Imperforate hymen presenting with massive haematocolpos and acute urinary retention in a teenage girl: A case report

Imperforate hymen is relatively rare but it is the most frequently encountered obstructive anomaly of the female lower genital tract. The clinical presentation vary significantly from patient to patient depending on the age at diagnosis but in most cases the diagnosis is missed in early childhood and therefore the diagnosis is made after puberty when the patient present with haematocolpos, heamatometra or both. When this happens, the presentation could even be tricky because the patient may presents with unlikely symptoms apart from cryptomenorhoea like, urinary retention or bowel obstruction or both. Here we present a 16 years old girl with imperforate hymen and presented with history of lower abdominal pain and distension associated with acute urinary retention. She was treated by hymenotomy and improved dramatically and was discharge 6th day post operatively.  This case report is presented to address to clinicians the possibility of imperforate hymen with haematocolpos as a differential diagnosis in adolescent girls particularly those who have not started having their menses in their teens and present with acute urinary retention so that their external genitalia are carefully examined to exclude the possibility of imperforate hymen as a cause of acute urinary retention due to the haematocolpos

Pioglitazone Prevents Capillary Rarefaction in Streptozotocin-Diabetic Rats Independently of Glucose Control and Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor Expression

Background/Aims: Reduction of capillary network density occurs early in the development of metabolic syndrome and may be relevant for the precipitation of diabetes. Agonists of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)-gamma transcription factor are vasculoprotective, but their capacity for structural preservation of the microcirculation is unclear. Methods: Male Wistar rats were rendered diabetic by streptozotocin and treated with pioglitazone in chow for up to 12 weeks. Capillary density was determined in heart and skeletal muscle after platelet endothelial cell adhesion molecule-1 (PECAM-1) immunostaining. Hallmarks of apoptosis and angiogenesis were determined. Results: Capillary density deteriorated progressively in the presence of hyperglycemia (from 971/mm(2) to 475/mm(2) in quadriceps muscle during 13 weeks). Pioglitazone did not influence plasma glucose, left ventricular weight, or body weight but nearly doubled absolute and relative capillary densities compared to untreated controls (1.2 vs. 0.6 capillaries/myocyte in heart and 1.5 vs. 0.9 capillaries/myocyte in quadriceps muscle) after 13 weeks of diabetes. No antiapoptotic or angiogenic influence of pioglitazone was detected while a reduced expression of hypoxia-inducible factor-3 alpha and PPAR coactivator-1 alpha (PGC-1 alpha) mRNA as well as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) protein possibly occurred as a consequence of improved vascularization. Conclusion: Pioglitazone preserves microvascular structure in diabetes independently of improvements in glycemic control and by a mechanism unrelated to VEGF-mediated angiogenesis. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Base

Enjeux et défis de la mise en oeuvre des Unités Forestières Artisanales dans le Maï-Ndombe en République Démocratique du Congo

peer reviewedL’exploitation forestière artisanale représente à la fois un enjeu et un défi majeurs dans l’optique d’une gestion durable et légale des forêts en République Démocratique du Congo (RDC). Bien qu’elle constitue un potentiel économique important, le secteur demeure cependant dans le domaine informel et illégal, en raison notamment des lacunes juridiques. Pour tenter de le réguler, les arrêtés n°84/2016 du 29 octobre 2016 relatif à l’exploitation forestière et n°85/2016, qui institutionnalise l’Unité Forestière Artisanale (UFA), ont été édictés par le Ministère de l’Environnement. La présente étude, conduite dans la Province de Maï-Ndombe entre janvier et février 2018, décrit les perceptions des parties prenantes sur l’applicabilité de ces textes et les défis de mise en oeuvre des UFA dans cette région. Des enquêtes ont été réalisées essentiellement avec l’administration forestière, les autorités politico-administratives et les exploitants artisanaux. L’analyse qualitative des données recueillies a permis d’établir des convergences ou divergences entre les déclarations des différents acteurs. Les résultats montrent que les textes régissant le secteur du sciage artisanal sont peu connus et/ou non respectés par les acteurs sur le terrain. Les exploitants accèdent à la profession sans détenir au préalable les documents administratifs requis. La licence d’abattage est utilisée à la place du permis de coupe artisanal et le carnet ou registre d’exploitation n’est tenu pour aucune opération forestière. Les souches des arbres abattus ou les billes ne comportent aucun marquage, rendant impossible une quelconque traçabilité. En outre, les différents acteurs n’ont pas les compétences techniques, financières et matérielles adéquates pour gérer une UFA. Cette étude révèle donc que, quatre années après l’instauration des UFA, rien n’est effectif sur le terrain. La mise en oeuvre de ce dispositif demeure un défi opérationnel en RDC. Le risque d’une réglementation « coquille creuse » est grand malgré le caractère non durable de l’exploitation du bois. Un renforcement des capacités des acteurs clés apparaît indispensable pour rendre effectif ce nouveau mode de gestion des forêts.Artisanal logging represents both a major issue and a major challenge for sustainable and legal forest management in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Although it has significant economic potential, the sector remains informal and illegal, mainly due to legal loopholes. In an attempt to regulate it, decrees no. 84/2016 of October 29, 2016 on logging, and no. 85/2016, which institutionalizes the Artisanal Forest Unit (AFU), was issued by the Ministry of the Environment. This study, conducted in the Province of Maï-Ndombe in February 2018, describes the perceptions of stakeholders on the applicability of these texts and the challenges of implementing AFUs in this region. Surveys were conducted primarily with the forestry administration, political-administrative authorities and artisanal loggers. The qualitative analysis of the data collected made it possible to establish convergences or divergences between the statements of the various actors. The results show that the texts governing the artisanal sawmilling sector are little known and/or not respected by the actors in the field. Operators enter the profession without first having the required administrative documents. The felling license is used instead of the artisanal cutting permit, and the logbook or logging register is not kept for any forestry operation. The stumps of felled trees or logs are not marked, making traceability impossible. In addition, the various actors do not have the technical, financial and material skills required to manage an AFU. This study therefore reveals that, four years after the establishment of AFUs, nothing is effective on the ground. The implementation of this system thus remains a major operational challenge in the DRC. The risk of a "hollow shell" regulation is high despite the unsustainable nature of timber exploitation. Capacity building of key actors appears to be essential to make this new forest management method effective

Variable exponent Besov-Morrey spaces

In this paper we introduce Besov-Morrey spaces with all indices variable and study some fundamental properties. This includes a description in terms of Peetre maximal functions and atomic and molecular decompositions. This new scale of non-standard function spaces requires the introduction of variable exponent mixed Morrey-sequence spaces, which in turn are defined within the framework of semimodular spaces. In particular, we obtain a convolution inequality involving special radial kernels, which proves to be a key tool in this work.publishe

Feature extraction and selection for Arabic tweets authorship authentication

© 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. In tweet authentication, we are concerned with correctly attributing a tweet to its true author based on its textual content. The more general problem of authenticating long documents has been studied before and the most common approach relies on the intuitive idea that each author has a unique style that can be captured using stylometric features (SF). Inspired by the success of modern automatic document classification problem, some researchers followed the Bag-Of-Words (BOW) approach for authenticating long documents. In this work, we consider both approaches and their application on authenticating tweets, which represent additional challenges due to the limitation in their sizes. We focus on the Arabic language due to its importance and the scarcity of works related on it. We create different sets of features from both approaches and compare the performance of different classifiers using them. We experiment with various feature selection techniques in order to extract the most discriminating features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to combine these different sets of features for authorship analysis of Arabic tweets. The results show that combining all the feature sets we compute yields the best results

Developmental Regulation of Genes Encoding Universal Stress Proteins in Schistosoma mansoni

The draft nuclear genome sequence of the snail-transmitted, dimorphic, parasitic, platyhelminth Schistosoma mansoni revealed eight genes encoding proteins that contain the Universal Stress Protein (USP) domain. Schistosoma mansoni is a causative agent of human schistosomiasis, a severe and debilitating Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) of poverty, which is endemic in at least 76 countries. The availability of the genome sequences of Schistosoma species presents opportunities for bioinformatics and genomics analyses of associated gene families that could be targets for understanding schistosomiasis ecology, intervention, prevention and control. Proteins with the USP domain are known to provide bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists and plants with the ability to respond to diverse environmental stresses. In this research investigation, the functional annotations of the USP genes and predicted nucleotide and protein sequences were initially verified. Subsequently, sequence clusters and distinctive features of the sequences were determined. A total of twelve ligand binding sites were predicted based on alignment to the ATP-binding universal stress protein from Methanocaldococcus jannaschii. In addition, six USP sequences showed the presence of ATP-binding motif residues indicating that they may be regulated by ATP. Public domain gene expression data and RT-PCR assays confirmed that all the S. mansoni USP genes were transcribed in at least one of the developmental life cycle stages of the helminth. Six of these genes were up-regulated in the miracidium, a free-swimming stage that is critical for transmission to the snail intermediate host. It is possible that during the intra-snail stages, S. mansoni gene transcripts for universal stress proteins are low abundant and are induced to perform specialized functions triggered by environmental stressors such as oxidative stress due to hydrogen peroxide that is present in the snail hemocytes. This report serves to catalyze the formation of a network of researchers to understand the function and regulation of the universal stress proteins encoded in genomes of schistosomes and their snail intermediate hosts