Vincristine-induced brain toxicity is reduced with prevention of peripheral axon degeneration in Sarm1 knockout mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vincristine is an essential chemotherapy agent administered for various pediatric cancers including acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). While multi-agent chemotherapy for pediatric ALL is highly curative, with survival approaching 95%, it carries the risk of irreversible neurocognitive late effects. Vincristine is known to cause peripheral neuropathy, but its relationship to brain toxicity remains understudied. We investigated vincristine-mediated brain toxicity in young mice lacking Sarm1, a gene whose deletion protects against vincristine-induced peripheral neuropathy. Littermate wildtype and knockout mice were randomly assigned to saline or vincristine groups. In vivo MRI was performed from childhood to early adulthood to measure brain structure volumes, followed by ex vivo diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to assess microstructural changes. In a separate cohort, electron microscopy (EM) quantified axon morphology in the sciatic nerve and corpus callosum. Vincristine induced significant volume reduction across the brain, while Sarm1 knockout reduced loss in both grey and white matter. Several regions, including the amygdala and dentate gyrus, showed near-complete recovery in knockouts. DTI revealed limited changes with no genotype differences. EM demonstrated vincristine-induced axon morphology alterations in wildtype mice in both the sciatic nerve and corpus callosum. Sarm1 knockout rescued sciatic nerve morphology but not corpus callosum axons. These findings suggest that SARM1-mediated peripheral axon damage may contribute to vincristine-induced brain volume deficits, whereas brain axons may be affected through distinct, SARM1-independent mechanisms. These results suggest a link between vincristine-induced peripheral axon damage and alterations in brain development, with implications for neurocognitive deficits experienced by ALL survivors. Our results suggest that mitigating vincristine-induced peripheral neuropathy may also help reduce neurocognitive deficits in pediatric patients undergoing vincristine treatment.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
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".