Background and ObjectivesThe goal of treatment for MS is to reduce the inflammation and induce the regeneration of degenerated axons. Considering the anti-inflammatory and regenerative capacity of mesenchymal stem cell (MSCs), in this study the therapeutic efficacy of allogeneic MSCs and MSCs-derived neural progenitor cells (MSCs-NPs) was investigated in cellular therapy of chronic experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE).Methods and ResultsMSCs, MSCs-NPs and MSCs+MSCs-NP were administered intravenously to EAE mice on days 22, 29, and 36 post immunization. The levels of cytokines and PGE2 in sera or supernatant of in vitro cultured splenocytes derived from treated mice were measured by ELISA. The results of this study showed that in comparison to MSCs monotherapy, MSCs-NPs administration had a more profound capability of inhibiting the proliferation of pathogenic MOG35–55-specific T cells, decreasing IFN-γ production and increasing anti-inflammatory IL-10 cytokine production. These findings could be explained by higher ability of in vitro cultured MSCs-NPs in production of PGE2 compared to MSCs. In line with these findings, while the administration of MSCs and MSCs-NPs significantly decreased the clinical scores of EAE in comparison with the untreated EAE group, MSCs-NPs were significantly more efficient in reducing clinical score compared to MSCs. Of interest, combined therapy with MSCs and MSCs-NPs did not provide any benefit over monotherapy with MSCs-NPs.ConclusionsIn comparison to MSCs, allogenic MSCs-NPs are more potent in the attenuation of EAE.

<b><i>Objective:</i></b> Interleukin (IL)-38 is a newly discovered member of the IL-1 cytokine family with a proposed anti-inflammatory profile. We studied the probable role of this cytokine in the pathogenesis of two autoimmune diseases: multiple sclerosis (MS) and systemic sclerosis (SSc). <b><i>Subjects and Methods:</i></b> A total of 87 MS patients and 86 SSc patients (40 new and recently untreated cases and 46 treated cases) were selected for this study. Eighty-seven and 80 age- and sex-matched healthy subjects were included as controls for MS and SSc, respectively. Clinical and paraclinical features of the patients were recorded at the time of sampling. Serum IL-38 was measured by ELISA. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Levels of serum IL-38 did not significantly differ between the total MS or SSc patients compared to controls. However, levels of IL-38 were significantly higher in newly diagnosed patients of MS (206.43 ± 38.97 pg/mL, <i>p</i> &#x3c; 0.0001) than in those previously treated (158.04 ± 39.45 pg/mL). Similarly, new/recently untreated cases of SSc patients showed increased IL-38 levels (185.19 ± 36.27 pg/mL, <i>p</i> = 0.001) compared to treated patients (166.82 ± 33.08 pg/mL). IL-38 levels in newly diagnosed MS patients (<i>p</i> = 0.007) and new/recently untreated SSc patients (<i>p</i> = 0.032) were significantly higher than those in healthy controls. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> The higher serum levels of IL-38 in new or recently untreated cases of MS and SSc patients than in treated patients and healthy controls suggest the possible role of this cytokine in the development of these diseases or as part of a feedback loop to attenuate the inflammatory conditions in early stages of these diseases.

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Myocardial infarction (MI) also known as heart attack is one of the prevalence cardiovascular diseases. MI that is due to the blockade in the coronary artery is caused by the lack of blood supply (ischemia) to heart tissue. Determining the risk of MI and hospitalizing the victim immediately can prolong patient’s life and enhance the quality of living through appropriate treatment. To make this decision more accurate, in this study, a decision support system is proposed to classify patients with hard chest pain (sign of MI) into high and low risk groups. Such a system can also assist in managing the limitation of bed in the care units such as cardiac care unit by deciding on admitting a subject with a hard chest pain whom refers to a hospital or not. Despite several efforts in this issue, the so far published results demonstrated that distinguishing these patients using just electrocardiogram (ECG) features is not promising. In addition, these methods did not focus on classifying the patients with high and low risks of MI. In this regard, auxiliary features from phonocardiogram (PCG) signals and clinical data were elicited to create a discriminative feature set and ultimately improve the performance of the decision making system. In this research, ECG (from 12 leads), PCG signal and clinical data were acquired from 83 patients two times (morning and evening) in the first day. Since the number of elicited features from the raw data of each patient is high, the irrelevant and non-discriminative features were eliminated by sequential forward selection. The selected features were applied to [Formula: see text]-nearest neighbor classifier resulted in 98.0% sensitivity, 100% specificity and 99.0% accuracy over the patients. The results illustrate that neither clinical data nor ECG features nor PCG features are lonely enough for estimating the risk of MI. Employing features from different modalities can improve the performance such that the developed multimodal-based system overperformed single modal-based systems. The obtained results are promising and suggest that using this system might be useful as a means for altering the risk of MI in patients.

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