Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “Cardiovascular”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Sex Differences in Vagus Nerve Stimulation Effects on Rat Cardiovascular and Immune Systems

Background: Investigations into the benefits of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) through pre-clinical and clinical research have led to promising findings for treating several disorders. Despite proven effectiveness of VNS on conditions such as epilepsy and depression, understanding of off-target effects and contributing factors such as sex differences can be beneficial to optimize therapy design. New Methods: In this article, we assessed longitudinal effects of VNS on cardiovascular and immune systems, and studied potential sex differences using a rat model of longterm VNS. Rats were implanted with cuff electrodes around the left cervical vagus nerve for VNS, and wireless physiological monitoring devices for continuous monitoring of cardiovascular system using electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. ECG morphology and heart rate variability (HRV) features were extracted to assess cardiovascular changes resulting from VNS in short-term and long-term timescales. We also assessed VNS effects on expression of inflammatory cytokines in blood during the course of the experiment. Statistical analysis was performed to compare results between Treatment and Sham groups, and between male and female animals from Treatment and Sham groups. Results: Considerable differences between male and female rats in cardiovascular effects of VNS were observed in multiple cardiovascular features. However, the effects seemed to be transient with approximately 1-h recovery after VNS. While short-term cardiovascular effects were mainly observed in male rats, females in general showed more significant long-term effects even after VNS stopped. We did not observe notable changes or sex differences in systemic cytokine levels resulting from VNS. Comparison With Existing Methods: Compared to existing methods, our study design incorporated wireless physiological monitoring and systemic blood cytokine level analysis, along with long-term VNS experiments in unanesthetized rats to study sex differences. Conclusion: The contribution of sex differences for long-term VNS off-target effects on cardiovascular and immune systems was assessed using awake behaving rats. Although VNS did not change the concentration of inflammatory biomarkers in systemic circulation for male and female rats, we observed significant differences in cardiovascular effects of VNS characterized using ECG morphology and HRV analyses.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Omega-3 fatty acids attenuate cardiovascular effects of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution

Background: Exposure to air pollution is associated with elevated cardiovascular risk. Evidence shows that omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (omega-3 PUFA) may attenuate the adverse cardiovascular effects of exposure to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ). However, it is unclear whether habitual dietary intake of omega-3 PUFA protects against the cardiovascular effects of short-term exposure to low-level ambient air pollution in healthy participants. In the present study, sixty-two adults with low or high dietary omega-3 PUFA intake were enrolled. Blood lipids, markers of vascular inflammation, coagulation and fibrinolysis, and heart rate variability (HRV) and repolarization were repeatedly assessed in 5 sessions separated by at least 7 days. This study was carried out in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, USA between October 2016 and September 2019. Daily PM 2.5 and maximum 8-h ozone (O 3 ) concentrations were obtained from nearby air quality monitoring stations. Linear mixed-effects models were used to assess the associations between air pollutant concentrations and cardiovascular responses stratified by the omega-3 intake levels. Results: The average concentrations of ambient PM 2.5 and O 3 were well below the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards during the study period. Significant associations between exposure to PM 2.5 and changes in total cholesterol, von Willebrand factor (vWF), tissue plasminogen activator, D-dimer, and very-low frequency HRV were observed in the low omega-3 group, but not in the high group. Similarly, O 3 -associated adverse changes in cardiovascular biomarkers (total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein, serum amyloid A, soluable intracellular adhesion molecule 1, and vWF) were mainly observed in the low omega-3 group. Lag-time-dependent biphasic changes were observed for some biomarkers. Conclusions: This study demonstrates associations between short-term exposure to PM 2.5 and O 3 , at concentrations below regulatory standard, and subclinical cardiovascular responses, and that dietary omega-3 PUFA consumption may provide protection against such cardiovascular effects in healthy adults.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Geographic disparities of cardiovascular and cancer mortality in the USA: 1981–2019

Background: Cardiovascular and cancer mortality are the two leading causes of death in the developed world including the USA. However, mortality trends for these diseases are highly dynamic, and the geographic landscape is in transition. We analyze patterns of mortality improvement at county level during recent decades focusing on mortality decline and geographic diversity. Methods: We grouped age-adjusted mortality rates of cardiovascular and cancer diseases from CDC WONDER for 2959 US counties into 3-year time periods to improve reliability. We calculated percent mortality decrease between 1981–83 and 2016–19 for both causes to quantify mortality improvements for counties. Results: Using standard deviation as an index of disparities, place-based cancer mortalities were 68% larger than cardiovascular disparities. Significantly, 566 US counties had same or higher rates of cancer mortality in 2019 as in 1981. The geographic distribution of mortality improvement in either cause tends to favor largely populated areas along coasts. Less-populated, rural places in the interior and southeastern regions were experiencing less improvement. Conclusions: At the county level, large place-based disparities exist for both causes of death with the magnitude of disparities being substantially larger for the reduction in cancer deaths. Put differently, place matters, more for cancer than cardiovascular mortality.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Simulated Microgravity Alters Gene Regulation Linked to Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease

Microgravity exposure induces a cephalad fluid shift and an overall reduction in physical activity levels which can lead to cardiovascular deconditioning in the absence of countermeasures. Future spaceflight missions will expose crew to extended periods of microgravity among other stressors, the effects of which on cardiovascular health are not fully known. In this study, we determined cardiac responses to extended microgravity exposure using the rat hindlimb unloading (HU) model. We hypothesized that exposure to prolonged simulated microgravity and subsequent recovery would lead to increased oxidative damage and altered expression of genes involved in the oxidative response. To test this hypothesis, we examined hearts of male (three and nine months of age) and female (3 months of age) Long–Evans rats that underwent HU for various durations up to 90 days and reambulated up to 90 days post-HU. Results indicate sex-dependent changes in oxidative damage marker 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) and antioxidant gene expression in left ventricular tissue. Three-month-old females displayed elevated 8-OHdG levels after 14 days of HU while age-matched males did not. In nine-month-old males, there were no differences in 8-OHdG levels between HU and normally loaded control males at any of the timepoints tested following HU. RNAseq analysis of left ventricular tissue from nine-month-old males after 14 days of HU revealed upregulation of pathways involved in pro-inflammatory signaling, immune cell activation and differential expression of genes associated with cardiovascular disease progression. Taken together, these findings provide a rationale for targeting antioxidant and immune pathways and that sex differences should be taken into account in the development of countermeasures to maintain cardiovascular health in space.

Genetics & Heredity↗
DOE OSTI2020

Multilevel and multifidelity uncertainty quantification for cardiovascular hemodynamics

Standard approaches for uncertainty quantification in cardiovascular modeling pose challenges due to the large number of uncertain inputs and the significant computational cost of realistic three-dimensional simulations. Here, we propose an efficient uncertainty quantification framework utilizing a multilevel multifidelity Monte Carlo (MLMF) estimator to improve the accuracy of hemodynamic quantities of interest while maintaining reasonable computational cost. This is achieved by leveraging three cardiovascular model fidelities, each with varying spatial resolution to rigorously quantify the variability in hemodynamic outputs. We employ two low-fidelity models (zero- and one-dimensional) to construct several different estimators. Our goal is to investigate and compare the efficiency of estimators built from combinations of these two low-fidelity model alternatives and our high-fidelity three-dimensional models. We demonstrate this framework on healthy and diseased models of aortic and coronary anatomy, including uncertainties in material property and boundary condition parameters. Our goal is to demonstrate that for this application it is possible to accelerate the convergence of the estimators by utilizing a MLMF paradigm. Therefore, we compare our approach to single fidelity Monte Carlo estimators and to a multilevel Monte Carlo approach based only on three-dimensional simulations, but leveraging multiple spatial resolutions. We demonstrate significant, on the order of 10 to 100 times, reduction in total computational cost with the MLMF estimators. We also examine the differing properties of the MLMF estimators in healthy versus diseased models, as well as global versus local quantities of interest. As expected, global quantities such as outlet pressure and flow show larger reductions than local quantities, such as those relating to wall shear stress, as the latter rely more heavily on the highest fidelity model evaluations. Similarly, healthy models show larger reductions than diseased models. In all cases, our workflow coupling Dakota’s MLMF estimators with the SimVascular cardiovascular modeling framework makes uncertainty quantification feasible for constrained computational budgets.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

AI-powered topic modeling: comparing LDA and BERTopic in analyzing opioid-related cardiovascular risks in women

Topic modeling is a crucial technique in natural language processing (NLP), enabling the extraction of latent themes from large text corpora. Traditional topic modeling, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), faces limitations in capturing the semantic relationships in the text document although it has been widely applied in text mining. BERTopic, created in 2022, leveraged advances in deep learning and can capture the contextual relationships between words. In this work, we integrated Artificial Intelligence (AI) modules to LDA and BERTopic and provided a comprehensive comparison on the analysis of prescription opioid-related cardiovascular risks in women. Opioid use can increase the risk of cardiovascular problems in women such as arrhythmia, hypotension etc. 1,837 abstracts were retrieved and downloaded from PubMed as of April 2024 using three Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) words: “opioid,” “cardiovascular,” and “women.” Machine Learning of Language Toolkit (MALLET) was employed for the implementation of LDA. BioBERT was used for document embedding in BERTopic. Eighteen was selected as the optimal topic number for MALLET and 23 for BERTopic. ChatGPT-4-Turbo was integrated to interpret and compare the results. The short descriptions created by ChatGPT for each topic from LDA and BERTopic were highly correlated, and the performance accuracies of LDA and BERTopic were similar as determined by expert manual reviews of the abstracts grouped by their predominant topics. The results of the t-SNE (t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) plots showed that the clusters created from BERTopic were more compact and well-separated, representing improved coherence and distinctiveness between the topics. Our findings indicated that AI algorithms could augment both traditional and contemporary topic modeling techniques. In addition, BERTopic has the connection port for ChatGPT-4-Turbo or other large language models in its algorithm for automatic interpretation, while with LDA interpretation must be manually, and needs special procedures for data pre-processing and stop words exclusion. Therefore, while LDA remains valuable for large-scale text analysis with resource constraints, AI-assisted BERTopic offers significant advantages in providing the enhanced interpretability and the improved semantic coherence for extracting valuable insights from textual data.

Research & Experimental Medicine↗
DOE OSTI2020

Annual PM2.5 and cardiovascular mortality rate data: Trends modified by county socioeconomic status in 2,132 US counties

This article contains data on county-level socioeconomic status for 2132 US counties and each county's average annual cardiovascular mortality rate (CMR) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration for 21 years (1990e2010). County CMR, PM2.5, and socioeconomic data were obtained from the US National Center for Health Statistics, US Environmental Protection Agency's Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system, and the US Census, respectively. Annual socioeconomic indices were created using seven county-level measures from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 US Census using factor analysis. Quintiles of this index were used to generate categories of county socioeconomic status. This national data set contains data for annual PM2.5 and CMR changes over a time-period when there was a significant reduction in US air pollutants (following the enactment of the 1970 Clean Air Act). These data are associated with the article “The contribution of improved air quality to reduced cardiovascular mortality: Declines in socioeconomic differences over time” [1]. Data are stored in a comma separated value format and can be downloaded from the USEPA ScienceHub data repository (https://doi.org/10.23719/ 1506014).

Socioeconomic status↗
DOE OSTI2021

The influence of dietary intake of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids on the association between short-term exposure to ambient nitrogen dioxide and respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes among healthy adults

Background: Short-term exposure to ambient nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) is associated with adverse respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes. Supplementation of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) has shown protection against exposure to fine particulate matter. This study aims to investigate whether habitual omega-3 PUFA intake differentially modify the associations between respiratory and cardiovascular responses and short-term exposure to ambient NO 2 . Methods: Sixty-two healthy participants were enrolled into low or high omega-3 groups based on their habitual omega-3 PUFA intake. Each participant was repeatedly assessed for lung function, blood lipids, markers of coagulation and fibrinolysis, vascular function, and heart rate variability (HRV) in up to five sessions, each separated by at least 7 days. This study was carried out in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, USA between October 2016 and September 2019. Daily ambient NO 2 concentrations were obtained from an area air quality monitoring station on the day of outcome assessment (Lag0), 4 days prior (Lag1-4), as well as 5-day moving average (5dMA). The associations between short-term exposure to NO 2 and the measured indices were evaluated using linear mixed-effects models stratified by omega-3 levels and adjusted by covariates including relative humidity and temperature. Results: The average concentration of ambient NO 2 during the study periods was 5.3±3.8 ppb which was below the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). In the high omega-3 group, an interquartile range (IQR) increase in short-term NO 2 concentrations was significantly associated with increased lung function [e.g. 1.2% (95%CI: 0.2%, 2.2%) in FVC at lag1, 2.6% (95%CI: 0.4%, 4.8%) in FEV1 at 5dMA], decreased blood lipids [e.g. -2.6% (95%CI: -4.4%, -0.9%) in total cholesterol at lag2, -3.1% (95%CI: -6.1%, 0.0%) in HDL at 5dMA, and -3.1% (95%CI: -5.5%, -0.7%) in LDL at lag2], improved vascular function [e.g. 8.9% (95%CI: 0.6%, 17.2%) increase in FMD and 43.1% (95%CI: -79.8%, -6.3%) decrease in endothelin-1 at 5dMA], and changed HRV parameters [e.g. -7.2% (95%CI: -13.6%, -0.8%) in HFn and 13.4% (95%CI: 0.2%, 28.3%) in LF/HF ratio at lag3]. In the low omega-3 group, an IQR increase in ambient NO 2 was associated with elevations in coagulation markers (von Willebrand Factor, D-dimer) and a decrease in HRV (very-low frequency); however, null associations were observed between short-term NO 2 exposure and changes in lung function, blood lipids, and vascular function. Conclusions: The results in this study imply that dietary omega-3 PUFA consumption may offer respiratory and vascular benefits in response to short-term exposure of healthy adults to NO 2 levels below the NAAQS.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

The POINTER Imaging baseline cohort: Associations between multimodal neuroimaging biomarkers, cardiovascular health, and cognition

Abstract INTRODUCTION The U.S. Study to Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk (U.S. POINTER) is evaluating lifestyle interventions in older adults at risk for cognitive decline and dementia. Here we characterize the baseline data set of the POINTER Imaging ancillary study. METHODS Participants underwent health and cognitive assessments and neuroimaging with multimodal positron emission tomography (PET) (beta‐amyloid [Aβ] and tau) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Framingham risk score (FRS) was used to quantify cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. RESULTS A total of 1052 participants (31% from underrepresented ethnoracial groups) were enrolled. Compared to Aβ−, Aβ+ (29%) participants were older, had higher apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 carriage rate and white matter hyperintensity volume, and greater temporal tau. FRS was related to MRI measures, but not AD biomarkers. FRS and tau had independent effects on cognition. DISCUSSION In this heterogenous, at‐risk cohort, CVD risk was related to more abnormal brain structure and poorer cognition, representing a putative non‐AD (Alzheimer's disease) pathway to brain injury and cognitive decline. Highlights The U.S. Study to Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk (U.S. POINTER) cohort is enriched for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and poor lifestyle POINTER Imaging collected multimodal neuroimaging data in this unique, at‐risk cohort Amyloid burden was related to age, apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 carriage, and measures of disease progression Associations between amyloid and tau, and tau and cognition, were relatively weak CVD risk and tau pathology were independently related to memory

Neurosciences & Neurology↗
DOE OSTI2023

Targeted curation of the gut microbial gene content modulating human cardiovascular disease

Despite the promise of the gut microbiome to predict human health, few studies expose the molecular-scale processes underpinning such forecasts. We mined over 200,000 gut-derived genomes from cultivated and uncultivated microbial lineages to inventory the gut microorganisms and their gene content that control trimethylamine-induced cardiovascular disease. We assigned an atherosclerotic profile to the 6,341 microbial genomes that encoded metabolisms associated with heart disease, creating the Methylated Amine Gene Inventory of Catabolism database (MAGICdb). From microbiome gene expression data sets, we demonstrate that MAGICdb enhanced the recovery of disease-relevant genes and identified the most active microorganisms, unveiling future therapeutic targets. From the feces of healthy and diseased subjects, we show that MAGICdb predicted cardiovascular disease status as effectively as traditional lipid blood tests. This functional microbiome catalog is a public, exploitable resource, designed to enable a new era of microbiota-based therapeutics and diagnostics

metatranscriptomics↗
DOE OSTI2022

Simulated Night- Shift Schedule Disrupts the Plasma Lipidome and Reveals Early Markers of Cardiovascular Disease Risk

Introduction: The circadian system coordinates daily rhythms in lipid metabolism, storage and utilization. Disruptions of internal circadian rhythms due to altered sleep/wake schedules, such as in night-shift work, have been implicated in increased risk of cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders. To determine the impact of a night-shift schedule on the human blood plasma lipidome, an in-laboratory simulated shift work study was conducted. Methods: Fourteen healthy young adults were assigned to 3 days of either a simulated day or night-shift schedule, followed by a 24-h constant routine protocol with fixed environmental conditions, hourly isocaloric snacks, and constant wakefulness to investigate endogenous circadian rhythms. Blood plasma samples collected at 3-h intervals were subjected to untargeted lipidomics analysis. Results: More than 400 lipids were identified and quantified across 21 subclasses. Focusing on lipids with low between-subject variation per shift condition, alterations in the circulating plasma lipidome revealed generally increased mean triglyceride levels and decreased mean phospholipid levels after night-shift relative to day-shift. The circadian rhythms of triglycerides containing odd chain fatty acids peaked earlier during constant routine after night-shift. Regardless of shift condition, triglycerides tended to either peak or be depleted at 16:30 h, with chain-specific differences associated with the direction of change. Discussion: The simulated night-shift schedule was associated with altered temporal patterns in the lipidome. This may be premorbid to the elevated cardiovascular risk that has been found epidemiologically in night-shift workers.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Quantile-Specific Heritability of Inflammatory and Oxidative Stress Biomarkers Linked to Cardiovascular Disease

Purpose: Heritability (h 2 , the proportion of the phenotypic variance attributable to additive genetic effects) is traditionally assumed to be constant throughout the distribution of the phenotype. However, the heritabilities of circulating C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, plasminogen activator inhibitor type-1 (PAI-1), and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) concentrations depend upon whether the phenotype is high or low relative to their distributions (quantile-dependent expressivity), which may account for apparent gene–environment interactions. Whether the heritabilities of other inflammatory biomarkers linked to cardiovascular disease are quantile-dependent remain to be determined. Patients and Methods: Quantile-specific offspring-parent (β OP ) and full-sib regression slopes (β FS ) were estimated by applying quantile regression to the age- and sex-adjusted phenotypes of families surveyed as part of the Framingham Heart Study. Quantile-specific heritabilities were calculated as: h 2 =2β OP /(1+r spouse ) and h 2 ={(1+8r spouse β FS ) 0.5 – 1}/(2r spouse ). Results: Heritability (h 2 ± SE) of lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA 2 ) mass concentrations increased from 0.11 ± 0.03 at the 10 th percentile, 0.08 ± 0.03 at the 25 th , 0.12 ± 0.03 at the 50 th , 0.20 ± 0.04 at the 75 th , and 0.26 ± 0.06 at the 90 th percentile, or 0.0023 ± 0.0006 per each one-percent increase in the phenotype distribution (P linear trend = 0.0004). Similarly, h 2 increased 0.0029 ± 0.0011 (P linear trend = 0.01) for sP-selectin, 0.0032 ± 0.0009 (P linear trend = 0.0001) for soluble intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (sICAM-1), and 0.0026 ± 0.0006 for tumor necrosis factor receptor 2 (TNFR2) (P linear trend = 5.0 × 10 -6 ) per each one-percent increase in their distributions when estimated from β OP . Osteoprotegerin and soluble ST2 heritability also increased significantly with increasing percentiles of their distributions when estimated from β FS . Lp-PLA 2 activity, CD40 ligand, TNFα, interleukin-18, and myeloperoxidase heritability showed no significant quantile-dependence. Conclusion: The heritabilities of circulating Lp-PLA 2 -mass, sP-selectin, sICAM-1, TNFR2, osteoprotegerin and soluble ST2 concentrations are quantile-dependent, which may contribute to purported genetic modulations of: 1) sP-selectin’s relationships to venous thrombosis, pulmonary hypertension, type 2 diabetes and atorvastatin treatment; 2) sICAM-I’s relationships to brain abscess and atorvastatin treatment; and 3) Lp-PLA 2 ’s relationships to myocardial infarction and preeclampsia.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗