Study of drug utilization pattern in emergency medicine ward at a tertiary care teaching hospital

Background: The emergency department represents an important platform for conducting drug utilization studies as patients present with a wide spectrum of diseases in acute form. An irrational prescription adversely affects the prognosis and recovery of patients. Hence, the objective of our study was to evaluate the drug utilization pattern and to determine the rationality of prescription using WHO prescribing indicators in emergency medicine ward.Methods: After obtaining Institutional Ethical Committee approval, a prospective observational study was conducted over 2 months. The case records of 150 patients admitted to the emergency medicine ward, with a hospital stay of more than 24hrs were reviewed to analyze the prescription pattern during the initial 48hrs of admission. Case records of patients irrespective of age, sex and diagnosis were included in the study. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the results (SPSS version 20).Results: A total of 1014 drugs were prescribed from 150 case records with a mean age of 47±18 years. An average of 6.76 drugs was prescribed per prescription; percentage of encounters with at least an antimicrobial was 115 (76.66%). Injections were prescribed in all patients (100%) and only 416 (41.02%) drugs were prescribed by generic name and 657 (64.79%) drugs abided to the WHO essential drug list. Majority of patients received anti-ulcerogenic drugs followed by antimicrobials.Conclusions: There was a tendency of polypharmacy with overuse of PPIs and antimicrobials. There is need to rationalize the drug therapy in terms of increasing prescription of drugs from essential drug list by generic name

Insilico and Invitro anthelmintic properties of phytocompounds in Rostellularia quinquangularis (J. Koenig ex Roxb.) Nees

The present study aimed to evaluate the anthelmintic activity of various extracts of Rostellularia quinquangularis (R. quinquangularis) against adult Indian earthworms (Pheretima posthuma). Petroleum ether extract (PERQ), ethyl acetate extract (RQEA), and ethanol extract (RQEE) of R. quinquangularis were tested at different concentrations (10, 20, 50, and 100 mg/mL), along with the positive control (albendazole) and negative control (normal saline). Anthelmintic activity was assessed based on the duration of paralysis and mortality. The RQEE extract showed significant anthelmintic activity, with the highest activity observed at a concentration of 100 mg/mL, exhibiting paralysis time of 1.62 min and death times of 19.9 min, compared to the standard albendazole. Further, HR LC-MS analysis of the RQEE extract revealed the presence of various phytoconstituents based on m/z signals. Molecular docking analysis using AutoDock Vina indicated that Columbianetin, Dunnione, Cryptochlorogenic acid, Gaylussacin, Luvangetin, and Albendazole showed docking scores of -8.1, -7.9, -7.4, -7.3, -7.2, and -6.8 Kcal/mol, respectively. These results suggest that R. quinquangularis possesses potent anthelmintic activity, supporting its traditional use in medicinal practices.

Circular Economy Pathways for Municipal Wastewater Management in India: A Practitioner’s Guide

The 2030 Water Resources Group is a unique publicprivate- civil society partnership that helps governments to accelerate reforms that will ensure sustainable water resource management for the long term development and economic growth of their country. It does so by helping to change the “political economy” for water reform in the country through convening a wide range of actors and providing water resource analysis in ways that are digestible for politicians and business leaders. The 2030 WRG was launched in 2008 at the World Economic Forum and has been hosted by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) since 2012

Food access and diet quality are associated with quality of life outcomes among HIV-infected individuals in Uganda.

BACKGROUND: Food insecurity is associated with poor nutritional and clinical outcomes among people living with HIV/AIDS. Few studies investigate the link between food insecurity, dietary diversity and health-related quality of life among people living with HIV/AIDS. OBJECTIVE: We investigated whether household food access and individual dietary diversity are associated with health-related quality of life among people living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda. METHODS: We surveyed 902 people living with HIV/AIDS and their households from two clinics in Northern Uganda. Health-related quality of life outcomes were assessed using the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS)-HIV Survey. We performed multivariate regressions to investigate the relationship between health-related quality of life, household food insecurity and individual dietary diversity. RESULTS: People living with HIV/AIDS from severe food insecurity households have mean mental health status scores that are 1.7 points lower (p<.001) and physical health status scores that are 1.5 points lower (p<.01). Individuals with high dietary diversity have mean mental health status scores that were 3.6 points higher (p<.001) and physical health status scores that were 2.8 points higher (p<.05). CONCLUSIONS: Food access and diet quality are associated with health-related quality of life and may be considered as part of comprehensive interventions designed to mitigate psychosocial consequences of HIV

Molecular evolution of cyclin proteins in animals and fungi

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The passage through the cell cycle is controlled by complexes of cyclins, the regulatory units, with cyclin-dependent kinases, the catalytic units. It is also known that cyclins form several families, which differ considerably in primary structure from one eukaryotic organism to another. Despite these lines of evidence, the relationship between the evolution of cyclins and their function is an open issue. Here we present the results of our study on the molecular evolution of A-, B-, D-, E-type cyclin proteins in animals and fungi.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We constructed phylogenetic trees for these proteins, their ancestral sequences and analyzed patterns of amino acid replacements. The analysis of infrequently fixed atypical amino acid replacements in cyclins evidenced that accelerated evolution proceeded predominantly during paralog duplication or after it in animals and fungi and that it was related to aromorphic changes in animals. It was shown also that evolutionary flexibility of cyclin function may be provided by consequential reorganization of regions on protein surface remote from CDK binding sites in animal and fungal cyclins and by functional differentiation of paralogous cyclins formed in animal evolution.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results suggested that changes in the number and/or nature of cyclin-binding proteins may underlie the evolutionary role of the alterations in the molecular structure of cyclins and their involvement in diverse molecular-genetic events.</p

Correlation of fasting and postprandial triglyceride levels and carotid artery intimal medial thickness in type 2 diabetic patients

Background: Although the prevalence of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus is increasing worldwide, the prevalence of type 2 DM is rising more rapidly, because of sedentary lifestyle, increasing obesity &nbsp; and increased life expectancy. Objectives: To study correlation between fasting and postprandial triglyceride levels and Carotid artery intimal medial thickness (CIMT) in Type 2 Diabetic Patients. Material and Methods: This cross sectional observation study was done in Department of General Medicine, Mysore Medical College and Research Institute, Mysore, Karnataka, India during January 2019 to June 2020.&nbsp; &nbsp;Sample size was 50 and Simple Random sampling method was used. Results: The mean carotid IMT of subjects with postprandial triglycerides &lt; 200 with normal fasting triglyceride was 0.92±0.33.&nbsp; The&nbsp; mean&nbsp; carotid&nbsp; IMT&nbsp; of&nbsp; subjects with&nbsp; postprandial&nbsp; triglyceride&nbsp; 200-299 with&nbsp; normal&nbsp; fasting&nbsp; triglyceride&nbsp; was 1.52±0.57. The mean carotid IMT of subjects with postprandial triglycerides ≥300 with normal fasting triglycerides was 1.66±0.45. Conclusion: postprandial hypertriglyceridemia, despite normal fasting triglyceride levels, may be an independent risk factor for early atherosclerosis in type 2 diabetes. Hence evaluating not only for FTG but also PPTG level during clinical assessment of patients with type 2 diabetes is important

Object-oriented wrappers for the Linux kernel

Linux is an open-source operating system, which has increased in its popularity and size since its birth. Various studies have been conducted in literature on the evolution of the Linux kernel, which have shown that there are considerable maintenance problems arising out of the coupling issues in the Linux kernel and this may hamper the evolution of the kernel in future. We propose an object-oriented (OO) wrapper-based approach to Linux kernel to provide OO abstractions to external modules. As the major growth of the size of the Linux kernel is in device drivers, our approach provides substantial benefits in terms of developing the device drivers in C++, although the kernel is in C. Providing reusability and extensibility features to device drivers improves the maintainability of the kernel. The OO wrappers provide several benefits to module developers in terms of understandability, development ease, support for OO modules, etc. The design and implementation of C++ wrappers for Linux kernel and the performance of a device driver re-engineered in C++ are presented in this paper

Role of Computed Tomography (CT) in traumatic head injury evaluation – a cross-sectional study

Introduction: CT is the single primary modality in the evaluation of patients with acute head injuries. With these, a study was taken to find various clinico radiological patterns of head injuries and to correlate the CT features with clinical operative findings. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study carried in patients of head injury. The patients with a head injury, craniofacial trauma who underwent CT scanning were included in the study. Patients on the ventilator and with Glasgow coma scale &lt;6 were excluded. Patients were scanned using dual Slice CT, Siemens somatom Emotion duo. A P-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Total 223 patients were included, 76.2% were males and 73.5% were abnormal scans. Among all intracranial traumatic lesions (ITL) the incidence of multiple ITLs were the most common (35%) and the death rate was 12.6%. Temporal bone fractures (15.2%) were the highest. Conclusion: It was concluded that 21 – 40 years is the typical age group for head injuries, common among male and the incidence of mortality rate is more &gt; 61 years. MICTLs are the most frequent type of hematomas