Expression of Ghrelin and GHSR-1a in Long Term Diabetic Rat's Kidney

The aim of this work was to study the relative ghrelin and growth hormone secretagogue receptor (GHS-R)1a gene expression in the kidney of long-term diabetic rats. Forty male Wistar albino rats were divided into four groups: C- control group, DI- one month diabetic rats group, DII- two months diabetic rats group, and DIII- three months diabetic rats group. Diabetes was induced by streptozotocin STZ (40mg/kg i.p). The rats were decapitated under ketamine anesthesia and their kidney tissues were removed. Tissue GHS-R mRNA levels, ghrelin expression, and histopathological damage scores were compared. Dilatation in the distal tubules, epithelial desquamation into the lumen of the tubules and transparent tubules showing glycogen vacuolation were observed in all the diabetic groups. Ghrelin immunoreactivity was significantly higher in group DI compared to group C, whereas in groups DII and DIII, ghrelin immunoreactivity was similar with group C. GHSR-1a mRNA level in group DIII was significantly lower than in group C. As a result, ghrelin immunoreactivity increased at the beginning of diabetes; however, with increase in the duration of diabetes ghrelin immunoreactivity approached to the control values. The expression of GHSR-1a mRNA decreased with increase in diabetes duration. It seemed that down-regulation of GHSR-1a contributed to the renal damage induced by long-term diabetes

Identify the Best Alternatives to Help the Diffusion of Teleconsultation by Using the Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM)

Healthcare is a very important issue in the U.S. and in the entire world and the total healthcare spending in the United States has increased over the years and by the end of 2021 it will reach up to 20% of the U.S. GDP. The increase of health expenditure, a growing U.S. population, and a projected physician shortage are the top three trends in healthcare industry. The literature highlights that researchers from different fields and with several interests recognize the important role of telemedicine in the healthcare industry. Teleconsultation is an advanced telemedicine application that offers great promise to address some of the challenges raised by these trends, and it is increasingly being included in discussions of medicine’s future. Telemedicine faces many challenges in legislation and regulation, finance, technical, ethical and culture, but still the future is squarely on telemedicine. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is integrated with Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM) to identify the best alternatives to help the diffusion of teleconsultation

Traffic Event Related Blog Post Classification by Using Traffic Related Named Entities

Real-time monitoring of traffic flow requires physical sensors to be deployed on road networks. Development of such systems might be impractical due to deployment costs of sensors on large scale networks. This study presents a method to extract traffic event related tweets from social streams in order to employ users of social media as human sensors of traffic conditions or events. The proposed method offers a cost effective way of monitoring events or conditions affecting traffic flow. The method consists of three steps. The first step involves natural language processing tasks for preprocessing the blog posts. The second step extracts a set of traffic event related named entities from blog post texts using the model that is constructed with Conditional Random Fields. The third step includes classification in order to detect blog posts reporting events or conditions affecting traffic flow. The proposed method is experimentally evaluated on a set of tweets collected in one month under varying feature sets. The results show the potential of the approach for traffic monitoring and reveals that the use of traffic related named entities increases the classification accuracy

Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) in Turkey: Results of a nationwide multicenter study

PubMed ID: 15643295Familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) is an autosomal recessive disease that is prevalent among eastern Mediterranean populations, mainly non-Ashkenazi Jews, Armenians, Turks, and Arabs. Since a large proportion of all the FMF patients in the world live in Turkey, the Turkish FMF Study Group (FMF-TR) was founded to develop a patient registry database and analyze demographic, clinical, and genetic features. The cohort was composed of 2838 patients (mean age, 23.0 ± 13.33 yr; range, 2-87 yr), with a male:female ratio of 1.2:1. There was a mean period of 6.9 ± 7.65 years from disease onset to diagnosis; the period was about 2 years shorter for each decade since 1981. Ninety-four percent of patients were living in the central-western parts of the country; however, their familial origins (70% from the central-eastern and Black Sea regions) reflected not only the ongoing east to west migration, but also the historical roots of FMF in Turkey. Patients' clinical features included peritonitis (93.7%), fever (92.5%), arthritis (47.4%), pleuritis (31.2%), myalgia (39.6%), and erysipelas-like erythema (20.9%). Arthritis, arthralgia, myalgia, and erysipelas-like erythema were significantly more frequent (p < 0.001) among patients with disease onset before the age of 18 years. Genetic analysis of 1090 patients revealed that M694V was the most frequent mutation (51.4%), followed by M680I (14.4%) and V726A (8.6%). Patients with the M694V/M694V genotype were found to have an earlier age of onset and higher frequencies of arthritis and arthralgia compared with the other groups (both p < 0.001). In contrast to other reported studies, there was no correlation between amyloidosis and M694V homozygosity in this cohort. However, amyloidosis was still remarkably frequent in our patients (12.9%), and it was prevalent (27.8%) even among the 18 patients with a disease onset after age 40 years. Twenty-two patients (0.8%) had nonamyloid glomerular diseases. The high prevalence of vasculitides (0.9% for polyarteritis nodosa and 2.7% for Henoch-Schönlein purpura) and high frequency of pericarditis (1.4%) were striking findings in the cohort. Phenotype II cases (those patients with amyloidosis as the presenting or only manifestation of disease) were rare (0.3% or less). There was a high rate of a past diagnosis of acute rheumatic fever, which suggested a possible misdiagnosis in children with FMF presenting with recurrent arthritis. To our knowledge, this is the largest series of patients with FMF reported from 1 country. We describe the features of the disease in the Turkish population and show that amyloidosis is still a substantial problem