ο³ο΅οοο‘ο²οΉ In affluent societies the prevalences of so-called βWesternβ diseases such as atherosclerosis, allergies and autoimmune disorders appear to have increased, while many diseases caused by communicable infections are now relatively less common. To test whether there may be a causal relationship we examined the effects of Schistosoma mansoni infections in mice that develop cardiovascular pathology as a result of a genetic deficiency in apolipoprotein E (apoEβ/β). The development of atherosclerotic lesions in the aortic arch and brachiocephalic artery of the apoEβ/β mice was reduced by approximately 50% in mice with the parasitic infection, when comparison was made with uninfected control mice fed the same diet. Observations on S. mansoni-infected conventional laboratory mice indicate that patent schistosome infections could be counteracting the effects of an atherogenic diet by modulating host lipid metabolism and inducing a reduction in blood total cholesterol concentrations.
The above results collectively indicate that the metabolism of lipids, particularly in the mice that had been fed an atherogenic diet, was affected by patent S. mansoni infections. Low levels of blood lipids have also been found in human patients with compensated hepatosplenic schistosomiasis (Dimenstein et al. 1992; Assaad-Khalil et al. 1992) and there are several possibilities that might account for reduced blood total cholesterol in schistosomeinfected hosts. Thus, schistosomes do not synthesize cholesterol (Meyer, Meyer & Bueding, 1970) and parasite incorporation of LDL (Bennett & Caulfield, 1991) via inducible LDL receptors (Rumjanek, McLaren & Smithers, 1983) might account for diminution in blood cholesterol levels in the infected animals. Alternatively, schistosome infection may induce synthesis of natural antibodies that metabolize cholesterol by opsonization (Alving & Wassef, 1999) or reduce circulating lipid levels by inhibiting lecithin: cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT) activity (Lima et al. 1998). The period during which the reduction in blood cholesterol occurred in the infected mice coincides with the time at which S. mansoni infections are known to become patent in this host (Doenhoff et al. 1979). Macrophages are a prevalent cell in the granulomas formed around schistosome eggs that become embolized in host tissues, particularly the liver and intestine (Smithers & Doenhoff, 1982) and they are also a principal cell type involved in a
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This is a it of a long shot, but I'm a researcher trying to develop an automated open-source portable microscope for field diagnosis of schistosomiasis infection. I'm currently developing a deep learning classifier for the images, but I don't have quite enough of them for it to run with high accuracy.
Does anyone here have access to images of schistosome / helminth eggs, either from your own work, another researcher you know might be interested, or a database you know of?
