Calciprotein particle counts associate with vascular remodelling in chronic kidney disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: Calciprotein particles (CPPs) are circulating calcium and phosphate nanoparticles associated with the development of vascular calcification (VC) in chronic kidney disease (CKD). Although recent studies have been focusing on associations of CPPs with the presence of VC in CKD, insights in the underlying processes and mechanisms by which CPPs might aggravate VC and vascular dysfunction in vivo are currently lacking. Here, we assessed the overall burden of abdominal VC in healthy kidney donors and CKD patients and subsequently performed transcriptome profiling in the vascular tissue obtained from these subjects, linking outcome to CPP counts and calcification propensity. METHODS AND RESULTS: Calcification scores were quantified in renal arteries, iliac arteries, and abdominal aorta using computed tomography (CT) scans of kidney donors and CKD patients. The vascular tissue was collected from kidney donors (renal artery) and CKD patients (iliac artery), after which bulk RNA sequencing and gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) were performed on a subset of patients. Calcification propensity (crystallization time, T50) was measured using nephelometry and CPP counts with microparticle flow cytometric analysis. Increased calcification scores (based on CT) were found in CKD patients compared to kidney donors. Transcriptome profiling revealed enrichment for processes related to endothelial activation, inflammation, extracellular matrix (ECM) remodelling, and ossification in CKD vascular biopsies compared to kidney donors. Calcification propensity was increased in CKD, as well as CPP counts, with the latter being significantly associated with markers of vascular remodelling. CONCLUSION: Our findings reveal that CKD is characterized by systemic VC with increased calcification propensity and CPP counts. Transcriptome profiling showed altered vascular gene expression with enrichment for endothelial activation, inflammation, ECM remodelling, and ossification. Moreover, we demonstrate, for the first time, that vascular remodelling processes are associated with increased circulating CPP counts. Interventions targeting CPPs are promising avenues for alleviating vascular remodelling and VC in CKD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".