Language and the Parameters of Power in Medical Discourse in Spoken Egyptian Arabic

The present study is an investigation of the parameters of power following in medical encounters in spoken Egyptian Arabic. The analysis will focus on the aspects of discourse: speech acts especially directives such as questions, orders and commands, features related to turn taking like different types of overlap, adjacency pairs and the concept of preference, Grice's concept of implicature and the politeness theory with its strategies for Face Threatening Acts.  The study aims at drawing conclusions concerning power and ways of claiming it in Egyptian Arabic medical encounters. Thus, the study differs from previous studies not only in investigating the Arabic language but also in the aspects of analysis, which has not been examined before because each of the previous studies concentrates on only one aspect of analysis

Parkinsonism Relat Disord

Background: Several studies suggested a significant role of epigenetic changes, including alterations in miRNA, histone modifications, and DNA methylation of α-synuclein (SNCA) in Parkinson’s disease (PD) pathogenicity. As of yet, only very few studies have been carried out in this field in Africa and none in Sudan. Materials and methods: We collected DNA from 172 Sudanese individuals (90 cases, 82 controls) who donated saliva for DNA extraction (mean age of onset: 40.6 ± 22.4 years). A family history of PD was evident in 64 patients. DNA preparation and bisulfite sequencing of SNCAintron1 was performed as described earlier. Results: Of the fourteen analyzed CpGs of SNCAintron1, CpGs 16-23 were hypomethylated in PD (P-value ranged from 0.023 to 0.003). P–values improved, when sporadic cases were excluded from the analysis. Conclusion: We identified the presence of a specific pattern of DNA methylation in a young Sudanese cohort of familial PD, which confirms the importance of the methylation of SNCAintron1 for PD. This phenomenon appears to be independent of ethnicity, the impact of environmental factors, drug history, or familial clustering