Lithium chloride promotes recovery of radiation-induced oral mucositis and dysgeusia
2021-03-11
(Press-News.org) Alexandria, Va., USA -- Oral mucositis and taste dysfunction (dysgeusia) occurs in nearly all patients receiving head and neck radiotherapy and tremendously affects the quality of life and treatment outcome. The study "LiCl Promotes Recovery of Radiation-Induced Oral Mucositis and Dysgeusia" published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), investigated the hypothesis that lithium chloride (LiCl) can promote the restoration of oral mucosa integrity and taste function after radiation.
LiCl is a potent activator of a key cell signaling pathway called Wnt/β-catenin that is critical for the development, regeneration and function of many tissue types. Researchers at the West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and the Clinical Research Center for Oral Diseases of Sichuan Province, Chengdu, China, compared the treatment efficacy of LiCl on oral mucositis to the treatment efficacy using keratinocyte growth factor, an agent approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for oral mucositis.
The results showed that LiCl alleviated the weight loss and tongue ulceration of the mice with radiation-induced oral mucositis, as well promoted proliferation of basal epithelial cells and inhibited epithelial-mesenchymal transition in tongue mucosa. The mice treated with LiCl showed an elevated taste bud renewal and taste-distortion recovery toward sweetness as compared to the mice treated using keratinocyte growth factor.
"The data from this study demonstrate that LiCl can mitigate radiation-induced oral mucositis by promoting cell proliferation in the basal layer and inhibiting epithelial-mesenchymal transition of the oral mucosa," said JDR Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Jakubovics, Newcastle University, England. "Lithium has been used in clinical practice for decades and is currently recommended as a first-line therapy for bipolar disorder. It is exciting to see that LiCl may also represent a promising new therapy to improve the quality of life of patients receiving radiotherapy."
INFORMATION:
About the Journal of Dental Research
The IADR/AADR Journal of Dental Research (JDR) is a multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the dissemination of new knowledge in all sciences relevant to dentistry and the oral cavity and associated structures in health and disease. The JDR ranks #3 in Impact Factor of 91 journals, #2 without self-citations, as well as #2 of 91 in Article Influence with a score of 1.627. The JDR's 5-year Impact Factor remained above 5 for the fifth year at 5.844 -- ranking #2 of 91 journals. With over 20,000 citations, the JDR also boasts the most citations in the "Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine" category, over 3,500 citations above the 2nd ranked journal in the field.
International Association for Dental Research
The International Association for Dental Research (IADR) is a nonprofit organization with over 10,000
individual members worldwide, with a Mission to drive dental, oral and craniofacial research to advance health and well-being worldwide. To learn more, visit http://www.iadr.org. The American Association for Dental Research (AADR) is the largest Division of IADR with 3,100 members in the United States. To learn more, visit http://www.iadr.org/aadr.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-11
BUFFALO, N.Y. - A University at Buffalo researcher's recent work on dyslexia has unexpectedly produced a startling discovery which clearly demonstrates how the cooperative areas of the brain responsible for reading skill are also at work during apparently unrelated activities, such as multiplication.
Though the division between literacy and math is commonly reflected in the division between the arts and sciences, the findings suggest that reading, writing and arithmetic, the foundational skills informally identified as the three Rs, might actually overlap in ways not previously imagined, let alone experimentally validated.
"These findings floored me," said Christopher McNorgan, PhD, the paper's author and an assistant professor in UB's Department of Psychology. "They elevate the ...
2021-03-11
Researchers at Princeton have determined how five cellular proteins contribute to an essential step in the life cycle of hepatitis B virus (HBV). The article describing these findings appeared March 11, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications.
Viruses have been with us, shaping our lives, societies and economies for millennia. While some viruses rapidly explode onto the world stage, others smolder in our communities for decades, shattering lives but making few headlines. Hepatitis B virus hasn't caused any nationwide lockdowns or stock market crashes because it is slow to spread from person to person and is rarely immediately fatal. It is nonetheless incredibly damaging because it can establish lifelong chronic infection ...
2021-03-11
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- New Army-funded research could help lay the groundwork for future quantum communication networks and large-scale quantum computers.
Researchers sent entangled qubit states through a communication cable linking one quantum network node to a second node.
Scientists at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, funded and managed by the U.S. Army Combat Capability Development, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory's Center for Distributed Quantum Information, also amplified an entangled state via the same cable first by using the cable to entangle two qubits in each of two nodes, then entangling these qubits further with other qubits in the nodes. The peer-reviewed journal ...
2021-03-11
Atherosclerosis is the underlying condition that causes heart attacks and strokes. Researchers at Radboudumc in the Netherlands have discovered a protein that appears to play an important role in atherosclerosis. The protein is called Prosaposin, and its role in atherosclerosis was sofar unknown. "We identified Prosaposin as a new potential target for the Science Translational Medicine.
Atherosclerosis is caused by cholesterol that builds up in the vessel wall and triggers chronic inflammation. It has been well established that cholesterol lowering drugs help to treat atherosclerosis. Recent research has shown that inhibiting inflammation can also help to prevent heart attacks and ...
2021-03-11
What The Study Did: In this phase 1 study, a single immunization with Ad26.COV2.S (Janssen/Johnson & Johnson) vaccine induced rapid binding and neutralization antibody responses as well as cellular immune responses. Two phase 3 clinical trials are currently underway to determine the efficacy of the Ad26.COV2.S vaccine.
Authors: Dan H. Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jama.2021.3645)
Editor's Note: Please see the article ...
2021-03-11
Does a warmer climate mean more dry land? For years, researchers projected that drylands -- including deserts, savannas and shrublands -- will expand as the planet warms, but new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) challenges those prevailing views.
Previous studies used atmospheric information, including rainfall and temperature, to make projections about future land conditions. The real picture is more complicated than that, said Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author ...
2021-03-11
AMES, Iowa - Parents would never give their children the keys to the car without supervised training and driver's education. An Iowa State University researcher says parents and educators need to take a similar approach before handing children a keyboard to access the digital world.
ISU psychology professor Douglas Gentile worked with the DQ (Digital Intelligence) Institute, an international think tank, to design a framework for digital literacy education. In a commentary, published by the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Gentile and his colleagues outlined how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated ...
2021-03-11
What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem.
In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to "the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The question that begets 42, at least in the ...
2021-03-11
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Charitable donations account for about 2% of gross domestic product in the U.S., but it's not well-understood whether an event such as a deadly storm inspires increases in charitable giving or simply reallocates a fixed supply of donation dollars that would have otherwise gone to another cause.
A new paper from a team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign experts finds that, in the aftermath of catastrophic tornadoes, charitable giving to alleviate an unanticipated event doesn't necessarily crowd out monetary donations to ...
2021-03-11
Millions of people die prematurely every year from diseases and cancer caused by air pollution. The first line of defence against this carnage is ambient air quality standards. Yet, according to researchers from McGill University, over half of the world's population lives without the protection of adequate air quality standards.
Air pollution varies greatly in different parts of the world. But what about the primary weapons against it? To find answers, researchers from McGill University set out to investigate global air quality standards in a study published ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Lithium chloride promotes recovery of radiation-induced oral mucositis and dysgeusia
