Anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties of Ocimum sanctum: a comparative study using animal models

Background: Ocimum sanctum commonly known as Tulsi has been used for thousands of years in the Ayurveda for its diverse healing properties. This study was conducted to evaluate the anti-inflammatory and analgesic activity of O. sanctum aqueous leaf extract in thermal and chemical induced pain and inflammatory animal models.Methods: Wistar albino rats (150-200 g) and swiss albino mice (25-30 g) were randomly divided into 4 groups of 6 animals each. The control group, test group, and standard drugs group received normal saline, O. sanctum extract (100 mg/kg), aspirin, and celecoxib respectively, by oral feeding. The anti-inflammatory effect was assessed by carrageenan induced rat paw edema and cotton pellet induced granuloma in rats. Analgesic effect was assessed by hot plate method and acetic acid induced writhing method in mice.Results: In carrageenan induced rat paw edema, maximum inhibition by O. sanctum, aspirin, and celecoxib were 13.43%, 30%, and 32%, respectively, and time to reach maximum inhibition for O. sanctum was 2 hrs. In cotton pellet induced granuloma, percentage inhibition by O. sanctum, aspirin, and celecoxib were 23.85%, 45.84%, and 42.77%, respectively. In hot plate method, maximum inhibition by O. sanctum, aspirin and celecoxib were 143.92%, 288.18%, and 260.59%, respectively. In acetic acid induced writhing method, percentage protection by O. sanctum, aspirin, and celecoxib were 50.2%, 71.4%, and 66.5%, respectively.Conclusion: The current study demonstrates statistically significant anti-inflammatory and analgesic activity of O. sanctum

Assessment of knowledge regarding prevention and treatment of Ebola virus among undergraduate medical students in Chennai, India: a questionnaire based study

Background: Ebola virus disease is a dreadful condition associated with high mortality rate threatening the entire world. Our study was aimed to assess the knowledge and to create awareness about Ebola among undergraduate medical students.Methods: A self-administered, pretested questionnaire with 30 questions focusing on the general information of virus, mode of transmission, clinical features and complications of the infection, diagnosis, treatment, preventive measures, and epidemiological features was given to the study participants. Scoring system was followed, and statistical analysis was done using Chi-square test and comparison between different sections by one-way analysis of variance.Results: Totally, 263 medical students participated in the study. Based on the percentile of scores obtained they were categorized into three groups, better knowledge (18-30), average knowledge (10-17), poor knowledge (0-9). On the whole 70% students had an average level of knowledge 25% students had better knowledge and 5% students had poor knowledge. Female students had better knowledge when compared to male students (p<0.0001). Similarly, second year students had better knowledge than interns and final year students (p<0.0001). Students had less knowledge regarding clinical features, epidemiological features and relatively poor knowledge regarding diagnosis and treatment. Comparatively, knowledge about mode of transmission, preventive measures and general information of virus were better.Conclusion: This study demonstrates apparent lack of knowledge regarding various aspects of Ebola and emphasis to conduct awareness programs to manage the dreadful consequences of the disease if rises

Assessment of medical students’ attitude towards didactic lectures taken in pharmacology in a private medical college

Background: To assess the attitude of second year medical students towards the teaching Principles in Pharmacology didactic lecture classes.Methods: It was a descriptive epidemiological and questionnaire based study. Second year students who were attending pharmacology lecture classes for a period of one month (nearly 8 lectures) were given questionnaire and ask to fill it by assessing the theory classes which was conducted throughout that month. Each question was graded with mark and finally total score was converted to 50 marks. Five-level Likert’s criteria were used to analyze few questions in the questionnaire. Data were analyzed by frequency distribution.Results: Out of 115 students who attended the questionnaire session, 61% students were having a very good and better attitude towards the faculty talking Pharmacology lecture classes and remaining students have a few lacking areas in the teaching mode which should be analyzed.Conclusions: Students have good attitude towards the faculty taking didactic lectures and the lacking areas can be future improved by efficient planning of interactive and interesting lecture methods for the usefulness of students as well as the teacher

ASSESSMENT OF KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE TOWARD DISPOSAL OF EXPIRED DRUGS AMONG MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS IN CHENNAI - A CROSS-SECTIONAL PROSPECTIVE STUDY

  Objective: Proper disposal of expired drugs can avoid drug abuse, drug diversion, environmental contamination, and accidental poisoning by children and animals. Our study was aimed to assess the knowledge and practice toward disposal of expired drugs among medical professionals.Methods: After obtaining verbal consent, a self-administered pretested questionnaire was given to tutors, junior resident, senior resident, assistant professors, associate professors, and professors of Tagore Medical and Dental College and Hospital. The questionnaire has two parts; part one includes demographic details of the study participants, and part two comprises questions, regarding their awareness, knowledge, and practice toward disposal of expired drugs. Data were described as a percentage and analyzed using Sigma Graphpad prism version-5 and Microsoft Excel 2007.Results: A total of 156 medical professionals participated in the study. Among them, 85 were males and 71 were females, whereas 123 (78.8%) were medical and 33 (21.2%) were dental faculties. It was observed that 74.3% of respondents check the expiry date of the drug always and 62.2% said the drug loses its therapeutic effect after the expiry date. Analyzing the method to dispose the expired drugs, 77.6% throw in their household dustbins, 2.6% flush in toilets, 19.2% return to the pharmacist, and 4.5% bury. One-fourth of the medical professionals not aware about environmental hazards due to improper disposal and also believe they do not cause any harm. 64% of preferred pharmacist would be the appropriate person to inform about proper disposal of drugs.Conclusion: This study shows lacunae in the knowledge and practice about proper disposal of expired drugs and recommends discussion regarding improper disposal and its consequences in various health programs

PREVALENCE AND ANTIBIOTIC SUSCEPTIBILITY PATTERN OF HIGH LEVEL AMINOGLYCOSIDE RESISTANCE AMONG GRAM POSITIVE ORGANISMS IN A TERTIARY CARE CENTRE

Objective: The study is done to determine the prevalence and the antimicrobial susceptibility against the gram positive organisms with high level amino glycosides resistance. Methods: This is a prospective study involving the analysis of clinical samples for gram positive organisms like Streptococcus species, Enterococcus species and Staphylococcus species and determining their antimicrobial susceptibility pattern. Results: From the collected clinical samples, all the gram positive organisms show resistance to gentamicin. Most of the Staphylococcus species showed a wide resistance to erythromycin followed by ceftrioxazone and many Enterococcus species shows resistance to penicillin, erythromycin, ciprofloxacin. Conclusion: The high level aminoglycoside resistant (HLAR) gram positive organisms showed susceptibility to few drugs that are prevalent in various clinical samples. Surveillance of antimicrobial resistance and sensitivity is essential in managing and control of infection

An Ensemble Learning Approach for Fast Disaster Response using Social Media Analytics

Natural disaster happens, as a result of natural hazards that cause financial, environmental or human losses. Natural disasters strike unexpectedly, affecting the lives of tens of thousands of people. During the flood, social media sites were also heavily used to disseminate information about flooded areas, rescue agencies, food and relief centres. This work proposes an ensemble learning strategy for combining and analysing social media data in order to close the gap and progress in catastrophic situation. To enable scalability and broad accessibility of the dynamic streaming of multimodal data namely text, image, audio and video, this work is designed around social media data. A fusion technique was employed at the decision level, based on a database of 15 characteristics for more than 300 disasters around the world (Trained with MNIST dataset 60000 training images and 10000 testing images).&nbsp; This work allows the collected multimodal social media data to share a common semantic space, making individual variable prediction easier. Each&nbsp; merged numerical vector(tensors) of text and audio&nbsp; is sent into the K-CNN algorithm, which is an&nbsp; unsupervised learning algorithm (K-CNN), and the&nbsp; image and video data is given to a deep learning&nbsp; based Progressive Neural Artificial Search (PNAS).&nbsp; The trained data acts as a predictor for future&nbsp; incidents, allowing for the estimation of total&nbsp; deaths, total individuals impacted, and total&nbsp; damage, as well as specific suggestions for food,&nbsp; shelter and housing inspections. To make such a prediction, the trained model is presented a satellite image from before the accident as well as the geographic and demographic conditions, which is expected to result in a prediction accuracy of more than 85%

Evaluation of awareness about obesity among general public visiting the tertiary care hospital

Background: Obesity is one of the fastest growing threats of health and well-being for both developed and developing countries. The aim of the study was to evaluate the awareness about obesity among general public.Methods: After obtaining institutional ethics committee approval and written informed consent from the participants, anthropometric measures like height, weight, hip and waist circumference for computing body mass index and waist hip ratio were taken. Using portable bioelectric impedance analyzer body fat percentage was measured. A validated questionnaire including socio demographic details and questions evaluating the awareness about obesity were given to the participants.Results: Totally 100 participants were evaluated, of which majority being female. Mean height of the male and female participants was 164 and 152cm respectively. Similarly, mean weight was found to be 72 and 65 kg. Based on the body mass index only 19% participants were within normal range, remaining 81% were overweight and obese. Percent body fat and waist hip ratio was found to be increased in both sexes. Majority of the participants were aware that obesity is associated with health problems but most of them were unaware how it is measured and the dietary foods to be taken to reduce obesity. However 64% participants think that obesity can reduce the life expectancy of the individual.Conclusions: Majority of the participants were obese and overweight while awareness about preventive measures was still lacking. Hence health care personnel need to take greater effort to educate and inform people about the implications

Neutral Point Clamped Transformerless Multilevel Converter for Grid-Connected Photovoltaic System

Transformer-less (TL) inverter topologies have elicited further special treatment in photo-voltaic (PV) power system as they provide high efficiency and low cost. Neutral point clamped (NPC) multilevel-inverter (MLI) topologies-based transformer-less are being immensely used in grid-connected medium-voltage high-power claims. Unfortunately, these topologies such as NPC-MLI, full-bridge inverter with DC bypass (FB-DCBP) suffer from the shoot-through problem on the bridge legs, which affect the reliability of the implementation. Based on the previous above credits, a T type neutral point clamped (TNP) - MLI (TNP-MLI) with Transformer-less topology called TL-TNP-MLI is presented to be an alternate which can be suitable in the grid connected PV power generation systems. The suggested TL-TNP-MLI topologies free from inverter bridge legs shoot-through burden, switching frequency common-mode current (CMC), and leakage current. The control system of the grid interface with hysteresis current control (HCC) strategy is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed PV connected transformer-less TNP-MLI topology with different grid and PV scenario has been verified through the MATLAB/Simulink simulation model and field-programmable gate area (FPGA) based experimental results for a 1.5 kW system.publishedVersio

Comparative Study of Iron Supplements in South Indian Antenatal Women with Iron Deficiency Anemia

BACKGROUND: Iron deficiency anemia is the most common nutritional disorder in the world. It is a major public health problem particularly among pregnant women with adverse effects on the mother and the new born. Iron supplementation is universally recommended to correct or prevent iron deficiency. AIMS &amp; OBJECTIVE: The present study was conducted to compare the efficacy and tolerability of three oral iron preparations in anemic pregnant women of more than 14 weeks of gestation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Randomized Control trial, done at Tagore Medical College and Hospital, Chennai. 60 antenatal women were selected; they were divided into three groups, 20 in each group. They were treated with Carbonyl iron, ferrous sulphate and ferrous fumarate. Hemoglobin estimation was done at 0 day, 30th and 60th day. Adverse effects were monitored. RESULTS: Data analysis showed an increase in haemoglobin levels in all three groups after the 30th day (p&lt;0.05). Carbonyl iron showed highly significant increase (p&lt;0.05) in the haemoglobin level as compared to the other two drugs at the end of the 60th day. CONCLUSION: Carbonyl iron is superior in efficacy when compared to ferrous sulphate and ferrous fumarate and is better tolerated. So carbonyl iron is safe in pregnancy and can be given as a supplement to treat iron deficiency anemia during pregnancy