Efficacy of memantine in treating patients with fibromyalgia

To evaluate the efficacy of Memantine as a therapeutic intervention for fibromyalgia. Methods: This clinical trial was conducted between October 2014 and December 2014. A total of 30 subjects with diagnosed fibromyalgia presenting to a private neurology clinic in Karachi, Pakistan were selected through purposive sampling technique. Adult patients belonging to both genders were included in the study. Patients were treated with incremental doses of Memantine. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 20 and associations were made using Chi square test with p-value of less than 0.05 taken as significant. Results: Out of 30 patients, 2 (6.7%) were males and 28 (93.3%) were females which shows a very high occurrence of fibromyalgia in females. The mean age of the subjects was found to be 38 years. Efficacy of the drug in patients with fibromyalgia was observed to be 93.3% which is significantly high. The baseline FIQ score when compared with the score at 3-month follow-up by applying Wilcoxon signed rank test showed mean ± S.D (67.18±13.23 vs. 34.17±15.18) where p=0.000. This shows a highly significant result (≤0.05). All of the patients with fibromyalgia reported improvement in their physical functioning and majority of the patients felt less anxious and less depressed on their final follow-up visit. By the end of the 3rd month, the level of stiffness and intensity of pain decreased significantly and patients reported less difficulty in performing work. Conclusion: Memantine has shown significant beneficial effects in reducing the intensity of pain and disability in patients with fibromyalgia

Analytic study of clinical presentation of intracranial space-occupying lesions in adult patients

Intracranial space-occupying lesions can be caused by a variety of disease processes, ranging from neoplasms to non-neoplastic lesions including hematomas, abscesses and vascular malformations. This article provides an overview of varied clinical presentations of patients with intracranial space-occupying lesions.Methods:A total of 200 cases of intracranial space-occupying lesions presenting at Neuro Clinic and Care were retrospectively analyzed. Adult patients from all age groups and both genders were included in this study. Results: 165 patients (82.5%) had neoplastic lesions while 35 (17.5%) had non-neoplastic lesions. Metastatic lesions from primary tumor elsewhere in the body comprised the most common group with81 cases (40.5%), followed by meningiomas with 27 cases (13.5%). Males were affected slightly more than females (1:0.8). The most common presenting symptom was headache 87 patients (43.5%,) followed by focal symptoms such as numbness, tingling or weakness being present in 80 (40%)and seizures observed in 65 (32.5%).Conclusion: The study reviews the wide range of symptoms the patients with intracranial space-occupying lesions present with, the most common being headache, followed by focal symptoms such as numbness, tingling or weakness, seizures and vomiting. Knowledge of these typical as well as atypical patterns of clinical presentation can aid physicians in timely detection and prompt application of diagnostic and therapeutic modalities

Determinants of organizational citizenship behavior: A case study of higher education institutes in Pakistan

This study empirically examines the relationship between altruism, conscientiousness, and civic virtue, three of the antecedents of organizational citizenship behavior, in higher education institutes in the Khyber Pakhtonkhuwa Province (KPK) of Pakistan. The study is based on primary data collected from ninety-five employees of various institutes in Pakistan. The data is analyzed using the techniques of rank correlation coefficient and multiple regression analysis. All the findings are tested at 0.01 and 0.05 levels of significance. The result concludes that altruism, conscientiousness, and civic virtue have strong positive impacts on the organizational citizenship behavior in the context of higher education institutes in Pakistan

Efficacy of memantine in treating patients with migraine and tension-type headache

Objective: To assess the efficacy of Memantine as a preventive and therapeutic intervention for migraine and tension-type headache. Methods: This clinical trial was conducted over a period of 3 months. A total of 44 subjects, with diagnosed migraine and/or tension-type headache, presenting to a private neurology clinic in Karachi, Pakistan were selected through purposive sampling technique. Patients were treated with incremental doses of Memantine. Adult patients belonging to both genders were included in the study. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 16.0 and associations were made using Chi square test with p-value of less than 0.05 taken as significant. Results: Out of 44 patients, 35 (79.5%) were females and 9 (20.5%) were males which shows a very high occurrence of migraine and tension-type headache in females. Average age was found to be 32.6 ≈ 33 years. Efficacy of the drug was observed to be 81.8% which is significantly high. The baseline MIDAS score when compared with the score at 3-month follow-up by applying Wilcoxon signed rank test showed mean ± S.D (39.52±21.27 vs. 6.72±6.41) where p=0.000 (\u3c0.05) which shows a highly significant result. All 44 patients were known cases of migraine while 25% (11) of them also suffered from tension-type headache. Patients were treated with incremental doses of Memantine and were observed for the efficacy of the drug. Patients maintained their diaries of intensity of pain, distressing influence of the pain and how it hindered their daily routine. Results showed that intensity of pain decreased significantly by the end of the 3rd month of treatment and majority of the patients felt less distressed on their final follow-up visit. By the end of the 3rd month, the level of hindrance in the daily routines of the patients caused by the headache also fell significantly. Conclusion: Memantine has significant beneficial effects in reducing intensity of pain and disability in patients with migraine and tension type headache

Robust gait recognition under variable covariate conditions

PhDGait is a weak biometric when compared to face, fingerprint or iris because it can be easily affected by various conditions. These are known as the covariate conditions and include clothing, carrying, speed, shoes and view among others. In the presence of variable covariate conditions gait recognition is a hard problem yet to be solved with no working system reported. In this thesis, a novel gait representation, the Gait Flow Image (GFI), is proposed to extract more discriminative information from a gait sequence. GFI extracts the relative motion of body parts in different directions in separate motion descriptors. Compared to the existing model-free gait representations, GFI is more discriminative and robust to changes in covariate conditions. In this thesis, gait recognition approaches are evaluated without the assumption on cooperative subjects, i.e. both the gallery and the probe sets consist of gait sequences under different and unknown covariate conditions. The results indicate that the performance of the existing approaches drops drastically under this more realistic set-up. It is argued that selecting the gait features which are invariant to changes in covariate conditions is the key to developing a gait recognition system without subject cooperation. To this end, the Gait Entropy Image (GEnI) is proposed to perform automatic feature selection on each pair of gallery and probe gait sequences. Moreover, an Adaptive Component and Discriminant Analysis is formulated which seamlessly integrates the feature selection method with subspace analysis for fast and robust recognition. Among various factors that affect the performance of gait recognition, change in viewpoint poses the biggest problem and is treated separately. A novel approach to address this problem is proposed in this thesis by using Gait Flow Image in a cross view gait recognition framework with the view angle of a probe gait sequence unknown. A Gaussian Process classification technique is formulated to estimate the view angle of each probe gait sequence. To measure the similarity of gait sequences across view angles, the correlation of gait sequences from different views is modelled using Canonical Correlation Analysis and the correlation strength is used as a similarity measure. This differs from existing approaches, which reconstruct gait features in different views through 2D view transformation or 3D calibration. Without explicit reconstruction, the proposed method can cope with feature mis-match across view and is more robust against feature noise

Assessment of selected heavy metals uptake from soil by vegetation of two areas of district Attock, Pakistan

The present study was conducted to examine the heavy metals in the soil and vegetation of two areas of district Attock (Pakistan). Investigations were made to compare the heavy metals concentrations (Cu, Pb, Cd, Ni, Zn) in a relatively less polluted site (Khour City) and a polluted site (Khour Company). An assessment of the selected heavy metals uptake by the soil and vegetation was made through calculation of bioaccumulation and enrichment factors. Samples of soil and plants were collected from both sites. From each site, four points were selected randomly for vegetation and soil sampling. Plant species included Eucalyptus camaldulensis, Calotropis procera, Ziziphus nummularia, Cynodon dactylon, Acacia senegal, Parthenium hysterophorus, Dalbergia sissoo and Desmostachya bipinnata. Heavy metals were detected in soil and vegetation of both areas using atomic absorption spectrophotometer. Lead concentration was highest amongst other heavy metals in both soil and vegetation (Cynodon dactylon). In studied plant species heavy metals concentrations varied among different species. The level of heavy metal concentration in Khour Company was greater compared to Khour City. The increasing level of heavy metal contamination in the Khour Company area may be because of higher traffic density and industrialization compared to Khour City

Testing strategies for stakeholders in Component Based Software Development

Like other methodologies, Component Based Software Development (CBSD) has become emerging software development paradigm due to selecting reliable, reusable and robust software components and assembling all these into suitable software architecture. In CBSD, more emphasis is given to select, test and to adapt new component into existing software architecture. If these activities are not performed properly then it will impact the functionality and quality of software. During development life cycles of software all stakeholders especially tester roles are involved to overcome the errors and reduce the defects rates, so they need proper guidelines. In this paper, authors propose a strategy via workflow chart which helps the stakeholders at various phases of software development life cycle. Moreover, this strategy leads to synchronize the work of tester role and ensure the quality product on time Keywords: CBD, Tester, functional testing, stakeholders, quality, CBSD, Third party

Antifungal and antispasmodic activities of the extracts of Euphorbia granulata

The dichloromethane and methanolic extracts of the plant Euphorbia granulata were investigated for their antifungal, antibacterial, phytotoxic, brine-shrimp cytotoxic, antioxidant, spasmolytic (antispasmodic) and acetylcholinestrase inhibitory activities. The dichloromethane extract showed strong inhibition against Microsporum canis (90%) and against Aspergillus flavus (50%). Both the extracts inhibited the spontaneous contractions in rabbit jejunum preparations with EC50 value of 0.17 and 1.3 mg/mL, respectively and also relaxed the K+-induced contractions with EC50 0.2 and 2.8 mg/mL, respectively, suggesting a calcium channel blocking activity. However, the extracts did not show antibacterial, phytotoxic, brine-shrimp cytotoxic, antioxidant and acetylcholinestrase inhibitory activities