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H-W Deng

Publications and source records attributed to H-W Deng.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Gene expression studies of osteoporosis: implications for microarray research.

Osteoporosis is one of the most common bone-related disorders in the elderly. It is a complex disease, and largely determined genetically. Traditional gene expression studies have shown that osteoporosis has complex regulating mechanisms which are controlled by multiple inherent factors, such as hormones, cytokines, various receptors, etc. The complex nature of osteoporosis, and the large number of genes involved in its onset and development, suggest the use of the state of the art microarray technique as a powerful tool to unravel mechanisms underlying etiology of osteoporosis.

Aged↗

Involvement of vanilloid receptors in heat stress-induced delayed protection against myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury.

Sprague-Dawley rats were pretreated with whole body hyperthermia (rectal 42 degrees C) for 15 min, 24 h before the experiments, and then the left main coronary artery of rat hearts was subjected to a 60 min occlusion followed by 3 h reperfusion. Myocardium injury degree was evaluated by measurement of infarct size and serum creatine kinase (CK) activity. Plasma concentrations of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), and the expression of alpha- and beta-CGRP mRNA in dorsal root ganglia were determined by radioimmunoassay and semi-quantitative reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction, respectively. Hyperthermia treatment significantly reduced infarct size and CK release concomitantly with a dramatic increase in plasma concentrations of CGRP and the expression of alpha-CGRP mRNA, but not beta-CGRP mRNA, which was completely abolished by pretreatment with capsazepine (38 mg/kg, s.c.), a competitive vanilloid receptor 1 antagonist. These results suggests that vanilloid receptor 1 on capsaicin-sensitive sensory nerves plays an important role in the modulation of the delayed cardioprotection induced by heat stress in rats.

Animals↗

Differentiation of Caucasians and Chinese at bone mass candidate genes: implication for ethnic difference of bone mass.

Bone mineral density (BMD) is an important risk factor for osteoporosis and has strong genetic determination. While average BMD differs among major ethnic groups, several important candidate genes have been shown to underlie BMD variation within populations of the same ethnicity. To investigate whether important candidate genes may contribute to ethnic differences in BMD, we studied the degree of genetic differentiation among several important candidate genes between two major ethnic groups: Caucasians and Chinese. The genetic variability of these two populations (1131 randomly selected individuals) was studied at six restriction sites exhibiting polymorphisms of five important candidate genes for BMD: the BsaHI polymorphism of the calcium-sensing receptor (CASR) gene, the SacI polymorphism of the alpha2HS-glycoprotein (AHSG) gene, the PvuII and XbaI polymorphisms of the estrogen receptor alpha (ESR1) gene, the ApaI polymorphism of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) gene, and the BstBI polymorphism of the parathyroid hormone (PTH) gene. The two ethnic groups showed significant allelic and genotypic differentiation of all the polymorphisms studied. The mean FST was 0.103, which significantly differed from zero (P < 0.01). The Chinese population had lower mean heterozygosity (0.331) than the Caucasian one (0.444); the CASR-BsaHI and PTH-BstBI polymorphisms contributed most significantly to this difference. Analysis of the intra- and inter-population variability suggests that various types of natural selection may affect the observed patterns of variation at some loci. If some of the candidate genes we studied indeed underlie variation in BMD, their population differentiation revealed here between ethnic groups may contribute to understanding ethnic difference in BMD.

Asian People↗