Jose ordovas

BACKGROUND: Recent studies have identified plasma metabolites associated with cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease; however, little research on this topic has been conducted in Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to add to the growing body of metabolomics research in Latinos to better understand and improve the health of this population. METHODS: We assessed the association between plasma metabolites and global cognition over 12 years of follow-up in 736 participants of the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study (BPRHS)...

The nasal mucosa is frequently the initial site of respiratory viral infection, replication, and transmission. Recent work has started to clarify the independent responses of epithelial, myeloid, and lymphoid cells to viral infection in the nasal mucosa, but their spatiotemporal coordination and relative contributions remain unclear. Furthermore, understanding whether and how primary infection shapes tissue-scale memory responses to secondary challenge is critical for the rational design of nasal-targeting therapeutics and vaccines...

BACKGROUND: Osteoporosis (OP) and low bone mass can be debilitating and costly conditions if not acted on quickly. This disease is also difficult to diagnose as symptoms develop unnoticed until fracture occurs. Therefore, gaining understanding of the genetic risk associated with these conditions could be beneficial for healthcare professionals in early detection and prevention. METHODS: The Boston Puerto Rican Osteoporosis (BPROS) study, an ancillary study to the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study (BPRHS), collected information regarding bone and bone health...

Objective Several studies have examined metabolomic profiles in relation to Alzheimer's disease and related dementia (AD/ADRD) risk; however, few studies have focused on minorities, such as Latinos, or examined Magnetic-Resonance Imaging (MRI)-based outcomes. Methods We used multiple linear regression, adjusted for covariates, to examine the association between metabolite concentration and MRI-derived brain age deviation. Metabolites were measured at baseline with untargeted metabolomic profiling (Metabolon, Inc)...

In order to evaluate whether telomere maintenance is associated with type 2 diabetes remission, newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients without glucose-lowering treatment (183 out of 1002) from the CORDIOPREV study (NCT00924937) were randomized to consume a Mediterranean or low-fat diet. Patients were classified as Responders, those who reverted from type 2 diabetes during the 5 years of dietary intervention ( n = 69), and Non-Responders, who did not achieve diabetes remission by the end of the follow-up period ( n = 104)...

BACKGROUND: APOE is a known genetic contributor to cardiovascular disease, but the differential role APOE alleles play in subclinical atherosclerosis remains unclear. METHODS: The PESA (Progression of Early Subclinical Atherosclerosis) is an observational cohort study that recruited 4184 middle-aged asymptomatic individuals to be screened for cardiovascular risk and multiterritorial subclinical atherosclerosis. Participants were APOE -genotyped, and omics data were additionally evaluated...

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular diseases (CVD), including coronary heart disease (CHD), display a higher prevalence in men than women. This study aims to evaluate the variations in the intestinal microbiota between men and women afflicted with CHD and delineate these against a non-CVD control group for each sex. METHODS: Our research was conducted in the framework of the CORDIOPREV study, a clinical trial which involved 837 men and 165 women with CHD. We contrasted our findings with a reference group of 375 individuals (270 men, 105 women) without CVD...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2023.1285333.].

BACKGROUND: Atherosclerosis is the leading underlying cause of coronary heart disease (CHD). In patients with CHD, intima-media thickness of common carotid arteries (IMT-CC) is a reliable, validated, and non-invasive marker of the progression of atherosclerosis. Dietary intervention may affect IMT-CC evolution through different pathways. There is a lack of clinical trials evaluating the effect of total dietary antioxidant content of diets on IMT-CC, especially in patients with CHD. OBJECTIVE: We evaluated the correlation between the diet's total antioxidant content and the changes in IMT-CC produced after 5 years of dietary intervention following two healthy diet models (Mediterranean diet and low-fat diet)...

BACKGROUND: Apolipoprotein E (APOE) is the strongest genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimer's Disease (AD), and the ε4 allele (APOE4) may interact with lifestyle factors that relate to brain structural changes, underlying the increased risk of AD. However, the exact role of APOE4 in mediating interactions between the peripheral circulatory system and the central nervous system, and how it may link to brain and cognitive aging requires further elucidation. In this analysis, we investigated the association between APOE4 carrier status and multimodal biomarkers (diet, blood markers, clinical diagnosis, brain structure, and cognition) in the context of gene-environment interactions...

Connexin 43 (CX43) is one of the major components of gap junctions, the structures responsible for the intercellular communication and transmission of the electrical impulse in the left ventricle. There is limited information on the histological changes of CX43 with age and their effect on electrophysiology, especially in humans. Here, we analyzed left ventricular biopsies from living donors starting at midlife to characterize age-related CX43 remodeling. We assessed its quantity, degree of lateralization, and spatial heterogeneity together with fibrotic deposition...

Biological aging is a relevant risk factor for chronic diseases, and several indicators for measuring this factor have been proposed, with telomere length (TL) among the most studied. Oxidative stress may regulate telomere shortening, which is implicated in the increased risk. Using a novel estimator for TL, we examined whether adherence to the Mediterranean diet (MedDiet), a highly antioxidant-rich dietary pattern, is associated with longer TL. We determined TL using DNA methylation algorithms (DNAmTL) in 414 subjects at high cardiovascular risk from Spain...

Cell-to-cell communication strategies include extracellular vesicles (EVs) in plants and animals. The bioactive molecules in a diet rich in vegetables and fruits are associated with disease-preventive effects. Plant-derived EVs (PDEVs) are biogenetically and morphologically comparable to mammalian EVs and transport bioactive molecules, including miRNAs. However, the biological functions of PDEVs are not fully understood, and standard isolation protocols are lacking. Here, PDEVs were isolated from four foods with a combination of ultracentrifugation and size exclusion chromatography, and evaluated as vehicles for enhanced transport of synthetic miRNAs...

Weight loss (WL) differences between isocaloric high-carbohydrate and high-fat diets are generally small; however, individual WL varies within diet groups. Genotype patterns may modify diet effects, with carbohydrate-responsive genotypes losing more weight on high-carbohydrate diets (and vice versa for fat-responsive genotypes). We investigated whether 12-week WL (kg, primary outcome) differs between genotype-concordant and genotype-discordant diets. In this 12-week single-center WL trial, 145 participants with overweight/obesity were identified a priori as fat-responders or carbohydrate-responders based on their combined genotypes at ten genetic variants and randomized to a high-fat (n = 73) or high-carbohydrate diet (n = 72), yielding 4 groups: (1) fat-responders receiving high-fat diet, (2) fat-responders receiving high-carbohydrate diet, (3) carbohydrate-responders receiving high-fat diet, (4) carbohydrate-responders receiving high-carbohydrate diet...

BACKGROUND: Many questions remain unanswered regarding the implication of lipid metabolites in severe SARS-CoV-2 infections. By re-analyzed sequencing data from the nasopharynx of a previously published cohort, we found that alox genes, involved in eicosanoid synthesis, were up-regulated in high WHO score patients, especially in goblet cells. Herein, we aimed to further understand the roles played by eicosanoids during severe SARS-CoV-2 infection. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We performed a total fatty acid panel on plasma and bulk RNA-seq analysis on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) collected from 10 infected and 10 uninfected patients...

The choroid plexus (ChP) is a vital brain barrier and source of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Here, we use chronic two-photon imaging in awake mice and single-cell transcriptomics to demonstrate that in addition to these roles, the ChP is a complex immune organ that regulates brain inflammation. In a mouse meningitis model, neutrophils and monocytes accumulated in ChP stroma and surged across the epithelial barrier into the CSF. Bi-directional recruitment of monocytes from the periphery and, unexpectedly, macrophages from the CSF to the ChP helped eliminate neutrophils and repair the barrier...

BACKGROUND: An optimal and correctly balanced metabolic status is essential to improve sports performance in athletes. Recent advances in omic tools, such as the lipid profile of the mature erythrocyte membranes (LPMEM), allow to have a comprehensive vision of the nutritional and metabolic status of these individuals to provide personalized recommendations for nutrients, specifically, the essential omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, individuating deficiencies/unbalances that can arise from both habitual diet and sportive activity...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: A critical telomere length (TL) is associated with cardiovascular mortality. Dietary habits have been demonstrated to affect cardiovascular risk. However, it remains unclear how exactly TL determines the response to specific dietary approaches in the reduction of arterial injury. We aimed to evaluate whether TL was associated with the progression of arterial injury (assessed by intima-media thickness of both common carotid arteries: IMT-CC), after long-term consumption of two healthy dietary models in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD)...

INTRODUCTION: Rate-limiting enzymes (RLEs) are innate slow points in metabolic pathways, and many function in bioprocesses related to nutrient sensing. Many RLEs carry causal mutations relevant to inherited metabolic disorders. Because the activity of RLEs in cardiovascular health is poorly characterized, our objective was to assess their involvement in cardiometabolic health and disease, and where altered biophysical and biochemical functions can promote disease. METHODS: A dataset of 380 human RLEs was compared to protein and gene datasets for factors likely to contribute to cardiometabolic disease, including proteins showing significant age-related altered expression in blood, and genetic loci with variants that associate with common cardiometabolic phenotypes...

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are a valuable tool for understanding the biology of complex human traits and diseases, but associated variants rarely point directly to causal genes. In the present study, we introduce a new method, polygenic priority score (PoPS), that learns trait-relevant gene features, such as cell-type-specific expression, to prioritize genes at GWAS loci. Using a large evaluation set of genes with fine-mapped coding variants, we show that PoPS and the closest gene individually outperform other gene prioritization methods, but observe the best overall performance by combining PoPS with orthogonal methods...