Attenuated hypocholesterolemia following severe trauma signals risk for late ventilator-associated pneumonia, ventilator dependency, and death: a retrospective study of consecutive patients

Body mass index interaction effects with hyperglycemia and hypocholesterolemia modify blunt traumatic brain injury outcomes: a retrospective study

INTRODUCTION

There is controversy regarding obesity or body mass index (BMI) effects on postinjury mortality and mechanical ventilation. The aim was to assess outcome associations with BMI and postinjury blood glucose and cholesterol.

METHOD

Adult blunt traumatic brain injury patients admitted to a level I trauma center and requiring ≥ 3 days of intensive care were investigated. Admission blood glucose and day-4 total cholesterol were captured from the medical records. Cholesterol ratio was calculated by dividing day-4 values by published national normative levels according to sex, age, and injury date.

RESULTS

The parent cohort included 588 patients. The ventilator days ≥ 10 or died group, when compared to the ventilator days < 10 and lived group, had higher Injury Severity Score (ISS) (29.2±9.9 versus [vs.] 23.7±9.7, P < 0.0001), BMI (27.9±6.8 vs. 26.0±5.5, P = 0.0002), and admission glucose (182.6±79 vs. 155.4±59 mg/dl, P < 0.0001, n = 476) and lower emergency department Glasgow Coma Scale score (ED GCS) (6.9±4.7 vs. 10.3±5.0, P < 0.0001) and cholesterol ratio (0.64±0.2 vs. 0.70±0.2, P = 0.0018, n = 364). The ventilator days ≥ 10 or died group had independent associations with increased ISS (P = 0.0709), decreased ED GCS (P = 0.0078), and increased BMI÷cholesterol ratio (P = 0.0003). The ventilator days ≥ 10 or died group had independent associations with increased ISS (P = 0.0013), decreased ED GCS (P < 0.0001), and increased BMI × glucose (P < 0.0001). Ventilator days were increased with higher ISS (P < 0.0001), BMI (P = 0.0014) and glucose (P = 0.0031) and with lower ED GCS (P < 0.0001) and cholesterol ratio (P = 0.0004). Ventilator days had independent associations with increased ISS (P < 0.0001), decreased ED GCS (P = 0.0041), and increased BMI÷cholesterol ratio (P = 0.0010). Ventilator days had independent associations with increased ISS (P < 0.0001), decreased ED GCS (P < 0.0001), and increased BMI × glucose (P = 0.0041).

CONCLUSION

For TBI patients, valid risk assessment measurements include ISS (anatomic injury burden), ED GCS (brain function), BMI (preinjury weight status), admission glucose (postinjury metabolism), and day-4 cholesterol ratio (postinjury inflammation).

Prognostic value of dyslipidemia for sick dogs hospitalized in the intensive care unit of a veterinary teaching hospital

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the lipidemia status and serum concentrations of cholesterol and triglycerides of dogs when initially examined for hospitalization in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a veterinary teaching hospital and to determine whether these variables were predictive of survival to hospital discharge. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. ANIMALS 549 client-owned sick (n = 398) and healthy (151) dogs. PROCEDURES Medical records of sick dogs hospitalized in the ICU at a veterinary teaching hospital between January 1, 2012, and September 30, 2015, and of healthy dogs evaluated at the teaching hospital during the same time frame were reviewed. Data collection included signalment, results of initial physical and clinicopathologic examinations, treatments, diagnosis, and survival to hospital discharge. Lipidemia status and serum concentrations of cholesterol and triglycerides were compared between healthy and sick dogs and between sick dogs that did and did not survive to hospital discharge. Regression analysis was performed to determine whether these variables were predictive of survival to hospital discharge in dogs. RESULTS Factors associated with increased odds of sick dogs not surviving to hospital discharge were hypocholesterolemia (OR, 1.87; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.04 to 3.34), hypertriglyceridemia (OR, 3.20; 95% CI, 2.00 to 5.13), and concurrent hypocholesterolemia and hypertriglyceridemia (OR, 55.7; 95% CI, 3.2 to 959.6) at the time of initial evaluation. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE Results indicated that hypocholesterolemia and hypertriglyceridemia, alone or in combination, at initial examination were negative prognostic indicators for survival of dogs hospitalized in the ICU and that these conditions were easily identified with routine serum clinicopathologic analyses. (J Am Vet Med Assoc 2019;254:699-709).

CD64-Neutrophil expression and stress metabolic patterns in early sepsis and severe traumatic brain injury in children

Background

Critical illness constitutes a serious derangement of metabolism. The aim of our study was to compare acute phase metabolic patterns in children with sepsis (S) or severe sepsis/septic shock (SS) to those with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and healthy controls (C) and to evaluate their relations to neutrophil, lymphocyte and monocyte expressions of CD64 and CD11b.

Methods

Sixty children were enrolled in the study. Forty-five children with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) were classified into three groups: TBI (n = 15), S (n = 15), and SS (n = 15). C consisted of 15 non- SIRS patients undergoing screening tests for minor elective surgery. Blood samples were collected within 6 hours after admission for flow cytometry of neutrophil, lymphocyte and monocyte expression of CD64 and CD11b (n = 60). Procalcitonin (PCT), C-reactive protein (CRP), glucose, triglycerides (TG), total cholesterol (TC), high (HDL) or low-density-lipoproteins (LDL) were also determined in all groups, and repeated on day 2 and 3 in the 3 SIRS groups (n = 150).

Results

CRP, PCT and TG (p < 0.01) were significantly increased in S and SS compared to TBI and C; glucose did not differ among critically ill groups. Significantly lower were the levels of TC, LDL, and HDL in septic groups compared to C and to moderate changes in TBI (p < 0.0001) but only LDL differed between S and SS (p < 0.02). Among septic patients, PCT levels declined significantly (p < 0.02) with time, followed by parallel decrease of HDL (p < 0.03) and increase of TG (p < 0.02) in the SS group. Neutrophil CD64 (nCD64) expression was higher in patients with SS (81.2%) and S (78.8%) as compared to those with TBI (5.5%) or C (0.9%, p < 0.0001). nCD64 was positively related with CRP, PCT, glucose, and TG (p < 0.01) and negatively with TC, LDL, and HDL (p < 0.0001), but not with severity of illness, hematologic indices, length of stay or mechanical ventilation duration.

Conclusions

In sepsis, the early stress-metabolic pattern is characterized by a high (nCD64, glucose, TG) - low (TC, HDL, LDL) combination in contrast to the moderate pattern of TBI in which only glucose increases combined with a moderate cholesterol - lipoprotein decrease. These early metabolic patterns persist the first 3 days of acute illness and are associated with the acute phase CD64 expression on neutrophils.

Metscape 2 bioinformatics tool for the analysis and visualization of metabolomics and gene expression data

MOTIVATION

Metabolomics is a rapidly evolving field that holds promise to provide insights into genotype-phenotype relationships in cancers, diabetes and other complex diseases. One of the major informatics challenges is providing tools that link metabolite data with other types of high-throughput molecular data (e.g. transcriptomics, proteomics), and incorporate prior knowledge of pathways and molecular interactions.

RESULTS

We describe a new, substantially redesigned version of our tool Metscape that allows users to enter experimental data for metabolites, genes and pathways and display them in the context of relevant metabolic networks. Metscape 2 uses an internal relational database that integrates data from KEGG and EHMN databases. The new version of the tool allows users to identify enriched pathways from expression profiling data, build and analyze the networks of genes and metabolites, and visualize changes in the gene/metabolite data. We demonstrate the applications of Metscape to annotate molecular pathways for human and mouse metabolites implicated in the pathogenesis of sepsis-induced acute lung injury, for the analysis of gene expression and metabolite data from pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, and for identification of the candidate metabolites involved in cancer and inflammation.

AVAILABILITY

Metscape is part of the National Institutes of Health-supported National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) suite of tools, freely available at http://metscape.ncibi.org. It can be downloaded from http://cytoscape.org or installed via Cytoscape plugin manager.

CONTACT

metscape-help@umich.edu; akarnovs@umich.edu

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.