Sex-specific impact of inflammation on traditional cardiovascular risk factors and atherosclerosis in axial spondyloarthritis. A multicentre study of 913 patients.

Introduction: The nature of the relationship between inflammation, cardiovascular (CV) risk factors and atherosclerosis in axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) remains largely unknown and sex differences in this regard are yet to be assessed.

Methods: Study including 611 men and 302 women from the Spanish multicentre AtheSpAin cohort to assess CV disease in axSpA. Data on CV disease risk factors were collected both at disease diagnosis and at enrolment, and data on disease activity, functional indices and carotid ultrasonography only at enrolment.

SeQual-Stream: approaching stream processing to quality control of NGS datasets.

Background: Quality control of DNA sequences is an important data preprocessing step in many genomic analyses. However, all existing parallel tools for this purpose are based on a batch processing model, needing to have the complete genetic dataset before processing can even begin. This limitation clearly hinders quality control performance in those scenarios where the dataset must be downloaded from a remote repository and/or copied to a distributed file system for its parallel processing.

Altered glycolysis triggers impaired mitochondrial metabolism and mTORC1 activation in diabetic β-cells.

Chronic hyperglycaemia causes a dramatic decrease in mitochondrial metabolism and insulin content in pancreatic β-cells. This underlies the progressive decline in β-cell function in diabetes. However, the molecular mechanisms by which hyperglycaemia produces these effects remain unresolved.

SparkEC: speeding up alignment-based DNA error correction tools.

Background: In recent years, huge improvements have been made in the context of sequencing genomic data under what is called Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). However, the DNA reads generated by current NGS platforms are not free of errors, which can affect the quality of downstream analysis. Although error correction can be performed as a preprocessing step to overcome this issue, it usually requires long computational times to analyze those large datasets generated nowadays through NGS.

Cardiovascular and disease-related features associated with extra-articular manifestations in axial spondyloarthritis. A multicenter study of 888 patients.

Objectives: To determine the potential impact of extra-articular manifestations (EAMs) on disease characteristics and cardiovascular (CV) risk in patients with axial spondylarthritis (axSpA).

Methods: This is a cross-sectional study from the AtheSpAin cohort, a Spanish multicenter cohort to study atherosclerosis in axSpA. Data on the history of CV events, subclinical carotid atherosclerosis, and disease-related features, including EAMs, were collected.