Nutraceuticals and their role in tumor angiogenesis.

Angiogenesis plays a pivotal role in cancer initiation, maintenance, and progression. Diet may inhibit, retard or reverse these processes affecting angiogenesis (angioprevention). Nutraceuticals, such as omega-3 fatty acids, amino acids, proteins, vitamins, minerals, fibers, and phenolic compounds, improve health benefits as they are a source of bioactive compounds that, among other effects, can regulate angiogenesis. The literature concerning the pro-angiogenic and/or anti-angiogenic nutraceuticals and the possible activated pathways in cancer and other non-neoplastic diseases by in vivo and in vitro experiments are reviewed.

Genetic control of variability in subcortical and intracranial volumes.

Sensitivity to external demands is essential for adaptation to dynamic environments, but comes at the cost of increased risk of adverse outcomes when facing poor environmental conditions. Here, we apply a novel methodology to perform genome-wide association analysis of mean and variance in ten key brain features (accumbens, amygdala, caudate, hippocampus, pallidum, putamen, thalamus, intracranial volume, cortical surface area, and cortical thickness), integrating genetic and neuroanatomical data from a large lifespan sample (n = 25,575 individuals; 8-89 years, mean age 51.9 years). We identify genetic loci associated with phenotypic variability in thalamus volume and cortical thickness. The variance-controlling loci involved genes with a documented role in brain and mental health and were not associated with the mean anatomical volumes. This proof-of-principle of the hypothesis of a genetic regulation of brain volume variability contributes to establishing the genetic basis of phenotypic variance (i.e., heritability), allows identifying different degrees of brain robustness across individuals, and opens new research avenues in the search for mechanisms controlling brain and mental health.

Thalamic connectivity measured with fMRI is associated with a polygenic index predicting thalamo-prefrontal gene co-expression.

The functional connectivity between thalamic medio-dorsal nucleus (MD) and cortical regions, especially the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), is implicated in attentional processing and is anomalous in schizophrenia, a brain disease associated with polygenic risk and attentional deficits. However, the molecular and genetic underpinnings of thalamic connectivity anomalies are unclear. Given that gene co-expression across brain areas promotes synchronous interregional activity, our aim was to investigate whether coordinated expression of genes relevant to schizophrenia in MD and DLPFC may reflect thalamic connectivity anomalies in an attention-related network including the DLPFC. With this aim, we identified in datasets of post-mortem prefrontal mRNA expression from healthy controls a gene module with robust overrepresentation of genes with coordinated MD-DLPFC expression and enriched for schizophrenia genes according to the largest genome-wide association study to date. To link this gene cluster with imaging phenotypes, we computed a Polygenic Co-Expression Index (PCI) combining single-nucleotide polymorphisms predicting module co-expression. Finally, we investigated the association between PCI and thalamic functional connectivity during attention through fMRI Independent Component Analysis in 265 healthy participants. We found that PCI was positively associated with connectivity strength of a thalamic region overlapping with the MD within an attention brain circuit. These findings identify a novel association between schizophrenia-related genes and thalamic functional connectivity. Furthermore, they highlight the association between gene expression co-regulation and brain connectivity, such that genes with coordinated MD-DLPFC expression are associated with coordinated activity between the same brain regions. We suggest that gene co-expression is a plausible mechanism underlying biological phenotypes of schizophrenia.