Prevalence of Hypertension and Association of Obesity with Hypertension in School Ggoing Children of Surat City, Western India.

Purpose: The association of obesity with hypertension has been recognized for the decades which are the important risk factors for the cardiovascular disease. So the purpose of the present study was to determine association of obesity with hypertension in school going children of Surat. Methodology: School going children aged between 12-18 years, of five schools in Surat were selected for the study. Height and weight were measured and BMI was calculated. Blood pressure measurements were taken as per recommendation of American heart society and family history of hypertension has also been assessed. Hypertension was considered if blood pressure is more than 95th percentile according to the update of task force report and Obesity was diagnosed by BMI for age. Results: Of 682 children, 8.94% were obese and 20.09% were hypertensive. Conclusion: Obesity is strongly associated with hypertension in children and both together may risk factors for later coronary disease

Observed trends and changes in daily temperature and precipitation extremes over the Koshi river basin

The Koshi river basin is a sub-basin of the Ganges shared among China, Nepal, and India. The river system has a high potential for investment in hydropower development and for irrigation in downstream areas. The upper part of the basin contains a substantial reserve of freshwater in the form of snow and glaciers. Climate variability, climate change, and climate extremes might impact on these reserves, and in turn impact on systems that support livelihoods, such as agriculture, biodiversity and related ecosystem services. Climatological variability and trends over the Koshi river basin were studied using RClimDex. Daily temperature data (20 stations) and precipitation data (50 stations) from 1975 to 2010 were used in the analysis. The results show that the frequency and intensity of weather extremes are increasing. The daily maximum temperature (TXx) increased by 0.1 °C decade−1 on average between 1975 and 2010 and the minimum (TNn) by 0.3 °C decade−1. The number of warm nights increased at all stations. Most of the extreme temperature indices showed a consistently different pattern in the mountains than in the Indo-Gangetic plains, although not all results were statistically significant. The warm days (TX90p), warm nights (TN90p), warm spell duration (WSDI), and diurnal temperature range (DTR) increased at most of the mountain stations; whereas monthly maximum and minimum values of daily maximum temperature, TX90p, cool nights (TN10p), WSDI, cold spell duration indicator (CSDI), DTR decreased at the stations in the Indo-Gangetic plains, while the number of cold days increased. There was an increase in total annual rainfall and rainfall intensity, although no clear long-term linear trend, whereas the number of consecutive dry days increased at almost all stations. The results indicate that the risk of extreme climate events over the basin is increasing, which will increase people's vulnerability and has strong policy implications

Quantifying Privacy Loss of Human Mobility Graph Topology

Human mobility is often represented as a mobility network, or graph, with nodes representing places of significance which an individual visits, such as their home, work, places of social amenity, etc., and edge weights corresponding to probability estimates of movements between these places. Previous research has shown that individuals can be identified by a small number of geolocated nodes in their mobility network, rendering mobility trace anonymization a hard task. In this paper we build on prior work and demonstrate that even when all location and timestamp information is removed from nodes, the graph topology of an individual mobility network itself is often uniquely identifying. Further, we observe that a mobility network is often unique, even when only a small number of the most popular nodes and edges are considered. We evaluate our approach using a large dataset of cell-tower location traces from 1 500 smartphone handsets with a mean duration of 430 days. We process the data to derive the top−N places visited by the device in the trace, and find that 93% of traces have a unique top−10 mobility network, and all traces are unique when considering top−15 mobility networks. Since mobility patterns, and therefore mobility networks for an individual, vary over time, we use graph kernel distance functions, to determine whether two mobility networks, taken at different points in time, represent the same individual. We then show that our distance metrics, while imperfect predictors, perform significantly better than a random strategy and therefore our approach represents a significant loss in privacy

Invariant Synthesis for Incomplete Verification Engines

We propose a framework for synthesizing inductive invariants for incomplete verification engines, which soundly reduce logical problems in undecidable theories to decidable theories. Our framework is based on the counter-example guided inductive synthesis principle (CEGIS) and allows verification engines to communicate non-provability information to guide invariant synthesis. We show precisely how the verification engine can compute such non-provability information and how to build effective learning algorithms when invariants are expressed as Boolean combinations of a fixed set of predicates. Moreover, we evaluate our framework in two verification settings, one in which verification engines need to handle quantified formulas and one in which verification engines have to reason about heap properties expressed in an expressive but undecidable separation logic. Our experiments show that our invariant synthesis framework based on non-provability information can both effectively synthesize inductive invariants and adequately strengthen contracts across a large suite of programs

Bioassay guided isolation and identification of anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial compounds from Urtica dioica L. (Urticaceae) leaves

The present study describes the anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial activity and lipophilic profile with acute toxicological studies of Urtica dioica. Successive extraction of the leaves with organic solvents of increasing polarity and their screening for anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial activity was assessed. Hexane extract showed good anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial activity; hence it was further fractionated using open silica gel column chromatography into 19 sub fractions which were pooled together according to their thin layer chromatography (TLC) profile to give an overall 5 fractions. Among the 5 fractions, fraction-II (FII) at a dose of 200 mg/kg body-weight (bw) exhibits equipotent anti-inflammatory activity (48.83% after 3 h) as that of the standard drug indomethacin (53.48%) in Wistar rats. FII also showed a potent anti-microbial activity against all the tested bacterial strains and its minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) value was 125, 15.62, 31.25, 250, 31.25, 125 and 7.81 ìg/ml against Enterococcus faecalis, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Shigella flexneri and Salmonella typhi, respectively which was determined by serial tube dilution method. FII was subjected to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis in search of potent anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial compound(s). 2,4-Di-t-butylphenol (4.56%), neophytadiene (26.97%), butyl tetradecyl ester (9.53%), dibutyl phthalate (7.45%), bis(2-ethyl hexyl) maleate (8.80%), 1,2-benzenedicarboxylic acid (9.89%) and 2-tert-butyl-4,6-bis(3,5-di-tert-butyl-4-hydroxybenzyl)phenol (3.19%) were the major constituents responsible for both anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial activity of hexane extract of U. dioica. Sub-acute oral toxicity of crude n-hexane extract of U. dioica was carried out in Wistar rats at doses of 250, 500, 1000 and 2000 mg/kg bw to assess the safety index. Hematological parameters from blood and other biochemical parameters from serum confirmed its safety at tested concentrations. Our results corroborate the anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial activity of U. dioica, and could justify its use in folk medicine for the treatment of rheumatic arthritis and other infectious diseases.Key words: Urtica dioica, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), toxicity