Effect of multimodal interventions on pain and activities of daily living among the elderly with osteoarthritis

The aim of the present study was to assess the effect of multimodal interventions on pain and activities of daily living among the elderly with         knee osteoarthritis attending Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation OPD at General Hospital Alappuzha,Kerala. Objectives were to assess the level of joint pain in elderly with knee osteoarthritis, to assess the ability of elderly to perform activities of daily living, to evaluate the effect of multimodal interventions on pain and activities of daily living of elderly with knee osteoarthritis and to find out association between multimodal interventions and analgesic usage. The investigator adopted quantitative experimental approach for the study and research design was quasi experimental non equivalent control group design. The sample size was 74 elderly patients diagnosed as knee osteoarthritis selected using purposive sampling technique. A structured interview schedule was used to assess the socio personal and clinical data; pain and activities of daily living were assessed by numerical pain rating scale and Katz index respectively. Routine care was given to control group, while the experimental group underwent multimodal interventions which included educational session, isometric exercises and moist heat application for three weeks along with routine care. After three weeks, post-test was done in both groups. The findings revealed that there was a significant reduction in pain (P<0.001), improvement in activities of daily living (P<0.001) and also reduction in frequency of analgesic intake (p< 0.001) among elderly with knee osteoarthritis

Incidence of ventilator associated pneumonia and its risk factors

Hospitals are intended to heal the sick; but they are also sources of infection. Ironically, the advances in medicine are partly responsible for the fact that today; hospital infections are the leading cause of death worldwide. Newer technology and latest surgical and medical diagnostic methods and treatment procedures have increased the number of invasive techniques leading to higher chances of nosocomial infection. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death due to nosocomial infections. Intubation & mechanical ventilation greatly increases the risk for ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). In developing country like India, such hospital-acquired infections have a significant impact on patient’s morbidity, mortality, hospital stay and on financial concerns of the patient, hospital and community. The present investigation was aimed to determine the incidence of ventilator associated pneumonia in the neurosurgery intensive care unit of a tertiary care centre and to determine the risk factors of ventilator associated pneumonia. A total of 30 samples belonging to the age group of 15 to 75 years who where on mechanical ventilator for more than 48 hours in the neurosurgery intensive care unit of a tertiary care centre were selected using convenience sampling. The incidence of VAP was estimated to be 30%. The risk factors identified for the development of VAP was found to be combined head and cervical spine injury (P=0.001), associated injuries (P=0.035), additional surgeries (P=0.025), nasogastric feeding (P=0.001), intake of immuno suppressive drugs (P=0.004), pre operative antibiotics (p=0.000) and duration of mechanical ventilation >5 days (P=0.000). The mortality among patients with VAP was found to be higher than patients without VAP (88.9% than non VAP patients)

Synthetic Biology’s Latest Trends in Antimicrobial Resistance and Biofilm

Recent instances of novel biological circuits that enable cells to gain biosynthetic skills demonstrate synthetic biology’s therapeutic potential. Synthetic biology is a branch of biology whose primary role is to build completely functional biological systems from the smallest basic elements such as DNA, proteins, and other organic molecules to complex bacteria. This review briefly mentions some novel way of synthetic strategies like bacterial modelling, two-component systems, synthetic peptide, and synthetic flavonoids used for targeting biofilm and drug-stable microbial communities. Bacterial modelling was mainly done in Escherichia coli and Mycoplasma using different strategies like introducing quorum sensing devices and CRISPR-mediated editing. Synthetic peptides are also one of the extensively studied ongoing areas which are produced from natural peptides taking as a template and altering amino acid position. Flavonoids are produced by two-step reaction and molecular hybridization methods. This kind of synthetic approach reported significant biofilm dispersion and lethal effects on clinically relevant bacteria like Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Streptococcus species and Klebsiella pneumonia

Human protein reference database as a discovery resource for proteomics

The rapid pace at which genomic and proteomic data is being generated necessitates the development of tools and resources for managing data that allow integration of information from disparate sources. The Human Protein Reference Database (http://www.hprd.org) is a web-based resource based on open source technologies for protein information about several aspects of human proteins including protein–protein interactions, post-translational modifications, enzyme–substrate relationships and disease associations. This information was derived manually by a critical reading of the published literature by expert biologists and through bioinformatics analyses of the protein sequence. This database will assist in biomedical discoveries by serving as a resource of genomic and proteomic information and providing an integrated view of sequence, structure, function and protein networks in health and disease

A manually curated functional annotation of the human X chromosome

Since the human genomic sequence first became publicly available1, 2, almost all annotations of individual chromosomes have been carried out by the groups involved in the sequencing. We carried out a detailed annotation of the human X chromosome using data generated by the Sanger Institute and other centers (obtained from ftp.sanger.ac.uk/pub/sequences/human/Chr_X). Here, we report the salient features of our analysis of its genome, transcriptome and proteome..

Development of Human Protein Reference Database as an Initial Platform for Approaching Systems Biology in Humans

Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD) is an object database that integrates a wealth of information relevant to the function of human proteins in health and disease. Data pertaining to thousands of protein-protein interactions, posttranslational modifications, enzyme/substrate relationships, disease associations, tissue expression, and subcellular localization were extracted from the literature for a nonredundant set of 2750 human proteins. Almost all the information was obtained manually by biologists who read and interpreted >300,000 published articles during the annotation process. This database, which has an intuitive query interface allowing easy access to all the features of proteins, was built by using open source technologies and will be freely available at http://www.hprd.org to the academic community. This unified bioinformatics platform will be useful in cataloging and mining the large number of proteomic interactions and alterations that will be discovered in the postgenomic era