Search Results (4)

Background: The intrahospital prevalence of diabetes and prediabetes is not well known in Austria and worldwide. Screening for diabetes in hospitalised patients requires systematic glycaemic assessment via HbA1c measurement, which is not routinely performed in all patients in most hospitals. This study is the first multicentre investigation to conduct structured HbA1c screening in hospitalised adult medical patients of all ages. Methods: In this exploratory multicentre analysis, HbA1c screening was performed in 3025 consecutive patients hospitalised at three different medical departments in Upper Austria. HbA1c screening was conducted over a period of three months between October 2023 and March 2024. Patients were diagnosed with diabetes (HbA1c ≥6.5% (≥48 mmol/mol)) or prediabetes (HbA1c 5.7–6.4% (39–47 mmol/mol)) based on HbA1c values or a previous diagnosis. Results: Dysglycaemia (diabetes or prediabetes) was identified in 1557 patients (51.5%). Diabetes was present in 840 patients (27.8%) and prediabetes in 717 patients (23.7%). A first-time diagnosis of diabetes was made in 73 patients (2.4%). The prevalence of diabetes was highest among patients aged 70–79 years (36.8% diabetes; 24.8% prediabetes). Conclusions: Structured HbA1c screening in 3025 consecutive hospitalised patients across three medical departments in Upper Austria revealed a diabetes prevalence of 27.8% and a prediabetes prevalence of 23.7%. Overall, dysglycaemia was present in 51.5% of hospitalised patients. Full article

Clinical classification models are mostly pathology-dependent and, thus, are only able to detect pathologies they have been trained for. Research is needed regarding pathology-independent classifiers and their interpretation. Hence, our aim is to develop a pathology-independent classifier that provides prediction probabilities and explanations of the classification decisions. Spinal posture data of healthy subjects and various pathologies (back pain, spinal fusion, osteoarthritis), as well as synthetic data, were used for modeling. A one-class support vector machine was used as a pathology-independent classifier. The outputs were transformed into a probability distribution according to Platt’s method. Interpretation was performed using the explainable artificial intelligence tool Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations. The results were compared with those obtained by commonly used binary classification approaches. The best classification results were obtained for subjects with a spinal fusion. Subjects with back pain were especially challenging to distinguish from the healthy reference group. The proposed method proved useful for the interpretation of the predictions. No clear inferiority of the proposed approach compared to commonly used binary classifiers was demonstrated. The application of dynamic spinal data seems important for future works. The proposed approach could be useful to provide an objective orientation and to individually adapt and monitor therapy measures pre- and post-operatively. Full article

DJ-1 is an abundant and ubiquitous component of cellular proteomes. DJ-1 supposedly exerts a wide variety of molecular functions, ranging from enzymatic activities as a deglycase, protease, and esterase to chaperone functions. However, a consensus perspective on its molecular function in the cellular context has not yet been reached. Structurally, the C-terminal helix 8 of DJ-1 has been proposed to constitute a propeptide whose proteolytic removal transforms a DJ-1 zymogen to an active hydrolase with potential proteolytic activity. To better understand the cell-contextual functionality of DJ-1 and the role of helix 8, we employed post-mitotically differentiated, neuron-like SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells with stable over-expression of full length DJ-1 or DJ-1 lacking helix 8 (ΔH8), either with a native catalytically active site (C106) or an inactive site (C106A active site mutation). Global proteome comparison of cells over-expressing DJ-1 ΔH8 with native or mutated active site cysteine indicated a strong impact on mitochondrial biology. N-terminomic profiling however did not highlight direct protease substrate candidates for DJ-1 ΔH8, but linked DJ-1 to elevated levels of activated lysosomal proteases, albeit presumably in an indirect manner. Finally, we show that DJ-1 ΔH8 loses the deglycation activity of full length DJ-1. Our study further establishes DJ-1 as deglycation enzyme. Helix 8 is essential for the deglycation activity but dispensable for the impact on lysosomal and mitochondrial biology; further illustrating the pleiotropic nature of DJ-1. Full article

In this contribution we outline polyelectrolyte (PEL) complex (PEC) nanoparticles, prepared by mixing solutions of the low cost PEL components poly(ethyleneimine) (PEI) and poly(acrylic acid) (PAC). It was found, that the size and internal structure of PEI/PAC particles can be regulated by process, media and structural parameters. Especially, mixing order, mixing ratio, PEL concentration, pH and molecular weight, were found to be sensible parameters to regulate the size (diameter) of spherical PEI/PAC nanoparticles, in the range between 80–1,000 nm, in a defined way. Finally, applications of dispersed PEI/PAC particles as additives for the paper making process, as well as for drug delivery, are outlined. PEI/PAC nanoparticles mixed directly on model cellulose film showed a higher adsorption level applying the mixing order 1. PAC 2. PEI compared to 1. PEI 2. PAC. Surface bound PEI/PAC nanoparticles were found to release a model drug compound and to stay immobilized due to the contact with the aqueous release medium. Full article