Underneath the Gut-Brain Axis in IBD-Evidence of the Non-Obvious.

The gut-brain axis (GBA) plays a pivotal role in human health and wellness by orchestrating complex bidirectional regulation and influencing numerous critical processes within the body. Over the past decade, research has increasingly focused on the GBA in the context of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Beyond its well-documented effects on the GBA-enteric nervous system and vagus nerve dysregulation, and gut microbiota misbalance-IBD also leads to impairments in the metabolic and cellular functions: metabolic dysregulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, cationic transport, and cytoskeleton dysregulation.

A comprehensive generalization of the Friendship Paradox to weights and attributes.

The Friendship Paradox is a simple and powerful statement about node degrees in a graph. However, it only applies to undirected graphs with no edge weights, and the only node characteristic it concerns is degree. Since many social networks are more complex than that, it is useful to generalize this phenomenon, if possible, and a number of papers have proposed different generalizations.

Effect of Long-Term Adaptation to Cold and Short-Term Cooling on the Expression of the TRPM2 Ion Channel Gene in the Hypothalamus of Rats.

The present study is aimed to elucidate the possible involvement of the thermosensitive TRPM2 ion channel in changing of the temperature sensitivity of the hypothalamus after different cold exposures-long-term adaptation to cold and short-term cooling. Quantitative RT-PCR was used to study the expression of the gene of thermosensitive TRPM2 ion channel in the hypothalamus in the groups of control (kept for 5 weeks at +20 to +22 °C) and cold-adapted (5 weeks at +4 to +6 °C) rats, as well as in the groups of animals which were subjected to acute cooling (rapid or slow) with subsequent restoration of body temperature to the initial level. It has been shown that after long-term adaptation to cold, the decrease in the gene expression was observed in the hypothalamus, while a short-term cooling does not affect the expression of the gene of this ion channel.

Node-based generalized friendship paradox fails.

The Friendship Paradox-the principle that "your friends have more friends than you do"-is a combinatorial fact about degrees in a graph; but given that many web-based social activities are correlated with a user's degree, this fact has been taken more broadly to suggest the empirical principle that "your friends are also more active than you are." This Generalized Friendship Paradox, the notion that any attribute positively correlated with degree obeys the Friendship Paradox, has been established mathematically in a network-level version that essentially aggregates uniformly over all the edges of a network. Here we show, however, that the natural node-based version of the Generalized Friendship Paradox-which aggregates over nodes, not edges-may fail, even for degree-attribute correlations approaching 1.

Effect of Skin Ion Channel TRPM8 Activation by Cold and Menthol on Thermoregulation and the Expression of Genes of Thermosensitive TRP Ion Channels in the Hypothalamus of Hypertensive Rats.

ISIAH (inherited stress-induced arterial hypertension) rats are characterized by high blood pressure and decreased gene expression in the anterior hypothalamus. Thermosensitive ion channel TRPM8 plays a critical role in the transduction of moderately cold stimuli that give rise to cool sensations. In normotensive animals, the activation of skin TRPM8 is known to induce changes in gene expression in the hypothalamus and induce alterations of thermoregulatory responses.

The paradox of second-order homophily in networks.

Homophily-the tendency of nodes to connect to others of the same type-is a central issue in the study of networks. Here we take a local view of homophily, defining notions of first-order homophily of a node (its individual tendency to link to similar others) and second-order homophily of a node (the aggregate first-order homophily of its neighbors). Through this view, we find a surprising result for homophily values that applies with only minimal assumptions on the graph topology.

The influence of cooling and TRPM8 ion channel activation on the level of pro-inflammatory cytokines in normotensive and hypertensive rats.

The role of thermosensitive TRP ion channels in physiological processes in the whole organism is far from being clear. In present work we tried to understand the possible participation of the cold-sensitive ion channel TRPM8 in regulation of the pro-inflammatory cytokine level in blood, and to see if hypertension (widely spread disease) changes this relationship. Experiments were carried out on normotensive Wistar rats and rats with inherited stress-induced arterial hypertension.