Introduction: Aloe vera (A. vera) has been used as a folk remedy to treat different gastrointestinal and metabolic symptoms as well as for traditional therapeutic and topical cosmetic uses.It has been proposed that its benefits are based on aloe´s unique composition of phytochemicals, in particular the complex polysaccharides that are present in the gel. Commercial A. vera juice is purified to remove latex constituents (such as anthraquinones) via activated charcoal filtration (decolorization). Limited information is available regarding A. vera’s biological effects after decolorization on the gastrointestinal tract. Objective: To evaluate the effect of different polysaccharide-enriched decolorized preparations of A. vera (whole leaf -WL- or inner leaf -InL-) on two human cells lines: stomach gastric adenocarcinoma (AGS) and Intestinal Myofibroblast (InMyoFib) cells. We hypothesize that these enriched preparations will have beneficial effects in these gut cell models. M&M: Proliferation: Cell Proliferation Kit I (MTS, Cat. No: 11465007001-Roche-SIGMA-ALDRICH).Scratch studies: Quantification was carried out using ImageJ software (NIH, Bethesda, MD).Apoptosis: H2O2 and Cytokine mix-induced apoptosis was analyzed using cell death detection ELISA plus (Sigma Cat. No 11 774 425 001; Roche Cat. No 11 544 675 001).Statistics: ANOVA, repeated measured design. 5 independent experiments. Results: 6 different preparations were tested at 3 concentrations: 10, 50 and 100 ug/ml in all the experiments. Proliferation: None of the preparations induced cell proliferation in AGS and Inmyofib cells.; 2 InL and 1 WL preparation inhibited AGS and Inmyofib cell proliferation in comparation to the negative control. Wound healing: A significant improvement was induced by all fractions tested in both cell types. Preparations improved the percentage of wound healing in comparation with the negative control, one WL improved this parameter to levels similar to the positive control. Apoptosis: Four out of the six extracts protected cells from H2O2-induced apoptosis in both cell lines. In the case of the cytokine stimulation, AGS cells evoked a 55% increase over the negative control. None of the herbal extracts could revert/prevent apoptosis in this cell line. Conversely, cytokines evoked an 80% increase in apoptosis in Inmyofyb cells and Aloe preparations were largely effective in inhibiting this process. Conclusion: It has been proposed that A. vera gel has the ability to treat or protect gastric ulcers and to alleviate intestinal discomfort in both in animals and humans. These activities have been attributed to several possible mechanisms, including its anti-inflammatory properties, healing effects, mucus-stimulatory effects and regulation of gastric secretions. Here we show that decolorized A. vera polysaccharide-enriched preparations can modulate gastrointestinal cell lines. Conflict of Interest Disclosure: This work was funded by Herbalife Nutrition International of America, Inc. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.
This article argues that Wilfrid Sellars’ work has implications for the notion of medium (and media) and how we discuss it in cultural and media theory. The research introduces Sellarsian materialism, which is both non-dualist and non-reductionist with respect to conception, in the context of Media Theory and traces within it an otherwise implicit articulation of the notion of medium that, is argued, becomes necessary when accounting for the working of rules of validity in a manner that does not naturalise the normative. The article, which begins by putting Sellars in dialogue with authors influenced by Kittler’s work, mobilizes Sellars’ writings on language acquisition and epistemology to show how a notion of medium emerges in Sellarsian philosophy of language, as a consequence of a non-dualist account of validity in linguistic behaviour. This notion explains the relation between language and conception: language can be described as the medium of conception, as opposed to being its means of expression or identified with conception.
We conducted an electronic health record (EHR)-based phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) to discover pleiotropic effects of variants in three lipoprotein metabolism genes PCSK9 , APOB , and LDLR . Using high-density genotype data, we tested the associations of variants in the three genes with 1232 EHR-derived binary phecodes in 51,700 European-ancestry (EA) individuals and 585 phecodes in 10,276 African-ancestry (AA) individuals; 457 PCSK9 , 730 APOB , and 720 LDLR variants were filtered by imputation quality ( r 2 > 0.4), minor allele frequency (>1%), linkage disequilibrium ( r 2 < 0.3), and association with LDL-C levels, yielding a set of two PCSK9 , three APOB , and five LDLR variants in EA but no variants in AA. Cases and controls were defined for each phecode using the PheWAS package in R. Logistic regression assuming an additive genetic model was used with adjustment for age, sex, and the first two principal components. Significant associations were tested in additional cohorts from Vanderbilt University ( n = 29,713), the Marshfield Clinic Personalized Medicine Research Project ( n = 9562), and UK Biobank ( n = 408,455). We identified one PCSK9 , two APOB , and two LDLR variants significantly associated with an examined phecode. Only one of the variants was associated with a non-lipid disease phecode, (“myopia”) but this association was not significant in the replication cohorts. In this large-scale PheWAS we did not find LDL-C-related variants in PCSK9 , APOB , and LDLR to be associated with non-lipid-related phenotypes including diabetes, neurocognitive disorders, or cataracts.
