Active clinical trials for "Inflammation"

The objective of this study is to elucidate the relationship between inflammation and lipoprotein atherogenicity, and to determine the relative contribution of inflammation and lipids to CV risk in RA. The central hypothesis of this study is that inflammation and lipoprotein atherogenicity is tightly linked such that both factors are important to assess CV risk in RA. Further, the investigators hypothesize that this relationship is obscured by a consideration of routine lipids alone.

SCI results in higher incidence of heart disease and diabetes and heart disease is the most common cause of death. Chronic inflammation, deleterious changes in vascular structure and impaired glucose metabolism are risk factors that contribute to both heart disease and diabetes. While exercise can help reduce these risk factors, paralysis and impaired accessibility often precludes exercise in persons with SCI. New research in able-bodied persons demonstrates passive heating decreases inflammation and improves vascular function. Similar studies in persons with SCI suggest they may also have the same health benefits however these studies only investigated the impact of short term (one episode) passive heating (as opposed to repeated bouts). Repeated bouts of heat exposure will likely be required to impact chronic inflammation, but this has never been tested in persons with SCI. This study will test the impact of repeated bouts (3x/week) of passive heat stress over a longer term (8 weeks) on inflammation, metabolism and vascular function.

Subclinical inflammation plays a critical role in all stages of the atherosclerotic process, from the initiation of the fatty streaks to the development of plaque instability and rupture, causing myocardial ischemia and acute coronary syndromes (ACS). A few studies have suggested that the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the inflammatory response are intimately linked. Accordingly, a relation between impaired cardiac autonomic tone and increased markers of inflammation has been reported in healthy subjects as well as in patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus, chronic coronary syndrome or decompensated heart failure. To get insight in the controversial relationship between cardiac autonomic dysfunction and inflammation in patients with ACS both with and without obstructive CAD and assess the precise mechanisms and molecular pathways by which these two pathophysiological conditions mutually influence each other, to characterize their prognostic implications and identify possible targets for novel therapeutic strategies.

Acute myocardial inflammation is an heterogenic syndrome involving different clinical pathologies with different outcome. For the purpose of this study protocol, we focuse on three entities of this syndrome, namely the acute cellular cardiac allograft rejection (ACR), cardiac sarcoidosis (CS) and the immune checkpoint inhibitor induced myocarditis (ICIM), for which non-invasive diagnosis remains challenging. Since accurate diagnosis of myocardial inflammation in an early stage is crucial, this study aims to investigate the accuracy of [68Ga]Ga-PentixaFor as a marker of for the presence of inflammatory cells (T-lymphocytes and M1) in described patients. The identification of a correlation between [68Ga]Ga-PentixaFor myocardial accumulation with currently accepted diagnostic tools would open up new ways to non-invasively diagnose acute myocardial inflammation.

Orthodontic treatment with fixed appliances can be necessary to correct malocclusions in adolescence or adulthood. It its known that orthodontic treatment induces aseptic pseudo-inflammatory reactions. However, studies could show that an increase of certain inflammatory cytokines during orthodontic treatment correlated with a higher risk of root resorption. Moreover, it has been shown that orthodontic treatment leads to a dysbiosis of the oral microbiome especially during the first 3 months of the orthodontic treatment. This could be a potential risk factor as the inflammation of periodontitis during an orthodontic treatment could favor root resorption and progressive destruction of the periodontal apparatus. Probiotics are already used successfully as an adjuvant therapy in the treatment of periodontitis to improve clinical parameters and to reduce local inflammation. However, there are only a few studies that investigated the influence of probiotics during an orthodontic treatment. Therefore, the aim of our study is to investigate if the daily intake of lozenges containing probiotics versus placebo lozenges during the first 3 months of orthodontic treatment with fixed appliances can improve clinical parameters, reduce local inflammation, systemic inflammation and prevent a dysbiosis of the oral microbiome.

Phase 1 of this study involves determining how consumption of dairy fat fractions rich in milk fat globule membrane influences postprandial inflammation in participants with metabolic syndrome or obesity during a high dietary fat challenge in a six-hour period.

Patients will be assigned to receive either Depo Medrol or Acthar treatment. A synovial biopsy, blood draws, synovial fluid aspiration, and physician assessments will be performed before and after initiating treatment.

The adaptive immune response plays an important role in myocardial healing and remodeling after acute myocardial infarction in patients. Therefore, the involved lymphocytes represent a novel target for therapeutic interventions. However, there are no established blood-derived biomarkers to predict the quantity and quality of the adaptive immune response to cardiac injury. Multimodal imaging of the heart and immunologic organs might provide such information. Recent retrospective analysis of patients after MI revealed enlarged mediastinal lymph nodes associated with increased CXCR4 radiotracer accumulation, thereby indicating that CXCR4 PET-based lymph node imaging provides a non-invasive quantitative readout of the local adaptive immune response. These considerations are further fuelled by the fact that, within lymph nodes, CXCR4 is expressed almost exclusively on lymphocytes, whereas various other cell types express CXCR4 within the myocardium. This leads to the hypothesis that the size of mediastinal lymph nodes and their respective CXCR4 PET signals correlate with the adaptive immune response to cardiac injury and might provide predictive information for functional cardiac decline during follow-up. This prospective clinical study will use multimodal imaging to monitor chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR4) expression in the lymph nodes, myocardium, spleen, and bone marrow after acute MI. The combination of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), echocardiography, and positron emission tomography (PET) along with blood collection for immunophenotyping will allow to determine i) if the size of mediastinal lymph nodes and their respective PET-derived CXCR4 signals at baseline correlate with the adaptive immune response to acute cardiac injury; and ii) if they predict cardiac adverse remodelling during longitudinal follow-up.

Data from human autopsy studies have showed that thrombosis of a ruptured plaque with a large necrotic core, inflammatory cells and a thin fibrous cap, the so-called thin cap fibroatheroma (TCFA), represents the main mechanism for acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an imaging technique that provides high-resolution, cross-sectional images of tissue in situ. The resolution of OCT (10 um) is appropriate for measuring a cap thickness less than65 μm, and even the plaque macrophage density. 68Ga-DOTA-(Tyr3)-octreotate/NaI3-octreotide(68Ga-DOTA-TATE/NOC) Positron Emission Tomography (PET)/Computed Tomography coronary angiography (CTCA), targeting the somatostatin receptor subtype-2 selectively expressed by M1 macrophages may show coronary inflammation. The SHORE protocol aims at evaluating the synergy between OCT and 68Ga-DOTA-TATE/NOC in predicting coronary plaque progression as assessed by CTCA

The aim of the present study is to show that the use of 0.55T MRI combined with a "dental" coil produces images of sufficient diagnostic value to assess areas of interest in dentistry, and to compare MR images to traditional, dental-oriented radiographic images for diagnostic purposes.