Study of the Urinary Ratio of 6 β-Hydroxycortisol/Cortisol as a Biomarker of CYP3A4 Activity in Egyptian Patients with Chronic Liver Diseases

The urinary ratio of 6 β-hydroxycortisol/cortisol (6 β-OHC/C) as a biomarker of CYP3A4 metabolizing activity has been studied in Egyptian patients with chronic liver cirrhosis associated with previous hepatic Schistosomiasis infection to determine any possible alteration in enzyme activity. The ratio of 6-β OHC/C was determined in morning urine samples collected from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in healthy adults (n = 36) and patients with liver cirrhosis (n = 57). The median age for control was 27 years (range: 18–50 years) and 50 years (range: 27–75 years) for patients. 6 β-OHC was detected in urine by ELIZA kits (Stabiligen, France). Patients with liver cirrhosis were categorized according to Child Pugh Classification into Child B (n = 28) and Child C (n = 29) classes. Cholestasis was observed in 9/28 of Child B class and 8/29 of Child C class of patients. The control subjects showed gender-related difference in the urinary ratio of 6 β-OHC/C. A significant reduction (P < 0.001) in 6 β-OHC/C ratio was observed only in Child C patients in comparison with control subjects. Regression analysis showed a significant correlation (P < 0.05) between 6 β-OHC/C ratio and serum albumin. The influence of cholestasis on the urinary ratio of 6-β OHC/C was observed on cirrhotic patients of Child B class. In conclusion, patients with chronic liver cirrhosis might have a reduction of metabolizing activity of CYP3A4 enzymes which could be identified by measuring the urinary ratio of 6 β-OHC/C. This reduction is more apparent in severe liver injury (Child C class). Therefore, it is important to understand the metabolic fate of drugs metabolized by 3A4 enzymes in patients with liver cirrhosis to avoid drug accumulation that might lead to development of drug toxicity

Exploiting Semantic Annotations and Q-Learning for Constructing an Efficient Hierarchy/Graph Texts Organization

Tremendous growth in the number of textual documents has produced daily requirements for effective development to explore, analyze, and discover knowledge from these textual documents. Conventional text mining and managing systems mainly use the presence or absence of key words to discover and analyze useful information from textual documents. However, simple word counts and frequency distributions of term appearances do not capture the meaning behind the words, which results in limiting the ability to mine the texts. This paper proposes an efficient methodology for constructing hierarchy/graph-based texts organization and representation scheme based on semantic annotation and Q-learning. This methodology is based on semantic notions to represent the text in documents, to infer unknown dependencies and relationships among concepts in a text, to measure the relatedness between text documents, and to apply mining processes using the representation and the relatedness measure. The representation scheme reflects the existing relationships among concepts and facilitates accurate relatedness measurements that result in a better mining performance. An extensive experimental evaluation is conducted on real datasets from various domains, indicating the importance of the proposed approach

Resistance Induction and Direct Antifungal Activity of Some Monoterpenes against Rhizoctonia solani, the Causal of Root Rot in Common Bean

This study was conducted to evaluate eco-friendly control agents (carvone, cuminaldehyde, and linalool) against Rhizoctonia solani, which causes root rot disease either by induction of defense response or direct antifungal activity. The induction of resistance was examined by detecting the transcription of defense genes and the effect of the tested control agents on the growth and the yield of common bean plants. The growth of R. solani was significantly inhibited after treatment with the tested compounds compared to the untreated control under laboratory conditions. The disease severity of root rot was decreased in common bean plants treated with the tested compounds compared to untreated control plants under greenhouse conditions. Common bean plants treated with the tested control agents expressed defense genes (Phenylalanine ammonia lyase and &beta;-1,3-Glucanase) involved in jasmonic acid (JA) and salicylic acid (SA) signaling pathways with 2&ndash;5 fold higher than the control. Treatment of common beans with the tested control agents and fungicide significantly improved the growth and yield characteristics of common bean. Therefore, the use of monoterpenes could be a novel strategy to control this pathogen and consider the first report