Publications by authors named "Elisa Toppi"

Homotaurine is a potential therapeutic compound for treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its efficacy is still under investigation. Emerging data have shown that other than neuroprotective, homotaurine is endowed with anti-inflammatory activities, though with still unclear underlying mechanisms. Inflammation plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of AD and we previously suggested that homotaurine supplementation in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) plays beneficial effects associated to a decrease in the circulating levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-18.

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Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and sporadic Alzheimer's disease (AD) are multifactorial conditions resulting from a complex crosstalk among multiple molecular and biological processes. The present study investigates the association of variants localized in genes and miRNAs with aMCI and AD, which may represent susceptibility, prognostic biomarkers or multi-target treatment options for such conditions. We included 371 patients (217 aMCI and 154 AD) and 503 healthy controls, which were genotyped for a panel of 120 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and, subsequently, analyzed by statistical, bioinformatics and machine-learning approaches.

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SARS-CoV-2 is the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, causing respiratory syndrome and other manifestations. The clinical consequences of the SARS-CoV-2 infection are highly heterogeneous, ranging from asymptomatic and mild to severe and fatal conditions, with the highest mortality rate reached among elderly people. Such heterogeneity appears strongly influenced by the host immune response, which in turn is profoundly affected by aging.

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Knowledge of the antibody-mediated immune response to SARS-CoV-2 is crucial to understand virus immunogenicity, establish seroprevalence, and determine whether subjects or recovered patients are at risk for infection/reinfection and would therefore benefit from vaccination. Here, we describe a novel and simple cell-ELISA specifically designed to measure viral spike S1-specific IgG produced in vitro by B cells in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) cultures from a cohort of 45 asymptomatic ( = 24) and symptomatic ( = 21) individuals, with age ranging from 8 to 99 years. All subjects underwent ELISA serological screening twice, at the same time as the cell-ELISA (T2) as well as 35-60 days earlier (T1).

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SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, leads to a respiratory syndrome and other manifestations. Most affected people show no or mild symptoms, but the risk of severe disease and death increases in older people. Here, we report a narrative review on selected studies targeting aging-related chronic neuroinflammation in the COVID-19 pandemic.

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