Publications by authors named "Constantin Polychronakos"

Article Synopsis
  • - The PRODY survey in China (2017-2019) aimed to assess the prevalence and risk factors for obesity and diabetes among youth, involving over 193,000 children aged 3-18 across twelve provinces.
  • - The study found a low prevalence of diagnosed pediatric diabetes at 0.62 per 1,000, with Type 1 diabetes (T1D) being more common (0.44) than Type 2 diabetes (T2D, 0.18), while undiagnosed T2D cases were significantly higher at 1.59 per 1,000.
  • - Maternal history of diabetes emerged as the primary risk factor for pediatric diabetes in China, highlighting the need for
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Monogenic Forms of Diabetes (MFD) account for about 3% of all diabetes, and their accurate diagnosis often results in life-changing therapeutic reassignment for the patients. Like other Mendelian diseases, reduced penetrance and variable expressivity are often seen in several different types of MFD, where symptoms develop only in a portion of the persons who carry the pathogenic variant or vary widely in symptom severity and age of onset. This complicates diagnosis and disease management in MFD.

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Background: Measurement of T cell receptor (TCR) or B cell receptor (BCR) gene utilization may be valuable in monitoring the dynamic changes in donor-reactive clonal populations following transplantation and enabling adjustment in therapy to avoid the consequences of excess immune suppression or to prevent rejection with contingent graft damage and to indicate the development of tolerance.

Objective: We performed a review of current literature to examine research in immune repertoire sequencing in organ transplantation and to assess the feasibility of this technology for clinical application in immune monitoring.

Methods: We searched MEDLINE and PubMed Central for English-language studies published between 2010 and 2021 that examined T cell/B cell repertoire dynamics upon immune activation.

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Article Synopsis
  • Type 1 diabetes is linked to autoimmune destruction of insulin-producing cells, making early onset more challenging to manage; researchers conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to explore genetic factors related to the age of diagnosis.
  • The study involved analyzing data from over 4,500 cases and identified genetic associations, particularly a significant link with the HLA-DQB1 gene and a related variant in the NELL1 gene that could lead to an earlier onset of diabetes.
  • Findings suggest that the gene HTATIP2 influences T cell behavior and may contribute to type 1 diabetes, indicating a potential new genetic target for further research; ongoing studies with larger groups could uncover more genetic factors.
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Context: Prohormone convertase 1/3 (PC1/3), encoded by protein convertase subtilisin kexin type 1 (PCSK1), converts inactive prohormones into biologically active peptides. Somatic mutations of insulinomas are associated with genetic defects interfering with control of insulin secretion from pancreatic beta cells. However, somatic mutations in proinsulinomas have not been described.

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Introduction: Kidney transplantation is the optimal treatment in end-stage kidney disease, but donor specific antibody development continues to negatively impact patients undergoing kidney transplantation. One of the recent advances in solid organ transplantation has been the definition of molecular mismatching between donors and recipients' Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA). While not fully integrated in standard clinical care, cumulative molecular mismatch at the level of eplets (EMM) as well as the PIRCHE-II score have shown promise in predicting transplant outcomes.

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The aim of this study is to develop a rapid and effective method to screen for Saudi carriers of one of the most common propionic acidemia mutations (c.425G > A) and to study the functional impact of this mutation. Using allele-specific primers, we have developed a qPCR assay that clearly distinguishes heterozygotes from mutated and wild type homozygotes that overcome the dependence on labor-intensive gene sequencing.

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Background: Monogenic forms of diabetes (MFD) are single gene disorders. Their diagnosis is challenging, and symptoms overlap with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Aim: To identify the genetic variants responsible for MFD in the Pakistani population and their frequencies.

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Objective: Recessive WFS1 mutations are known to cause Wolfram syndrome, a very rare systemic disorder. However, they were also found in non-syndromic diabetes in Han Chinese misdiagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D), a molecular cause that appears to be considerably more common than the fully expressed syndrome. We aimed to better define the incidence and clinical features of non-syndromic diabetes due to recessive WFS1 mutation.

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Background: Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY) is an autosomal dominant type of diabetes. Pathogenic variants in fourteen genes are reported as causes of MODY. Its symptoms overlap with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

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Objective: To identify circulating proteins influencing type 1 diabetes susceptibility using Mendelian randomization (MR).

Research Design And Methods: We used a large-scale two-sample MR study, using cis genetic determinants (protein quantitative trait loci [pQTL]) of up to 1,611 circulating proteins from five large genome-wide association studies, to screen for causal associations of these proteins with type 1 diabetes risk in 9,684 case subjects with type 1 diabetes and 15,743 control subjects. Further, pleiotropy-robust MR methods were used in sensitivity analyses using both cis and trans-pQTL.

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Maturity-onset diabetes in the young (MODY) comprises monogenic phenotypes of young-onset, insulinopenic diabetes. All its forms are dominantly inherited. Why? Are the pancreatic β cells only harmed by heterozygous variants? We propose that recessive MODYs do exist but have escaped detection due to lack of family history suggestive of monogenic inheritance.

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Autoimmune diseases are among the most common chronic illness caused by a dysregulated immune response against self-antigens. Close to 5% of the general population in Western countries develops some form of autoimmunity, yet its underlying causes, although intensively studied, are still not fully known, and no curative therapies exist. It is well established that autoimmune diseases have common mechanisms and are caused by both genetic and non-genetic risk factors.

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Type 1 diabetes (T1D) patients with low genetic risk scores (GRS) may be non-autoimmune or autoimmune mediated by other genetic loci. The T1D-GRS2 provides us an opportunity to look into the genetic architecture of these patients. A total of 18,949 European individuals were included in this study, including 6599 T1D cases and 12,323 controls.

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Background: Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with type 1 diabetes in observational studies, but evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is lacking. The aim of this study was to test whether genetically decreased vitamin D levels are causally associated with type 1 diabetes using Mendelian randomization (MR).

Methods And Findings: For our two-sample MR study, we selected as instruments single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are strongly associated with 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD) levels in a large vitamin D genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 443,734 Europeans and obtained their corresponding effect estimates on type 1 diabetes risk from a large meta-analysis of 12 type 1 diabetes GWAS studies (Ntot = 24,063, 9,358 cases, and 15,705 controls).

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Hypothesis: About 1% of patients clinically diagnosed as type 1 diabetes have non-autoimmune monogenic diabetes. The distinction has important therapeutic implications but, given the low prevalence and high cost of testing, selecting patients to test is important. We tested the hypothesis that low genetic risk for type 1 diabetes can substantially contribute to this selection.

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Introduction: Loss-of-function mutations in tRNA methyltransferase 10 homologue A (), a tRNA methyltransferase, have recently been described as a monogenic cause of early-onset diabetes with microcephaly, epilepsy and intellectual disability.

Research Design And Methods: We report a Chinese young patient who was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus as a result of a mutation.

Results: A homozygous mutation c.

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Article Synopsis
  • 4H leukodystrophy is an autosomal recessive disorder linked to hypomyelination and several endocrine issues, caused by mutations in genes like POLR3A and POLR3B.
  • The study involved 150 patients and aimed to systematically assess their endocrine and growth abnormalities while exploring potential genotype/phenotype links.
  • Findings revealed that delayed puberty and short stature are common in these patients, highlighting a need for more thorough investigation of endocrine problems in this group.
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Most replicated genetic determinants for type 1 diabetes are common (minor allele frequency [MAF] >5%). We aimed to identify novel rare or low-frequency (MAF <5%) single nucleotide polymorphisms with large effects on risk of type 1 diabetes. We undertook deep imputation of genotyped data followed by genome-wide association testing and meta-analysis of 9,358 type 1 diabetes case and 15,705 control subjects from 12 European cohorts.

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Concordance for type 1 diabetes (T1D) is far from 100% in monozygotic twins and in inbred nonobese diabetic (NOD) mice, despite genetic identity and shared environment during incidence peak years. This points to stochastic determinants, such as postzygotic mutations (PZMs) in the expanding antigen-specific autoreactive T cell lineages, by analogy to their role in the expanding tumor lineage in cancer. Using comparative genomic hybridization of DNA from pancreatic lymph-node memory CD4 T cells of 25 diabetic NOD mice, we found lymphocyte-exclusive mosaic somatic copy-number aberrations (CNAs) with highly nonrandom independent involvement of the same gene(s) across different mice, some with an autoimmunity association (e.

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It is estimated that ∼1% of European ancestry patients clinically diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (T1D) actually have monogenic forms of the disease. Because of the much lower incidence of true T1D in East Asians, we hypothesized that the percentage would be much higher. To test this, we sequenced the exome of 82 Chinese Han patients clinically diagnosed with T1D but negative for three autoantibodies.

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