News Finding: "It also shows that these changes may be reversible, which paves the way for potential treatments."
Paper Finding: This effect is also independent of blood pressure, because normotensive DM rats treated with H+H showed little improvement, and hypertensive DM rats treated with simvastatin and cilostazol showed significant improvements in pathology.
News Context: "This important research helps us understand why small vessel disease happens, providing a direct link between small blood vessels and changes in the brain that are linked to dementia," Dr. Anna Williams, group leader at the University of Edinburgh's Medical Research Council Center for Regenerative Medicine, said in a press release. "It also shows that these changes may be reversible, which paves the way for potential treatments." For the first time, researchers found how changes in the small blood vessels associated with SVD damage brain cells.
Paper Context: These data demonstrate that improving endothelial dysfunction reverses the oligodendroglial changes in DM rats in vivo, further demonstrating that these are secondary to endothelial dysfunction. This effect is also independent of blood pressure, because normotensive DM rats treated with H+H showed little improvement, and hypertensive DM rats treated with simvastatin and cilostazol showed significant improvements in pathology. We then filtered this resulting list of 32 genes further (Fig.