauss and Sarvesh Chelvanambi, who are the lead authors in one of the exciting discoveries from our October 11th issue.
                                           The first article I want to share with you is titled, Reactive Vasodilation Predicts Mortality in Primary Systemic Light Chain Amyloidosis. The first authors are Drs Kimon Stamatelopoulos, Georgios Georgiopoulos, and the corresponding author is Dr Efstathios Kastritis. And the studies were conducted at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens School of Medicine in Athens, Greece.
                                           So we hear about amyloids a lot in things like Alzheimer's, but amyloids are really just aggregates of protein that fold into shapes. And the nature of these shapes allows these individual protein molecules to bind and form many copies that form these fibers that are rather sticky. And the fibers then aggregate into larger and larger globules. And light chain amyloidosis is the most common type of amyloidosis. It's a rare but deadly disease, and it's caused by antibody-producing cells that are aberrantly churning out parts of antibodies called light chains. And it's these light chains that will aggregate and form sticky fibers.
                                           So these fibers aggregate and form amyloid deposits, and these deposits build up and damage the organs and the tissue in which they're accumulating. And because it's dependent on where the aggregates are accumulating, AL amyloidosis can present with a wide variety of symptoms. However, symptoms of heart dysfunction and low blood pressure correlate with poor prognosis.
                                           And because vascular dysfunction can contribute to hypotension or low blood pressure, this group decided to examine the vascular health of patients by conducting a measurement called flow-mediated vasodilation. And so this is a measurement where the diameter of the brachial artery, which is located in your arm, is measured before and then after a brief period of lower arm ischemia. And they formed a cohort of 115 newly diagnosed AL patients and another cohort of 115 matched controls. This study found that in AL patients, flow-mediated vasodilation was higher than in aged, sex, and cardiovascular risk factor-matched controls. The mean follow-up time for this study was 54 months, and in that time, the authors went on to find that high values of FMD in t