Tips from the American Journal of...(Prediction of Kidney Disease Progression...)

Dr. Marieke van Zoelen and colleagues at The University of Amsterdam have identified a therapeutic target for preventing oxygen toxicity. They present these findings in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Pathology.

Breathing molecular oxygen at high pressures may cause oxygen toxicity, which is characterized by cell death in the central nervous system, lung, and eye. Patients on high concentrations of supplemental oxygen due to respiratory failure or premature birth, people undergoing hyperbaric oxygen therapies, scuba divers, and astronauts are all at risk for oxygen toxicity.

Van Zoelen et al hypothesized that uPAR, which attracts immune cells, plays a role in oxygen toxicity in the lungs. They found that mice treated with high levels of oxygen had an increased number of uPAR-expressing immune cells in their lungs and that mice that lacked uPAR expression had less lung injury.

This work suggests that "inhibition of uPAR may be a novel strategy to reduce the lung injury that accompanies oxygen therapy."

van Zoelen MAD, Florquin S, de Beer R, Pater JM, Verstege MI, Meijers JCM, van der Poll T: Urokinase plasminogen activator receptor-deficient mice demonstrate reduced hyperoxia-induced lung injury. Am J Pathol 2009, 174: 2182-2189

Researchers led by Drs. Takahashi Yamamura and Shinji Oki at the National Institute of Neuroscience, Tokyo, Japan have found that the synthetic retinoid AM80 is effective in treating early symptoms in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis (MS). They report their data in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Pathology.

MS is a disease where the immune system attacks the central nervous system, preventing communication between nerve cells in
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