Edinburgh Napier University

About: Edinburgh Napier University is a education organization based out in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2665 authors who have published 6859 publications receiving 175272 citations.

Senescent phenotypes and telomere lengths of peripheral blood T-cells mobilized by acute exercise in humans.

Abstract: Acute bouts of aerobic exercise are known to mobilize antigen-experienced CD8+ T-cells expressing the cell surface marker of senescence, KLRG1, into the blood. It is not known; however if this is due to a selective mobilization of terminally differentiated T-cells (i.e., KLRG1 +/CD28-/CD57+) or a population of effector memory T-cells (i.e., KLRG1+/CD28+/CD57-) that have not reached terminal differentiation. The aim of this study was to further characterize KLRG1 + T-cells mobilized by acute exercise by assessing the co-expression of KLRG1 with CD28 or CD57 and to determine telomere lengths in the CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell subsets. Nine moderately trained male subjects completed an exhaustive treadmill running protocol at 80%. Blood lymphocytes isolated before, immediately after and 1h after exercise were labelled with antibodies against KLRG1, CD28 or CD57, CD4 or CD8 and CD3 for 4-color flow cytometry analysis. Telomere lengths in CD3+, CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells were determined using Q-PCR. The relative proportion of KLRG1 + cells among the CD8+ T-cells increased by 40% immediately after exercise, returning to baseline 1h later. This was due to a mobilization of KLRG1+/CD28- (61% increase), KLRG1+/CD57+ (56% increase) and to a lesser extent, KLRG1+/CD57- cells (24% increase). Telomeres in CD8+ T-cells displayed an increased relative length immediately after exercise, whereas no change occurred for CD4+ or the overall CD3+ T-cells. In conclusion, the increased frequency of KLRG1 +/CD8+ T-cells in blood after acute exercise is predominantly due to a selective mobilization of terminally differentiated T-cells. The increased relative telomere length in CD8+ T-cells after exercise might indicate that KLRG1+ cells mobilized by exercise are under stress or aberrant signaling-induced senescence (STASIS). We postulate that a frequent mobilization of these cells by acute exercise might eventually allow naive T-cells to occupy the "vacant" immune space and increase the naive T-cell repertoire.

DACAR Platform for eHealth Services Cloud

Abstract: The use of digital technologies in providing health care services is collectively known as eHealth. Considerable progress has been made in the development of eHealth services, but concerns over service integration, large scale deployment, and security, integrity and confidentiality of sensitive medical data still need to be addressed. This paper presents a solution proposed by the Data Capture and Auto Identification Reference (DACAR) project to overcoming these challenges. The key contributions of this paper include a Single Point of Contact (SPoC), a novel rule based information sharing policy syntax, and Data Buckets hosted by a scalable and cost-effective Cloud infrastructure. These key components and other system services constitute DACAR's eHealth platform, which allows the secure capture, storage and consumption of sensitive health care data. Currently, a prototype of the DACAR platform has been implemented. To assess the viability and performance of the platform, a demonstration application, namely the Early Warning Score (EWS), has been developed and deployed within a private Cloud infrastructure at Edinburgh Napier University. Simulated experimental results show that the end-to-end communication latency of 97.8% of application messages were below 100ms. Hence, the DACAR platform is efficient enough to support the development and integration of time critical eHealth services. A more comprehensive evaluation of the DACAR platform in a real life clinical environment is under development at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital in London.