A Pre-clinical Animal Model of Trypanosoma brucei Infection Demonstrating Cardiac Dysfunction.

African trypanosomiasis (AT), caused by Trypanosoma brucei species, results in both neurological and cardiac dysfunction and can be fatal if untreated. Research on the pathogenesis and treatment of the disease has centred to date on the characteristic neurological symptoms, whereas cardiac dysfunction (e.g.

Trypanosoma brucei cathepsin-L increases arrhythmogenic sarcoplasmic reticulum-mediated calcium release in rat cardiomyocytes.

Aims: African trypanosomiasis, caused by Trypanosoma brucei species, leads to both neurological and cardiac dysfunction and can be fatal if untreated. While the neurological-related pathogenesis is well studied, the cardiac pathogenesis remains unknown. The current study exposed isolated ventricular cardiomyocytes and adult rat hearts to T.

Differentiating AD from aging using semiautomated measurement of hippocampal atrophy rates.

Manual segmentation of the hippocampus is the gold standard in volumetric hippocampal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analysis; however, this is difficult to achieve reproducibly. This study explores whether application of local registration and calculation of the hippocampal boundary shift integral (HBSI) can reduce random variation compared with manual measures. Hippocampi were outlined on the baseline and registered-repeat MRIs of 32 clinically diagnosed Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and 47 matched controls (37-86 years) with a wide range of scanning intervals (175-1173 days).