Potential Therapeutic Uses of Thalidomide for Pulmonary Fibrosis

Thalidomide was widely used to avoid morning sickness in pregnant women, but was recalled due to its teratogenic effects and malformations in thousands of children. However, potential beneficial effects such as anti-inflammatory, system regulatory activities and the anti-angiogenic effect of thalidomide have been reported. As the studies about thalidomide continued, its new effects and applications made researchers more interested in it and became a promising agent in the treatment of a variety of clinical situations where standard treatments have failed. To make this purpose more achievable, Scopus, Science Direct, Google Scholar, and PubMed were searched. After obtaining and reviewing articles related to thalidomide and its indications, different therapeutic uses of thalidomide for pulmonary diseases are classified on mechanisms. In recent years, thalidomide has been an effective agent in treating cough associated with pulmonary fibrosis and the main suggested mechanism refers to regulation production of inflammatory mediators, including cytokines and chemokines, which trigger Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT). The mechanism of EMT is related to the inhibition of Transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β1)-mediated signaling pathways, Smad2 (Suppressor of Mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 2) / 3, Akt / Glycogen synthase kinase 3 beta (GSK-3β), and Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK). Thalidomide is also involved in paraquat-induced and bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis. Also, Thalidomide gained attention as a suitable agent for the treatment of cough associated with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and for severe pulmonary damage cause by severe acute respiratory syndrome, coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), responsible for the global pandemic in 2020, due to its anti-inflammatory-anti-angiogenesis and pro-apoptotic properties

Floristic and Ethnobotanical Study of Indigenous Plants of Ranapur Reserve Forest, Odisha, India

The indigenous plants of Ranapur reserve forest of Odisha state, India, possess ample scope in ethnobotany due to their medicinal properties. Keeping in view of the requirements of the urbanites, this work highlights the utilization of native flora, identification, ethnobotany, floristic survey, and preservation of natural and cultivated plant species within the hills of Ranapur, Odisha. A field study around the Ranapur forest resulted in a wide diversity accounting for 143 plant species belonging to 53 families, which were identified and documented alongside their botanical name, family, and habitat following local herbaria, archives of Flora of Orissa, monographs, and standard taxonomic study. Gmelina arborea, Rauwolfia serpentina, and Crataeva nurvala (Varuna) fall into the RET taxa (Rare, Endangered, and Threatened) and are groundbreaking against various diseases. A few wild plants such as Shorea robusta, Dalbergia sissoo, Pterocarpus marsupium, Murraya koenigii, and Schleichera oleosa were the most dominant species in the study area. The present study adds detailed database concerning the floral diversity and their medicinal values, which attracts many researchers as well as the local populace to conserve and explore their wide-spectrum applications. This could be useful in novel drug discovery and authenticates the ethnomedicinal knowledge

Large-scale unit commitment under uncertainty: an updated literature survey

The Unit Commitment problem in energy management aims at finding the optimal production schedule of a set of generation units, while meeting various system-wide constraints. It has always been a large-scale, non-convex, difficult problem, especially in view of the fact that, due to operational requirements, it has to be solved in an unreasonably small time for its size. Recently, growing renewable energy shares have strongly increased the level of uncertainty in the system, making the (ideal) Unit Commitment model a large-scale, non-convex and uncertain (stochastic, robust, chance-constrained) program. We provide a survey of the literature on methods for the Uncertain Unit Commitment problem, in all its variants. We start with a review of the main contributions on solution methods for the deterministic versions of the problem, focussing on those based on mathematical programming techniques that are more relevant for the uncertain versions of the problem. We then present and categorize the approaches to the latter, while providing entry points to the relevant literature on optimization under uncertainty. This is an updated version of the paper "Large-scale Unit Commitment under uncertainty: a literature survey" that appeared in 4OR 13(2), 115--171 (2015); this version has over 170 more citations, most of which appeared in the last three years, proving how fast the literature on uncertain Unit Commitment evolves, and therefore the interest in this subject

Traditional knowledge of Iranian farmers on biological pest management

676-678Traditional knowledge of Iranian farmers on biological pest management has been discussed. Methods of controlling the insect pest population of a certain species by exposing it to its natural enemies have been enumerated

Investigating the effect of ORS with probiotics, zinc and vitamin A on children's diarrhea: a randomized clinical trial

Background: Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death in developing countries. Due to the interaction of diarrhea and malnutrition on each other, as well as the role of malnutrition in children's developmental and developmental disorders, improving diarrhea treatment programs plays an important role in children's health. Our aim in this study was to evaluate the effect of ORS with probiotics, zinc and vitamin A on children's diarrhea. Methods: In this clinical trial study, children aged 9 months to 5 years were referred to Shahid Beheshti Hospital in Kashan with a complaint of acute watery diarrhea in 2017-2018. The children were randomly divided into five groups. In these groups, patients with zinc gluconate were treated with 20 mg of omental with ORS, vitamin A 20000 units with ORS, CFU probiotic with ORS, zinc gluconate, vitamin A and probiotic with ORS and finally ORS were treated only they got. Then, during the daily visit, the condition of the patients in terms of continuing diarrhea and the number of times diarrhea was asked to their mother during the last 24 hours and was recorded in the questionnaires. Then the results were entered in SPSS17 software and analyzed according to related statistical methods. Results: All the intervention groups were similar and comparable in terms of gender characteristics (p = 0.052), age (p = 0.871) and weight (p = 0.958). The duration of diarrhea after intervention in the combined group decreased significantly (P <0.001) and in the ORS group only increased significantly (p = 0.013). The frequency of diarrhea decreased significantly after intervention in all groups (P <0.001). In the combined group, the number of diarrhea and the length of hospital stay decreased significantly. Conclusion: The results of the present study showed that the group of children receiving zinc supplements, vitamin A, probiotics and ORS had a significant decrease in the number of times diarrhea and the duration of diarrhea and the duration of hospitalization

Reliability and validity of the Iranian version of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ 4.0 Generic Core Scales in adolescents

Objective The objective of this study was to investigate the reliability and validity of the Iranian version of the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ 4.0 (PedsQL™ 4.0) Generic Core Scales in adolescents Methods After linguistic validation, the Iranian version of the PedsQL™ 4.0 was completed by 848 healthy and 26 chronically ill adolescents aged 13–18 years and their parents. Results The internal consistency as measured by Cronbach’s alpha coefficients exceeded the minimum reliability standard of .70. No floor effects were observed. Ceiling effects detected ranged from 1.5% for adolescent self-report total scale score to 42.2% for self-report social functioning. All monotrait-multimethod correlations were higher than multitrait-multimethod correlations. The intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) between adolescent self-report and parent proxy-report showed good to excellent agreement. Exploratory factor analysis supported mainly comparable results with the original US English dialect version. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis for 5-factor models for both self-report and proxy-report indicated acceptable fit for the proposed models. Regarding gender and health status, as hypothesized from previous studies, girls reported lower health-related quality of life than boys on the total score, physical and emotional functioning, and healthy adolescents reported significantly higher health-related quality of life than those with chronic illnesses. Conclusion The findings support the initial reliability and validity of the Iranian version of the PedsQL™ 4.0 as a generic instrument to measure HRQOL of adolescents in Iran

Plant Gel-Mediated Synthesis of Gold-Coated Nanoceria Using Ferula gummosa: Characterization and Estimation of Its Cellular Toxicity toward Breast Cancer Cell Lines

In this study, a novel method using Ferula gummosa gums as a capping agent was used to synthesize the nanoceria for the first time. The method was economical and performed at room temperature. Furthermore, it was coated with gold (Au/nanoceria) and fully characterized using X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (FESEM-EDX), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), dynamic light scattering (DLS), and zeta potential (& zeta; potential). The crystallite size obtained from the results was 28.09 nm for Au/nanoceria. The energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) analysis of Au/nanoceria revealed the compositional constituents of the product, which display the purity of the Au/nanoceria. The cell toxicity properties of the non-doped and Au-coated nanoceria were identified by a MTT analysis on a breast cancer cell line (MCF7). Additionally, human foreskin fibroblast cells (HFF) were used as a normal cell line. The cytotoxicity results indicated that the toxicological effect of Au/nanoceria on cancer cells was significant while having little toxic effect on normal cells. The toxicity effect of nanoceria clearly shows the dependence on dose and time, so, with increasing the dose of Au/nanoceria, the death of cancer cells also increases