Biological and Behavioural Markers of Parkinson’s Disease

Today, upwards of 10 million people—approximately 9 500 of whom reside in New Zealand—are living with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Yet, the means of diagnosing PD remain somewhat similar to those available to James Parkinson in 1817. Recently, however, there has been an increasing interest in the role of biomarkers in PD; these, in turn, are hoped to provide the necessary means by which PD can be diagnosed earlier, treated better and—ultimately—altogether prevented and/or cured. Given the multifaceted nature of the aetiology underlying PD, a “multi-system” approach to biomarkers is more likely to yield fruitful results. Thus, the overarching aim of this study was to explore several biomarkers (within two realms—biological and behavioural) that may be used at different time-points as the disease progresses. In the biological markers trials, biofluid samples (i.e., cerebrospinal fluid ‘CSF’ and plasma) were obtained from 11 patients with PD. Analyses of these samples did not detect any blackcurrant anthocyanins either before or after oral supplementation with blackcurrant concentrate for four weeks. Consumption of blackcurrant concentrate, however, significantly increased the CSF concentration of cyclic glycine-proline. This led to the hypothesis of an indirect mechanism underlying the putative benefit of berry-fruit consumption on the risk of developing PD—perhaps through modulating the peripheral resistance to insulinlike growth factor-1 otherwise observed in patients with PD. CSF concentrations of the aminoterminal fragment of C-type natriuretic peptide were significantly lower in PD patients than the reported range from a group of pre-operative orthopaedic patients. Finally, the obtained samples were utilised to characterise the profile of exosomes present in the CSF and plasma of PD patients. The three patients with the highest plasma exosome concentrations also had the lowest scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. The behavioural markers study investigated biomarkers in patients with established PD—a stage when cognition may become involved. The emphasis was to obtain an in-depth evaluation of novel eye movement-performance associations. In general, no remarkable differences in eye movement parameters were noted among the three study groups (n = 16 per group): PD with normal cognition (PDN), PD with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) and matched controls (NC) in natural and laboratory-based neuropsychological tasks. This indicates a relatively preserved organisation of neuropsychological task performance as evident from eye movements among the participants. In addition, some insights into human behaviour on several tasks were gained. In the animal naming task, participants from all three groups tended to fixate on the animal’s head in order to name it. Participants also fixated on the distal ends of lines when attempting the Judgement of Line Orientation task. PD-MCI participants were found to make significantly more vertical saccades when searching the Where’s Wally?™ Maze task in comparison with NC and PD-N participants. On the Symbol Digit Modalities Test, PD-MCI participants scored significantly lower than NC and PDN participants. Finally, task organisation of the tea-making task was mostly consistent among the study participants; PD participants (of both groups) executed the task significantly slower than NC participants. Given the relatively small sample sizes, an exploratory approach was generally taken. To gain confidence in the results of individual findings, further research ought to be carried out in order to exclude the possibility of sampling variability accounting for the reported observations

Fog based Secure Framework for Personal Health Records Systems

The rapid development of personal health records (PHR) systems enables an individual to collect, create, store and share his PHR to authorized entities. Health care systems within the smart city environment require a patient to share his PRH data with a multitude of institutions' repositories located in the cloud. The cloud computing paradigm cannot meet such a massive transformative healthcare systems due to drawbacks including network latency, scalability and bandwidth. Fog computing relieves the burden of conventional cloud computing by availing intermediate fog nodes between the end users and the remote servers. Aiming at a massive demand of PHR data within a ubiquitous smart city, we propose a secure and fog assisted framework for PHR systems to address security, access control and privacy concerns. Built under a fog-based architecture, the proposed framework makes use of efficient key exchange protocol coupled with ciphertext attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) to guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control within the system respectively. We also make use of digital signature combined with CP-ABE to ensure the system authentication and users privacy. We provide the analysis of the proposed framework in terms of security and performance.Comment: 12 pages (CMC Journal, Tech Science Press

Gafor : Genetic algorithm based fuzzy optimized re-clustering in wireless sensor networks

Acknowledgments: The authors are grateful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this work through Vice Deanship of Scientific Research Chairs: Chair of Pervasive and Mobile Computing. Funding: This research was funded by King Saud University in 2020.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Towards prevention of sportsmen burnout : Formal analysis of sub-optimal tournament scheduling

Funding Statement: The authors are grateful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia for funding this work through the Vice Deanship of Scientific Research Chairs: Chair of Pervasive and Mobile Computing.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Thyroid disorders, epidemiology and outcome among patients in South Western region: Southern Saudi Arabia

Background: Thyroid gland may have a group of a medical condition that affects its main function. The thyroid gland is located at the front of the neck and produces thyroid hormones. The released hormones go through the blood to many body organs for regulating their function, meaning that it is an endocrine organ. These hormones normally act in the body to regulate energy use, infant development, and childhood development. The study aimed to assess the epidemiology of thyroid disorders among cases in the south-western region, Saudi Arabia, and to assess the reporting quality for these cases data.Methods: A retrospective record based descriptive approach was used through reviewing medical records of all cases that were admitted and diagnosed as thyroid related disorders for different indications in the main hospital (king Khalid Hospital) during the period from January 2018 to January 2020. Data extracted throng pre-structured questionnaire including patient's bio-clinical data, preoperative radiological and laboratory investigations. Also, laryngoscope pre and post operatively was reviewed to record findings.Results: The study included 405 cases with thyroid disorders whose ages ranged from 15 to 71 years old with a mean age of 30.5±10.6 years. Females were 82.7% of the included cases, and 83.8% were Saudi. Thyroid related symptoms were recorded for 1-2 years among 58.1% of the cases and for more than 5 years among 15.8%. Thyroid enlargement was recorded for 73.1% of the cases. The multinodular enlargement was recorded for 53.5% of the cases followed with diffuse thyroid enlargement (27.3%). Regarding the type of surgery undergone, total thyroidectomy was the most recorded followed with lobectomy.Conclusions: The study revealed that the majority of the cases were females at middle age presented with benign lesions with Euthyroid status. The most important conclusion was the significant remarkable underreporting of the different clinical data for the cases with many missing items

Chlorhexidine versus Povidone-Iodine for the prevention of ‎Surgical Site ‎Infections: A review.‎

BackgroundSurgical Site Infections (SSIs) are the third most frequently reported health care-associated ‎infection‎ and it remain a major clinical problem despite improvements in prevention, as they ‎are associated with ‎significant mortality and morbidity. Prevention strategies for SSIs are based ‎on reducing the risk of infection by bacteria, So many antiseptic agents are ‎used, the most ‎common one are Chlorhexidine and Povidone-Iodine.‎AimsTo discuss the ‎findings of RCTs that compare Chlorhexidine versus Povidone-Iodine in the prevention of ‎Surgical ‎Site ‎Infections (SSIs).‎Methods This systematic review was carried out, including PubMed, Google Scholar, and EBSCO that ‎examining randomized trials of Chlorhexidine and Povidone-Iodine to summarize the major ‎RCT that compare Chlorhexidine versus Povidone-Iodine in the prevention of Surgical Site ‎Infections (SSIs).‎Results The review included six randomized studies that compare between Chlorhexidine and Povidone-‎Iodine for the prevention of SSIs. The findings showed that many studies prefer using ‎Chlorhexidine over Povidine-Iodine to reduce SSIs, few studies prefer using PVI as antiseptic ‎and other studies reported that there is no significant difference between both. ConclusionMajority of results prefer using Chlorhexidine than Povidone-Iodine‎ as antiseptics but ‎there were few findings prefer ‎PVI and other studies reported that there was no significant ‎difference between using them as ‎antiseptics.

Vitamin D serum level predicts stroke clinical severity, functional independence, and disability—A retrospective cohort study

BackgroundStroke is a leading cause of mortality and disability and one of the most common neurological conditions globally. Many studies focused on vitamin D as a stroke risk factor, but only a few focused on its serum level as a predictor of stroke initial clinical severity and recovery with inconsistent results. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between serum vitamin D levels and stroke clinical severity at admission and functional independence and disability at discharge in Saudi Arabia.MethodologyA retrospective cohort study of adult ischemic stroke patients who had their vitamin D tested and admitted within 7 days of exhibiting stroke symptoms at King Abdulaziz Medical City (KAMC) Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Based on vitamin D level, the patients were categorized into normal [25(OH)D serum level ≥ 75 nmol/L], insufficient [25(OH)D serum level is 50–75 nmol/L], and deficient [25(OH)D serum level ≤ 50 nmol/L]. The primary outcome was to assess the vitamin D serum level of ischemic stroke patients’ clinical severity at admission and functional independence at discharge. The National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) was used to assess the clinical severity, whereas the modified Rankin scale (mRS) was used to assess functional independence and disability.ResultsThe study included 294 stroke patients, out of 774, who were selected based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The mean age of the participants was 68.2 ± 13.4 years, and 49.3% were male. The patients’ distribution among the three groups based on their vitamin D levels is: normal (n = 35, 11.9%), insufficient (n = 66, 22.5%), and deficient (n = 196, 65.6%). After adjusting for potential covariates, regression analysis found a significant inverse relationship of NIHSS based on 25(OH)D serum level (beta coefficient: −0.04, SE: 0.01, p = 0.003). Patients with deficient serum vitamin D level also had significantly higher odds of worse functional independence in mRS score [OR: 2.41, 95%CI: (1.13–5.16), p = 0.023] when compared to participants with normal vitamin D level.ConclusionLow vitamin D levels were associated with higher severity of stroke at admission and poor functional independence and disability at discharge in patients with acute ischemic stroke. Further randomized clinical and interventional studies are required to confirm our findings

Solvability of second order linear differential equations in the sequence space n(ϕ) n(ϕ)n(\phi)

Abstract We apply the concept of measure of noncompactness to study the existence of solution of second order differential equations with initial conditions in the sequence space n(ϕ) $n(\phi)$

Comparative Performance Analysis of Bat Algorithm and Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm using Standard Benchmark Functions

Optimization problem relates to finding the best solution from all feasible solutions. Over the last 30 years, many meta-heuristic algorithms have been developed in the literature including that of Simulated Annealing (SA), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Harmony Search Algorithm (HS) to name a few. In order to help engineers make a sound decision on the selection amongst the best meta-heuristic algorithms for the problem at hand, there is a need to assess the performance of each algorithm against common case studies. Owing to the fact that they are new and much of their relative performance are still unknown (as compared to other established meta-heuristic algorithms), Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFO) and Bat Algorithm (BA) have been adopted for comparison using the 12 selected benchmark functions. In order to ensure fair comparison, both BFO and BA are implemented using the same data structure and the same language and running in the same platform (i.e. Microsoft Visual C# with .Net Framework 4.5). We found that BFO gives more accurate solution as compared to BA (with the same number of iterations). However, BA exhibits faster convergence rat