Interleukin-6 Levels in Generalized and Localized Aggressive Periodontitis Patients

AbstractINTERLEUKIN-6 LEVELS IN GENERALIZED AND LOCALIZED AGGRESSIVE PERIODONTITIS PATIENTSBy Bindu Reddy, D.D.S.A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at the Virginia Commonwealth UniversityVirginia Commonwealth University, 2004Major Director: Joseph V. Califano, D.D.S., Ph.D.Associate Professor, Department of Periodontics Periodontitis is an inflammatory disease involving the supporting structures of the dentition. Many studies have shown that there is a relationship between periodontal disease, the presence of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and systemic disease such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes mellitus. The purpose of this study was to measure serum Interleukin-6 levels in generalized and localized aggressive periodontitis and non-periodontitis patients and look for relationships with measures of disease severity. We also examined variables known to have a relationship with IL-6. A total of 172 subjects, comprising three periodontal subgroups, non-periodontitis (NP=61), generalized aggressive periodontitis (GAP=77), and localized aggressive periodontitis (LAP= 34), had serum samples evaluated for IL-6 levels using a highly sensitive ELISA test. The IL-6 levels were compared with clinical and demographic data including age, race, gender, number of teeth, probing depth, attachment loss, bleeding index, plaque index, gingival index, cotinine levels, smoking status, and CRP levels. Using multiple regression analysis, smoking status (p=0.0015) was the only variable found to have a significant relationship with IL-6 levels for all three groups

Frequency, risk factors and materno-foetal outcomes among cases of Placenta previa at a tertiary care hospital: a two year study

Background: Placenta previa refers to the presence of placental tissue that extends over the internal cervical os.  Placenta previa is linked to maternal hypovolemia, anaemia, and long hospital stay and with prematurity, low birth weight, low APGAR score in newborn. So it is very important to identify the condition at an early date to warn the condition thereby reducing the maternal and foetal morbidity and mortality. The present study was aimed to estimate the prevalence of PP, its associated predisposing risk factors and maternal morbidity, mortality and the perinatal outcome.Methods: A prospective observational study for two years was conducted at a tertiary care hospital. Pregnant mothers with >28 weeks of age with H/o ante partum haemorrhage were screened for placenta previa, confirmed by ultra sonography and included in the study. Clinical history, obstetric examination was done and followed up till the delivery. Maternal and foetal outcomes were recorded. Data analyzed by using SPSS version 20.Results: 1.4% incidence of PP was noted, mean age of group was 29.17±1.6 years. Age group of 21-30 years, multiparity Gravida 2-4, previous history of caesarean section and less number of ante natal checkups were significant risk factors and LSCS was most common outcome. Prematurity, low birth weight and APGAR <7 score for 1 minute was common foetal outcomes.Conclusions: Our study strongly suggests foetal surveillance programmes in cases of placenta previa. Measures should be made to bring awareness about PP, in urban slums and to increase medical checkups regularly. Making USG mandatory during every ANC and referral of cases of PP to tertiary care centres would definitely reduce the chances of morbidity and mortality

Exploring the Existing and Unknown Side Effects of Privacy Preserving Data Mining Algorithms

The data mining sanitization process involves converting the data by masking the sensitive data and then releasing it to public domain. During the sanitization process, side effects such as hiding failure, missing cost and artificial cost of the data were observed. Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) algorithms were developed for the sanitization process to overcome information loss and yet maintain data integrity. While these PPDM algorithms did provide benefits for privacy preservation, they also made sure to solve the side effects that occurred during the sanitization process. Many PPDM algorithms were developed to reduce these side effects. There are several PPDM algorithms created based on different PPDM techniques. However, previous studies have not explored or justified why non-traditional side effects were not given much importance. This study reported the findings of the side effects for the PPDM algorithms in a newly created web repository. The research methodology adopted for this study was Design Science Research (DSR). This research was conducted in four phases, which were as follows. The first phase addressed the characteristics, similarities, differences, and relationships of existing side effects. The next phase found the characteristics of non-traditional side effects. The third phase used the Privacy Preservation and Security Framework (PPSF) tool to test if non-traditional side effects occur in PPDM algorithms. This phase also attempted to find additional unknown side effects which have not been found in prior studies. PPDM algorithms considered were Greedy, POS2DT, SIF_IDF, cpGA2DT, pGA2DT, sGA2DT. PPDM techniques associated were anonymization, perturbation, randomization, condensation, heuristic, reconstruction, and cryptography. The final phase involved creating a new online web repository to report all the side effects found for the PPDM algorithms. A Web repository was created using full stack web development. AngularJS, Spring, Spring Boot and Hibernate frameworks were used to build the web application. The results of the study implied various PPDM algorithms and their side effects. Additionally, the relationship and impact that hiding failure, missing cost, and artificial cost have on each other was also understood. Interestingly, the side effects and their relationship with the type of data (sensitive or non-sensitive or new) was observed. As the web repository acts as a quick reference domain for PPDM algorithms. Developing, improving, inventing, and reporting PPDM algorithms is necessary. This study will influence researchers or organizations to report, use, reuse, or develop better PPDM algorithms

Correlation of Pap smear and colposcopic findings in relation to histopathological findings among women attending a tertiary care hospital: a two year study

Background: Cervical malignancy is ranked second among the malignancies in females with breast carcinoma the first. Screening for cervical cancer by conventional cytology and supported by colposcopy and histopathology can easily identify the premalignant lesions and also other non-invasive inflammatory lesions of the cervix. Objective of this study was to find the correlation of Pap smear, colposcopic findings and colposcopic guide biopsy in evaluation of cervical lesions in women and to analyze the various risk factorsMethods: A prospective study for two years was conducted by department of obstetrics among women aged from 20-60 years. Socio demographic data, clinical history and examination were done and findings noted. Pap smear, colposcopy and colposcopic guided biopsy was done and findings were noted and analyzed foe sensitivity, specificity and compared with Pap smear.Results: In present study sensitivity of Pap smear for detecting lesions above LSIL was 28%, specificity 99.32%, PPV was 93.47%, negative predictive value 76.21% and accuracy of Pap smear was 78%. The sensitivity of colposcopy in detection of low grade lesions and above came out to be 80.2%, specificity 82.14%, positive predictive value 66.78%, negative predictive value 86.78% and accuracy of colposcopy was 84.65%.The incidence of preinvasive lesions (LSIL and HSIL) was 33.6% with LSIL (19.2%) and HSIL (14.4%) and of invasive lesions was 9.6%.Conclusions: This study suggests that accuracy of detection of cervical abnormalities is higher when cytology, colposcopic biopsy and colposcopy are used complimentarily in diagnosis of cervical lesions. Colposcopy eliminates the need for repeated follow up as in Pap smear which has low sensitivity

Simulation of High Step-Up Resonant Parallel LC Converter for Grid Connected Renewable Energy Sources

With the rapid improvement of large-scale renewable energy sources and HVDC grid, it is a capable alternative to connect the renewable energy sources to the HVDC grid with a pure dc system, in which high-power high-voltage step-up dc–dc converters are the key equipment to transmit the electrical energy. This paper presents a High step up LC converter it can achieve high voltage gain using an LC parallel resonant tank.Also provided zero voltage switching (ZVS) technology under switch turn-On condition also at turn-Off conditions at main power switches by rectifying diodes to reduce the conduction losses. The operation principle of the converter and its resonant parameter selection is presented in this paper. The operation principle of the converter has been successfully verified with the help of MATLAB/SIMULINK

Psycho-Social Variables of Elementary School Children with Spelling Difficulties in relation to their Academic Achievement

Accurate spelling is a complex act that requires cognitive and linguistic knowledge of the phonological, morphological, syntactical and semantic principles of language. Students with disabilities frequently exhibit spelling difficulties related to language learning and are inefficient in cognitive processing. These difficulties often are developmental in nature. The present study is conducted on 222 children with spelling difficulties of five Taluks of Kerala State. Remediation of spelling difficulties in children requires comprehensive assessment. In this article, the researchers discuss about the theory related to spelling disabilities, assessment, remediation and psychosocial correlates of spelling difficulties in children. The major findings of the study state that there is a significant positive correlation between psycho-social variables and academic achievement of children with spelling difficulties. The authors also highlighted the need for early intervention and use of various remedial strategies to overcome spelling difficulties in children

Effect of Various Plant Extracts on Dry Root Rot of Chillies Caused by Sclerotium rolfsii

Eight different plant extracts were evaluated&nbsp;in vitro&nbsp;against&nbsp;Sclerotium rolfsii&nbsp;causing dry root rot in chillies. Among these, leaf extract of neem (Azadirachta indica)&nbsp;caused maximum inhibition of mycelial growth (80.74%), followed by periwinkle&nbsp;Vinca rosea&nbsp;(78.8%) and bottlebrush (Callistemon, 74.8%) respectively. Sclerotial production was inhibited to an extent of 11% and the inhibition caused was maximum with neem extract, followed by&nbsp;Polyalthia longifolia&nbsp;and&nbsp;V. rosea&nbsp;extracts. Though sclerotial germination was inhibited by 30% to 95% in various treatments, the most effective treatment was that of neem leaf extract (95%), followed by ginger extract (92%)

Facial Emotions and Behaviour Monitoring System using DNN

&nbsp; In this paper, Machine Learning Algorithms are used to implement the proposed approach to identify social distance, face masks, drowsiness detection, age-gender detection, and emotion detection. While dealing with social distancing initially, we need to detect humans’ faces, which are available by using COCO (Common Objects in Context) datasets, and later on, polygon-shaped ROI (Rectangular-region of Interest) is warped with a rectangle, which helps to find the distance from each centroid (person). Similarly, we predict the facemask, age-gender, emotion, and drowsiness altogether using frontal-face detection and eye-detection via haarcascade dataset loaded into Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to train and test the models on colour mapped images. In the proposed model, we are using machine-learning techniques such as linear discriminant Analysis (LDA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for age-gender detection and emotion detection, K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) for Social Distancing, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for facemask detection and drowsiness detection. The accuracy of proposed system depends on frame (i.e., 88.2%, 89.7%, 95.1% and 98.3% in 0~0.2s, 0.2~0.6s, 0.6~1s, &gt;1s time windows respectively). The accuracy even depends upon the distance away from the camera (i.e., 60.4%, 73.9%, 89.3%, 95.2%, and 62.2% in &gt;15, 15~10, 10~6, 6~0.5, &lt;0.5 meters respectively). The resultant average accuracy of all the models is 96.3%, which is capable to predict various tasks as said above. This complete model is made accessible to users via a standalone software/Desktop GUI. The proposed approach is promising for performing all the tasks and activities more accurately and efficiently.the systemic health of the patient and avoiding possible drug interaction

Compatibility of Biocontrol Agent Trichoderma viride with Various Pesticides

Compatibility of&nbsp;Trichoderma viride&nbsp;with 25 pesticides was evaluated&nbsp;in vitro. Among six seed-treatment chemicals tested, T. viride showed a high compatibility with the insecticide Imidacloprid (7.6cm mycelial growth), followed by Mancozeb (6.3cm) and Tebuconazole (3.7cm). Contact fungicides, viz., Pencycuron and Propineb were found to be fully compatible with&nbsp;T. viride. Among the 10 herbicides also tested, the fungus was highly compatible with Imazathafir (9.0cm) followed by 2,4-D Sodium salt (8.9cm) and Oxyfluoforen (6.5cm) while being totally incompatible with systemic fungicides like Carbendazim, Hexaconazole, Tebuconazole and Propiconazole

EFFECT OF MYOPIA ON PRIMARY OPEN ANGLE GLAUCOMA

Objective: It is a retrospective study to evaluate the effect of myopia on primary open-angle glaucoma by classifying the eyes into NMG (non-myopic glaucoma), HMG (highly myopic glaucoma) And MMG (mild to moderate myopic glaucoma). Methods: The study was performed on 120 patients with primary open-angle glaucoma who were medically treated. Any participant who had surgery done was excluded from the study. The relation between glaucoma and different myopia and progression were assessed on the basis of age, gender, risk factors. Results: Out of the 120 cases assessed, 46 [38 percent] were female and 74 [62 percent] were males. On the basis of age there were 9 cases between 31-40 y, 30 cases between the ages 41-50, 40 cases between 51-60, 32 cases between 61-70 and 9 cases between 71-80, on the basis of myopia 59 [49 percent] were NMG 47 [39 percent] were MMG and 14 [12 percent] were HMG. On the basis of risk factors,12 of them had Diabetes Mellitus, 7 had Hypertension, 7 had a history of steroid use, 3 had a history of migraines and 6 of them had a family history of glaucoma. In the observed one year period 73 percent if the cases were not progressive while 27 percent were progressive. In this study, it has been observed that the males are more commonly affected and the age group with the most cases was the 51 to 60 age group. The majority of the cases showed no risk factors though Diabetes Mellitus is the most common. The progression of the disease is seen more frequently in cases associated with Diabetes Mellitus and Hypertension. In MMG 12 out of the 47 cases were progressive and in NMG 15 out of the 59 cases were progressive. Conclusion: Though high myopia is important in the pathogenesis of glaucoma there was no evidence that high myopia increases the progression of the disease of the 14 cases, only 5 were progressive