Association Between Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and Severe Male Reproductive Organ Impairment (Germinal Epithelial Loss): Study on a Mouse Model and on Human Patients

PFOS-elicited metabolic perturbation in liver and fatty acid metabolites in testis of adult mice

Introduction

Multiple factors can contribute to sub-fecundity, including genetics, lifestyle, and environmental contaminants. PFASs are characterized as "forever chemicals" due to their ubiquitous contamination and their persistence in the environment, wildlife, and humans. Numerous studies have demonstrated that PFAS exposure adversely affects multiple bodily functions, including liver metabolism and gonadal function. It is unclear, however, how the disruption of hepatic fatty acid metabolism affects testicular function.

Methods

In this study, male mice were administered 0.3 and 3 μg/g body weight of PFOS for 21 days.

Results

Our data showed that PFOS exposure caused hepatic steatosis, as evidenced by significant increases in triglyceride levels, expression of ATP-citrate lyase, and fatty acid synthase, as well as fasting insulin levels. PFOS perturbed the expression levels of hepatokines, of which fibroblast growth factor-21 (Fgf-21), leukocyte cell-derived chemotaxin-2 (Lect-2), and retinol-binding protein-4 (Rbp-4) were significantly reduced, whereas angiopoietin-like 4 (Angptl4) was noticeably increased. While Rbp-4 and Fgf-21 are known to contribute to spermatogenesis and testosterone synthesis. In PFOS-exposed groups, testicular ATP, and testosterone decreased significantly with a significant increase in the expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-coactivator 1α. Mass spectrophotometry imaging revealed the localization of PFOS in testes, along with significant increases in fatty acid metabolites. These included arachidonic acid, dihomo-α-linolenic acid, dihomo-γ-linolenic acid, oxidized ceramide, diacylglycerol, phosphatidylcholine, and phosphatidylethanolamine, which are associated with inflammation and post-testicular causes of infertility.

Discussion

This study revealed potential links between PFOS-elicited changes in hepatic metabolism and their impacts on testicular biology. This study provides insights into alternative targets elicited by PFOS that can be used to develop diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for improving testicular dysfunction.

TissueSpace: a web tool for rank-based transcriptome representation and its applications in molecular medicine

BACKGROUND

Cross-platform or cross-experiment transcriptome data is hard to compare as the original gene expression values from different platforms cannot be compared directly. The inherent gene expression ranking information is rarely utilized.

OBJECTIVE

Use of reduced vector to represent transcriptome data independent of platforms.

METHODS

Thus, we turned the expression profile into a rank vector, where a higher expression has a higher rank value, then applied Latent semantic analysis (LSA) to get compact and continuous 100-dimensional vector representations for samples.

RESULTS

Results showed that the reconstructed vector has a precision of 96.7% in recovering tissue labels from an independent dataset. A user-friendly tool TissueSpace was developed, which provides users the following functionalities: (1) convert different gene ID types to Ensembl gene IDs; (2) project any human transcriptome profile to get vector representation for downstream analysis; (3) functional enrichment for each of the 100-dimensional vector features. Case studies for its applications in human common diseases indicate its usefulness.

CONCLUSIONS

TissueSpace could be used to generate testable hypotheses for translational medicine. The TissueSpace tool is available at http://bioinformatics.fafu.edu.cn/tissuespace/ .

Seminal plasma piRNA array analysis and identification of possible biomarker piRNAs for the diagnosis of asthenozoospermia

Asthenozoospermia (AZS) is characterized by reduced sperm motility and its pathogenesis remains poorly understood. Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) have been indicated to serve important roles in spermatogenesis. However, little is known about the correlation of piRNA expression with AZS. In the present study, small RNA sequencing (small RNA-seq) was performed on sperm samples from AZS patients and fertile controls. Reverse transcription-quantitative (RT-q) PCR was used to validate the small RNA-seq results. Bioinformatics analyses were performed to predict the functions of differentially expressed piRNAs (DEpiRNAs). Logistic regression models were constructed and receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis was used to evaluate their diagnostic performance. A total of 114 upregulated and 169 downregulated piRNAs were detected in AZS patients. Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses showed that the DEpiRNAs were mainly associated with transcription, signal transduction, cell differentiation, metal ion binding and focal adhesion. These results were verified by RT-qPCR analysis of eight selected piRNAs. The PCR results were consistent with the sequencing results in patients with AZS compared with controls in the first cohort. The expression of piR-hsa-32694, piR-hsa-26591, piR-hsa-18725 and piR-hsa-18586 was significantly upregulated in patients with AZS. The diagnostic power of the four piRNAs was further analyzed using ROC analysis; piR-hsa-26591 exhibited an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.913 (95% CI: 0.795-0.994). Logistic regression modelling and subsequent ROC analysis indicated that the combination of the 4 piRNAs achieved good diagnostic efficacy (AUC: 0.935).

Effect of Low-Intensity Endurance Training and High-Intensity Interval Training on Sperm Quality in Male Rats with Fatty Liver

Background

We aimed to investigate the effect of low-intensity endurance training (LIET) and high-intensity inter- val training (HIIT) on sperm parameters, chromatin status, and oxidative stress in a rat model of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

Materials and Methods

For this experimental study, we divided 40 male Wistar rats into four groups (control, sham, HIIT and LIET) according to diet treatment and exercise training protocol. Liver triglycerides, sperm parameters, sperm lipid peroxidation (BODIPY C11 probe) and chromatin status [chromomycin A3 (CMA3)], and acridine orange [AO] staining) were assessed in these groups at the end of the study.

Results

The mean liver triglyceride values significantly improved in both the LIET and HIIT groups compared to the control and sham groups. The mean of testicular volume, sperm concentration, motility, intensity of sperm lipid peroxidation and DNA damage were similar within groups. While, the mean percentage of sperm lipid peroxidation and protamine deficiency were significantly higher in the LIET and HIIT groups compared to the control group.

Conclusion

Both LIET and HIIT in the rat NAFLD model had no adverse effects on testicular morphometric param- eters, sperm concentration, motility, and DNA integrity. However, the mean sperm lipid peroxidation and protamine deficiency were significantly higher in both exercise groups. Our study suggests that exercise or antioxidant supple- mentation could minimise the adverse effects of oxidant by-products of exercise.

Vitamins combined with traditional Chinese medicine for male infertility: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND

Male infertility is a tough problem in medicine. This article aims to provide the latest evidence for the efficacy and safety of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) combined with vitamins in the treatment of male infertility.

METHOD

All randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that used TCM combined with vitamins for male infertility treatment were included in databases of China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang, VIP Database, China Biology Medicine disc (CBM), MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane Library. The quality of the included articles was evaluated using the Cochrane Reviewer's Handbook 5.3, and meta-analysis was performed using Stata 15.

RESULTS

A total of 14 eligible studies with 1488 patients were included in this meta-analysis. The results suggested that, compared with vitamin E or vitamin E + C alone, combination of TCM with vitamins increased significantly sperm concentration, sperm motility, sperm viability, liquefaction time of semen, the activity of acrosome enzyme, and the pregnancy rate of patients with male infertility. Three kinds of TCM (Shengjing capsule, Huanshao capsule, and compound Xuanju capsule) showed significant improvement for male infertility in terms of pregnancy rate, sperm concentration, or sperm motility. In addition, the results of the publication bias test demonstrated that no significant bias occurred.

CONCLUSION

Traditional Chinese medicine combined with vitamins has significant efficacy in the treatment of male infertility with no increase in side effects. The specific implementing regulations still need more long-term, multicenter, randomized, and double-blind clinical trials.

Negative effect of feeding with high energy diets on testes and metabolic blood parameters of male Japanese quails, and positive role of milk thistle seed

In this study, it was aimed to investigate the changes in testicular tissue and cell count, testicular oxidative stress and some metabolic blood parameters of male broiler Japanese quails fed with high energy diet and milk thistle (Silybum marianum) seed. One hundred-twenty male 15-day-old Japanese quail chicks were divided into 4 equal groups with 30 each. The applications in each group were repeated 3 times with 10 animals each. Control group was fed with basal diet. Milk thistle seed group was fed with diet including 1% milk thistle seed. High energy diet group was fed with high energy diet including 10% corn syrup. High energy diet + milk thistle seed group was fed with high energy diet including 10% corn syrup along with 1% milk thistle seed. The feeding period in all groups was 35 days. When the quails reached 50 days old, a total of 48, 12 from each group (4 from each replication) were euthanized and blood samples and testes were collected. Compared with the control group, significant increases in body weight, serum cholesterol and glucose level, aspartate aminotransferase activity and testicular malondialdehyde level; however, significant decreases in serum testosterone level, testicular glutathione peroxidase activity, counts of round and elongated spermatid and sperm as well as histopathologically, significant decreases in seminiferous tubular diameter and seminiferous epithelium thickness, and marked disorganization in germinal cells were determined in quails fed with high energy diet. It was observed that almost all of the disturbances in testicular tissue, cell number, oxidant-antioxidant balance and metabolic blood parameters caused by feeding with high energy diet were significantly prevented by supplementation of milk thistle seed to the diet with high energy. On the other hand, alone milk thistle seed and high energy diet + milk thistle seed administrations decreased body weight in comparison to control and high energy diet groups. As a result, feeding with high energy diet causes disturbances in testes of male quails by affecting liver metabolic functions and testicular oxidant-antioxidant balance, but milk thistle seed addition to diet plays a protective role.

Showing NAFLD, as a key connector disease between Alzheimer's disease and diabetes via analysis of systems biology

AIM

This study was designed to perform network analysis of Alzheimers҆ disease and diabetes and to find their correlation with each other and other diseases/pathways.

BACKGROUND

Alzheimer's disease (AD) as a neurodegenerative disease and diabetes as a metabolic disease are two major health problems in the recent years. The recent studies have reported their correlation and same spreading pathways of these two diseases together, but details of this relation are not well known yet at molecular level..

METHODS

In thermal proteome profiling (TPP) technique, after treatment of the extracted proteins by heat and drug concentration, the resulting proteins were analyzed by mass spectrometry. Enrichment analysis of these proteins led to development of AD and diabetes. First, corresponding genes for each disease were extracted from DisGeNET database and then, protein-protein interaction network was constructed for each of them using the search tool for retrieval of interacting genes and proteins (STRING). After analyzing these networks, hub-bottleneck nodes of networks were evaluated. Also, common nodes between two networks were extracted and used for further analysis.

RESULTS

High correlation was found between AD and diabetes based on the existence of 40 common genes. Results of analyses revealed 14 genes in AD and 12 genes in diabetes as hub-bottleneck 7 of which were common including caspase 3 (CASP3), insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), catalase (CAT), tumor necrosis factor (TNF), leptin (LEP), vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGFA), and interleukin 6 ( IL-6).

CONCLUSION

Our results revealed a direct correlation between AD and diabetes and also a correlation between these two diseases and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), suggesting that a small change in each of these three diseases can lead to development of any other diseases in the patients. Also, the enrichments exhibited the existence of common pathways between AD, diabetes, NAFLD, and male infertility.

Association between high-fat diet feeding and male fertility in high reproductive performance mice

The increasing worldwide prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MetS), especially in younger populations, is a risk factor for fertility disorders. However, a direct correlation of MetS with male infertility still remains unclear. In this work, we evaluated whether MetS has a negative impact on fertility of hybrid male mice with high reproductive performance. To induce a MetS-like condition, (C57BL/6xBALB/c) F1 male mice were fed a high-fat diet (HFD, 30% fat) for 19 weeks, while controls received a normal-fat diet (NFD, 6% fat). HFD-fed animals exhibited increased body weight, hypercholesterolemia, hyperglycemia and glucose intolerance. In vivo fertilisation assays performed along the treatment period showed no differences in fertilisation nor in vitro embryo development rates between groups. While testicular weight and morphology were similar in both groups, HFD-fed mice presented lighter epididymides and higher amounts of gonadal fat. Moreover, sperm count was lower in HFD-fed mice, despite normal sperm viability, morphology, motility or acrosome reaction. Finally, no differences were observed in in vitro fertilisation rates between groups. In summary, although HFD feeding altered some reproductive parameters, it did not impair male fertility in high performance breeders suggesting the possibility that a fertility impairment could be the result of the cumulative combination of environmental and/or genetic factors.

The Relationship Between Health-Related Quality of Life and Anabolic Hormone Levels in Middle-Aged and Elderly Men With Prediabetes: A Cross-Sectional Study

The aim of this study was to compare health-related quality of life (HRQoL) between men with prediabetes (PD) and a control group as well as to investigate the relationship between HRQoL and anabolic hormones. The analysis was carried out in 176 middle-aged (40–59 years) and elderly (60 80 years) men with PD, and 184 control peers. PD was defined according the American Diabetes Association and HRQoL was assessed by the SF-36 questionnaire. Total testosterone (TT), calculated free testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS), and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) were measured. Analysis of the standardized physical and mental component summary scores (SF-36_p and SF-36_m) revealed that patients with PD had lower SF-36_p and SF-36_m than control group (p < .02 and p < .001). Middle-aged men with PD had lower SF-36_p and SF-36_m than control peers, whereas elderly men with PD had lower only SF-36_p. In men with PD negative correlations between glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) and SF-35_m score (r = −0.3768; p = .02) and between HbA1c and SF-36_p score (r = −0.3453; p = .01) were reported. In middle-aged prediabetic men, SF-36_p was associated with high free testosterone and low HbA1c while SF-36_m with high TT and high DHEAS. In elderly patients with PD, SF-36_p was associated with high TT, high IGF-1, and low HbA1c, while SF-36_m correlated with high free testosterone and high DHEAS. In conclusion, PD in men is associated with decreased HRQoL in comparison with healthy men, and generally better quality of life is associated with higher testosterone, higher free testosterone, higher DHEAS, and lower HbA1c.