Publications by authors named "E C Foerster"
A 28-year-old man was admitted to our psychiatric ward with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and comorbid depression. At intake, obsessive-compulsive symptoms were present most time of the day and were related to an intense fear of causing interpersonal misunderstandings. Various treatment attempts, including cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) with exposure and response prevention (ERP), selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, clomipramine, and add-on antipsychotics were either ineffective and/or were not tolerated, and the patient's condition worsened progressively.
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- Recent thymic emigrant (RTE) cells are immature T cells that mature outside the thymus and play a key role in immune responses, especially in early life and after lymphodepletion.
- Researchers used RBPJind mice to examine the stages of RTE maturation, highlighting a specific intermediate stage that prefers producing IL-17 over IFN-γ.
- The study found that Notch signaling is crucial for the maturation and function of these intermediate T cells; without it, their ability to contribute to inflammatory responses, like colitis, is significantly impaired.
The breakdown of the intestinal mucosal barrier is thought to underlie the progression to Crohn disease (CD), whereby numerous risk factors contribute. For example, a genetic polymorphism of the autophagy gene ATG16L1, associated with an increased risk of developing CD, contributes to the perturbation of the intestinal epithelium. We examined the role of Atg16l1 in protecting the murine small intestinal epithelium from T-cell-mediated damage using the anti-CD3 model of enteropathy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe small intestinal epithelial barrier inputs signals from the gut microbiota in order to balance physiological inflammation and tolerance, and to promote homeostasis. Understanding the dynamic relationship between microbes and intestinal epithelial cells has been a challenge given the cellular heterogeneity associated with the epithelium and the inherent difficulty of isolating and identifying individual cell types. Here, we used single-cell RNA sequencing of small intestinal epithelial cells from germ-free and specific pathogen-free mice to study microbe-epithelium crosstalk at the single-cell resolution.
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- - The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) plays a crucial role in immune modulation and is significantly active in tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) within pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).
- - Deleting or inhibiting AhR in macrophages led to decreased PDAC tumor growth, enhanced response to immune therapies, and increased CD8 T cell activity, independent of tryptophan metabolism within the macrophages.
- - In patients with PDAC, higher AhR levels correlated with worse outcomes and a suppressive immune environment, indicating that AhR regulation could be a critical factor in the disease's progression.