Publications by authors named "Marco Santamaria"

The mechanisms for cardiac injury after hemorrhagic shock (HS) are unresolved. We hypothesize that remote organ damage can be caused by uncontrolled pancreatic proteolytic activity, as enteral protease inhibition improves outcomes in experimental HS. Uncontrolled proteolysis in the heart may disrupt cardiac metabolism and adrenergic control with subsequent deleterious outcomes.

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Background: Irreversible hemorrhagic shock is characterized by hyporesponsiveness to vasopressor and fluid therapy. Little is known, however, about the mechanisms that contribute to this phenomenon. Previous studies have shown that decreased intestinal perfusion in hemorrhagic shock leads to proteolytically mediated increases in gut permeability, with subsequent egress of vasoactive substances systemically.

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A preliminary mass spectrometry based shotgun protocol was set up to compare the peptidome of plasma samples from healthy and hemorrhagic shock rats with the aim of verifying the possible role of uncontrolled proteolytic activity in circulatory shock. Since the hemorrhagic shock model requires heparin as anticoagulant, a preliminary experiment using plasma sample obtained in the presence/absence of heparin from healthy rats was performed to determine whether its presence is fully compatible with the peptidomic protocol proposed. The entire protocol was tested in a pilot experiment to compare the peptidome of healthy or heparin-anticoagulated rats subjected to hemorrhagic shock.

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It has been previously shown that intestinal proteases translocate into the circulation during hemorrhagic shock and contribute to proteolysis in distal organs. However, consequences of this phenomenon have not previously been investigated using high-throughput approaches. Here, a shotgun label-free quantitative proteomic approach was utilized to compare the peptidome of plasma samples from healthy and hemorrhagic shock rats to verify the possible role of uncontrolled proteolytic activity in shock.

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Metabolic disease is accompanied by a range of cellular defects ("comorbidities") whose origin is uncertain. To investigate this pathophysiological phenomenon we used the Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat (SHR), which besides an elevated arterial blood pressure also has many other comorbidities, including a defective glucose and lipid metabolism. We have shown that this model of metabolic disease has elevated plasma matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activity, which cleaves the extracellular domain of membrane receptors.

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