Publications by authors named "Wasserman D"

Premenopausal women and endurance-trained individuals of either sex have reduced cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Endurance training shifts fuel selection towards fats to spare carbohydrates; interestingly, women prioritize fats as an energy resource more than men do during exercise. Relying on fats during exercise drives whole-body lipolysis and promotes lipid uptake and oxidation capacity in skeletal muscles.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Polysomnography, the gold standard diagnostic tool in sleep medicine, is performed in an artificial environment. This might alter sleep and may not accurately reflect typical sleep patterns. While macro-structures are sensitive to environmental effects, micro-structures remain more stable.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Academic psychiatry is essential for advancing mental health understanding and treatments. However, women encounter more obstacles hindering their progress in academia than men. This Editorial aims to highlight these obstacles and propose strategies to address them, advocating for a more supportive environment for women psychiatrists' ongoing growth and development.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Microvascular dysfunction contributes to insulin resistance, particularly in individuals with a genetic variant (G allele) that reduces CD36 expression, impacting blood vessel function and glucose disposal.* -
  • Through various experimental methods, the study found that while CD36-deficient mice and humans showed improved insulin-stimulated glucose disposal, they had issues with blood volume response and vascular compliance, indicating a paradoxical relationship between microvascular resistance and insulin sensitivity.* -
  • The findings suggest that while CD36 deficiency may enhance glucose disposal efficiency, it simultaneously hampers the microvasculature's response to insulin, affecting oxygen delivery and energy metabolism in muscle and heart tissues.*
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Microvascular insulin delivery to myocytes is rate limiting for the onset of insulin-stimulated muscle glucose uptake. The structural integrity of capillaries of the microvasculature is regulated, in part, by a family of transmembrane adhesion receptors known as integrins, which are composed of an α and a β subunit. The integrin β1 (itgβ1) subunit is highly expressed in endothelial cells (ECs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers investigated the effects of the PDE-5a inhibitor sildenafil and found that it enhances the benefits of exercise by improving microcirculation and exercise capacity in diet-induced obese mice, but not in sedentary mice.
  • * In lean mice with reduced endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), exercise training still improved endurance, indicating that while eNOS function is important, training alone can lead to significant benefits in microcirculation and exercise performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * The study focused on the integrin β1 subunit in endothelial cells, revealing that its absence led to impaired microvascular function and glucose uptake in response to insulin.
  • * Findings showed that mice lacking endothelial integrin β1 had decreased capillary flow and density, resulting in compromised insulin-mediated glucose delivery, highlighting its importance for proper muscle function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center (MMPC)Live Program was established in 2023 by the National Institute for Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance biomedical research by providing the scientific community with standardized, high quality phenotyping services for mouse models of diabetes and obesity. Emerging as the next iteration of the MMPC Program which served the biomedical research community for 20 years (2001-2021), MMPCLive is designed as an outwardly-facing consortium of service cores that collaborate to provide reduced-cost consultation and metabolic, physiologic, and behavioral phenotyping tests on live mice for U.S.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Obesity is linked to insulin resistance, affecting both glucose uptake and the body's blood vessel response to insulin, which is crucial for delivering glucose to tissues.
  • A study tested the role of sympathetic activation in impaired insulin-triggered blood vessel dilation in obese adults using a controlled experiment with insulin and drugs to block sympathetic responses.
  • Results showed that blocking sympathetic activation significantly improved blood flow and microvascular function when insulin was administered, indicating that sympathetic activity may hinder insulin's vascular effects in obesity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Obesity increases deposition of extracellular matrix (ECM) components of cardiac tissue. Since obesity aggregates with insulin resistance and heart disease, it is imperative to determine whether the increased ECM deposition contributes to this disease cluster. The hypotheses tested in this study were that in cardiac tissue of obese mice i) increased deposition of ECM components (collagens and hyaluronan) contributes to cardiac insulin resistance and that a reduction in these components improves cardiac insulin action and ii) reducing excess collagens and hyaluronan mitigates obesity-associated cardiac dysfunction.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Rural emergency prehospital care in British Columbia is conducted primarily by the British Columbia Ambulance Services or ground search and rescue volunteers. Since 2014, the volunteer Air Rescue One (AR1) program has provided helicopter emergency winch rescue services to rural British Columbia. The aim of this research was to describe the activity of the AR1 program and to make recommendations to improve future operations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cytochrome P450 epoxygenase Cyp2c44, a murine epoxyeicosatrienoic acid (EET)-producing enzyme, promotes insulin sensitivity, and Cyp2c44-/- mice show hepatic insulin resistance. Because insulin resistance leads to hepatic lipid accumulation and hyperlipidemia, we hypothesized that Cyp2c44 regulates hepatic lipid metabolism. Standard chow diet (SCD)-fed male Cyp2c44-/- mice had significantly decreased EET levels and increased hepatic and plasma lipid levels compared with wild-type mice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease is the most common form of liver disease and poses significant health risks to patients who progress to metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis. Fatty acid overload alters endoplasmic reticulum (ER) calcium stores and induces mitochondrial oxidative stress in hepatocytes, leading to hepatocellular inflammation and apoptosis. Obese mice have impaired liver sarco/ER Ca-ATPase (SERCA) function, which normally maintains intracellular calcium homeostasis by transporting Ca ions from the cytoplasm to the ER.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Kidney tubules use fatty acid oxidation (FAO) to support their high energetic requirements. Carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1A (CPT1A) is the rate-limiting enzyme for FAO, and it is necessary to transport long-chain fatty acids into mitochondria. To define the role of tubular CPT1A in aging and injury, we generated mice with tubule-specific deletion of Cpt1a (Cpt1aCKO mice), and the mice were either aged for 2 years or injured by aristolochic acid or unilateral ureteral obstruction.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Dysfunction of endothelial insulin delivery contributes to insulin resistance, with CD36 playing a key role in this process as a fatty acid transporter.
  • Research shows that both CD36-deficient mice and humans demonstrate enhanced glucose disposal despite signs of endothelial dysfunction, such as reduced blood vessel compliance.
  • This paradox suggests that while CD36 deficiency impairs insulin signaling in microvascular cells, it may simultaneously lead to changes in muscle gene expression that improve glucose utilization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mammals are protected from changes in environmental temperature by altering energetic processes that modify heat production. Insulin is the dominant stimulus of glucose uptake and metabolism, which are fundamental for thermogenic processes. The purpose of this work was to determine the interaction of ambient temperature induced changes in energy expenditure (EE) on the insulin sensitivity of glucose fluxes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Menstrual symptoms are predominantly studied among adults but may occur directly after menarche. Adolescent menstrual healthcare, however, faces specific obstacles and more research into menstrual symptoms as a determinant of adolescent well-being is therefore advocated.

Objective: This study aimed to investigate menstrual symptoms and their impact on everyday life and well-being among postmenarchal adolescents.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The ability to efficiently absorb light in ultrathin (subwavelength) layers is essential for modern electro-optic devices, including detectors, sensors, and nonlinear modulators. Tailoring these ultrathin films' spectral, spatial, and polarimetric properties is highly desirable for many, if not all, of the above applications. Doing so, however, often requires costly lithographic techniques or exotic materials, limiting scalability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Risks and benefits of experimental fetal therapies can remain uncertain after initial clinical studies, especially long-term effects. Nevertheless, pregnant individuals may request them, hoping to benefit their future child. Guidance about offering experimental fetal therapies outside research (as "innovative therapy") is limited, despite their ethical complexity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF