Pharmacological evidence of hypotensive activity of Somina (herbal drug) in normotensive rats

Purpose: To evaluate the effects of somina (herbal drug) on the arterial blood pressure.Methods: Hypotensive activity was studied in pentothal sodium-anesthetized normotensive albino rats at various doses of somina (5, 10, 15, 20 and 35 mg/kg). The drugs were administered intravenously and changes in arterial blood pressure (systolic, diastolic and mean arterial blood pressure) were registered directly from the carotid artery. Acetylcholine (Ach, 10-4 M) was used as positive control for comparison while the receptor activity of Ach and somina was assessed using atropine (muscarinic receptor antagonist) on rat heart.Results: Somina caused dose-dependent significant (p < 0.05) reduction in mean arterial pressure blood pressure (MABP). The 35 mg/kg dose caused 46.7 % fall in MABP, which was significant (p < 0.05) when compared with control. The results were comparable with those of acetylcholine (10-4 M) which showed 45.6 % fall in MABP. For receptor activity, atropine (10-4 M) was administered i.v., and then the Ach and somina (45 mg/kg) was administered one at a time. Non-significant fall in MABP was observed (1.2 and 20 %, p > 0.05) in rats that were pretreated with atropine.Conclusion: Somina possesses potent hypotensive effect at different doses in normal rats by stimulating non-selective muscarinic receptors.Keywords: Somina, Acetylcholine, Atropine, Herbal drug, Blood pressure, Hypotensive activity, Muscarinic receptor, Vascular relaxant activit

Learning Politics through Entertainment: Exploring the Effects of Biographical Films on Political Learning and Attitude Toward Female Politicians

This study examined the effects of semi-fictional biographical political films on political learning and attitude change in audiences of fictionalized accounts of female politicians. Data from 310 participants indicated that content-related political learning significantly increased and attitude toward female politicians positively changed after exposure. A conceptual model of the political entertainment effects indicated that initial political learning transported the audience into the biographical narrative, which led to greater enjoyment, as well as learning gain and a positive attitude toward female politicians. Our findings provide important clarification to existing research and offer both theoretical, methodological, and practical implications

Existing and Expected Service Quality of Grameenphone Users in Bangladesh

. The Grameenphone (GP) is a market leader in the telecommunication industry in Bangladesh. This study investigates the existing and expected service quality of Grameenphone users in Bangladesh. The Study reveals that there are significant gap between existing and expected perceived service network, 3G, customer care, physical facilities, billing cost, information service, mobile banking and GP offers. The study concludes that customer satisfaction is a dynamic phenomenon. Maintaining desired level of customer satisfaction requires corporate proactive responsiveness in accessing, building & retaining satisfied customers for sustainable competitive advantages in the marketplace

Information and Communication Technologies for Veterinary Sciences and Animal Husbandry in Jammu and Kashmir

Use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is growing in all spheres of activity. Veterinary Sciences andAnimal Husbandry should therefore be no exception. Efforts are needed to incorporate ICT in all endeavours related to livestock development in Jammu and Kashmir. All organizations and departments concerned with Veterinary Sciences andAnimal Husbandry need to realize the potential of ICT for the speedy and timely dissemination of information modules to the livestock rearers.The awareness among livestock rearers about the information and availability of ICT services is the first step to be taken to increase livestock rearers' participation in ICT initiatives.Access to information and communication is essential to the stakeholders at alllevels in the process of development. Various information and communication technology tools in knowledge and information dissemination needed for livestock rearers and possible IT application tools in realizing their needs in Jammu and Kashmir are discussed

Serum magnesium levels and acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a retrospective study

A decrease in serum Mg+ 2 is associated with airway hyper-reactivity and impaired pulmonary function. The purpose of this study was to determine if decreased serum Mg+ 2 levels in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are associated with acute exacerbations. In a retrospective study, the charted serum Mg+ 2 levels in 100 COPD patients were examined. These included 50 patients who presented with an acute exacerbation of COPD and 50 stable patients. Chart review was sequential within both groups. Serum Mg 2+ levels in the stable COPD patients averaged 0.91±0.10 mmol/L (mean±SD) with a 95% CI of 0.88–0.94 mmol/L. Patients undergoing an exacerbation had significantly lower serum Mg+ 2 levels (0.77±0.10 mmol/L; CI, 0.74–0.79; p< 0.0001). Logistic regression of the dichotomous outcomes as a function of serum Mg+ 2 concentration demonstrated a highly significant

Vitamin D Deficiency and Its Associated Factors among Female Migrants in the United Arab Emirates

Vitamin D is important for bone health, and vitamin D deficiency could be linked to noncommunicable diseases, including cardiovascular disease. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency and its associated risk factors among female migrants from Philippines, Arab, and South Asian countries residing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We used a cross-sectional study to recruit a random sample (N = 550) of female migrants aged 18 years and over in the city of Al Ain, UAE. Vitamin D deficiency was defined as serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations ≤20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L). We used multivariable logistic regression analysis to identify risk factors associated with vitamin D deficiency. The mean age of participants was 35 years (SD ± 10). The overall prevalence rate of vitamin D deficiency was 67% (95% CI 60–73%), with the highest rate seen in Arabs (87%), followed by South Asians (83%) and the lowest in Filipinas (15%). Multivariate analyses showed that low physical activity (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 4.59; 95% CI 1.98, 10.63), having more than 5 years duration of residence in the UAE (aOR = 4.65; 95% CI: 1.31, 16.53) and being obese (aOR = 3.56; 95% CI 1.04, 12.20) were independently associated with vitamin D deficiency, after controlling for age and nationality. In summary, vitamin D deficiency was highly prevalent among female migrants, especially Arabs and South Asians. It is crucial that health professionals in the UAE become aware of this situation among this vulnerable subpopulation and provide intervention strategies aiming to rectify vitamin D deficiency by focusing more on sun exposure, physical activity, and supplementation

Environmental Noise Reduction based on Deep Denoising Autoencoder

Speech enhancement plays an important role in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) even though this task remains challenging in real-world scenarios of human-level performance. To cope with this challenge, an explicit denoising framework called Deep Denoising Autoencoder (DDAE) is introduced in this paper. The parameters of DDAE encoder and decoder are optimized based on the backpropagation criterion, where all denoising autoencoders are stacked up instead of recurrent connections. For better speech estimation in real and noisy environments, we include matched and mismatched noisy and clean pairs of speech data to train the DDAE. The DDAE has the ability to achieve optimal results even for a limited amount of training data. Our experimental results show that the proposed DDAE outperformed the baseline algorithms. The DDAE shows superior performances based on three-evaluation metrics in noisy and clean pairs of speech data compared to three baseline algorithms

HPLC method with monolithic column for simultaneous determination of irbesartan and hydrochlorothiazide in tablets

A simple, sensitive and accurate HPLC method with high throughput has been developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of irbesartan (IRB) and hydrochlorothiazide (HCT) in combined pharmaceutical dosage forms. The proposed method employed, for the first time, a monolithic column in the analysis. Optimal chromatographic separation of the analytes was achieved on Chromolith® Performance RP-18e column using a mobile phase consisting of phosphate buffer (pH 4):acetonitrile (50:50, V/V) pumped isocratically at a flow rate of 1.0 mL min–1. The eluted analytes were monitored with a UV detector set at 270 nm. Under the optimum chromatographic conditions, linear relationship with a good correlation coefficient (R ≥ 0.9997) was found between the peak area and the corresponding concentrations of both IRB and HCT in the ranges of 10–200 and 1–20 ng mL–1. The limits of detection were 2.34 and 0.03 ng mL-1 for IRB and HCT, respectively. The intra- and inter-assay precisions were satisfactory as the RSD values did not exceed 3 %. The accuracy of the proposed method was > 97 %. The proposed method had high throughput as the analysis involved a simple procedure and a very short run-time of 3 min. The results demonstrated that the method is applicable in the quality control of combined pharmaceutical tablets containing IRB and HCT