Phytochemical Screening and In vitro Evaluation of Pharmacological Activities of Aphanamixis polystachya (Wall) Parker Fruit Extracts

Purpose: To investigate the crude n-hexane, ethyl acetate and methanol extracts of Aphanamixis polystachya fruit for their cytotoxic, antimicrobial, antioxidant and thrombolytic activities.Methods: The fruit extracts were screened for major phytochemical compounds using in vitro established procedures. Antimicrobial and cytotoxic studies of the fruit extracts were conducted using disc diffusion and brine shrimp lethality bioassay methods, respectively, while an in vitro thrombolytic model was used to assess the clot lysis effect of the extracts with streptokinase as positive control. Antioxidant activity was evaluated by free radical scavenging activity using 2, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and nitric oxide assay as well as total phenolic content.Results: The fruit extracts were a rich source of phytochemicals and among the extracts n-hexane extract showed highest antimicrobial activity against Shigella dysenteriae (zone of inhibition: 9.7±0.2 mm) and Candida albicans (zone of inhibition: 8.8±0.3 mm) at a concentration of 1000ìg/disc, whereas at the same concentration methanol extract showed highest zone of inhibition, 10.1±0.4mm, against Staphylococcus aureus. Compared to potassium permanganate with a median lethal concentration(LC50) of 13.23 ìg/ml in the brine shrimp lethality assay, the LC50 of n-hexane, ethyl acetate and methanol extracts were 15.77, 17.51 and 141.37 ìg/ml, respectively. All the extracts showed significant clot lysis activity (p < 0.001) with reference to negative control and % clot lysis of the extracts were approximately 13. Notable antioxidant activity of the methanol extract was observed unlike the other extracts.Conclusion: The results of the study demonstrated the potential cytotoxic, thrombolytic and antioxidant activities of the fruit extracts of A.  polystachya and therefore further studies on the isolation and identification of active principles are required.Keywords: Aphanamixis polystachya, Antimicrobial, Antioxidant, Cytotoxic, Thrombolytic, Phytochemical screenin

Boys are more stunted than girls in Sub-Saharan Africa: a meta-analysis of 16 demographic and health surveys

BACKGROUND: Many studies in sub-Saharan Africa have occasionally reported a higher prevalence of stunting in male children compared to female children. This study examined whether there are systematic sex differences in stunting rates in children under-five years of age, and how the sex differences in stunting rates vary with household socio-economic status. METHODS: Data from the most recent 16 demographic and health surveys (DHS) in 10 sub-Saharan countries were analysed. Two separate variables for household socio-economic status (SES) were created for each country based on asset ownership and mothers' education. Quintiles of SES were constructed using principal component analysis. Sex differentials with stunting were assessed using Student's t-test, chi square test and binary logistic regressions. RESULTS: The prevalence and the mean z-scores of stunting were consistently lower amongst females than amongst males in all studies, with differences statistically significant in 11 and 12, respectively, out of the 16 studies. The pooled estimates for mean z-scores were -1.59 for boys and -1.46 for girls with the difference statistically significant (p < 0.001). The stunting prevalence was also higher in boys (40%) than in girls (36%) in pooled data analysis; crude odds ratio 1.16 (95% CI 1.12–1.20); child age and individual survey adjusted odds ratio 1.18 (95% CI 1.14–1.22). Male children in households of the poorest 40% were more likely to be stunted compared to females in the same group, but the pattern was not consistent in all studies, and evaluation of the SES/sex interaction term in relation to stunting was not significant for the surveys. CONCLUSION: In sub-Saharan Africa, male children under five years of age are more likely to become stunted than females, which might suggest that boys are more vulnerable to health inequalities than their female counterparts in the same age groups. In several of the surveys, sex differences in stunting were more pronounced in the lowest SES groups

Ultra wide Band (UWB) Based Early Breast Cancer Detection using Artificial Intelligence

Breast cancer is a silent killer malady among women community all over the world. The death rate is increased as it has no syndrome at early stage. There is no remedy; hence, detection at the early stage is crucial. Usually, women do not go to clinic/hospital for regular breast health checkup unless they are sick. This is due to long queue and waiting time in hospital, high cost, people‟s busy schedule, and so on. Recently, several research works has been done on early breast cancer detection using Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technolo-gy because of its non-invasive and health-friendly nature. Each proposed UWB system has its own limitation including system complexity, expensive, expert operable in clinic. To overcome these problems, a system is required which should be simple, cost-effective and user-friendly. This chapter presents the de-velopment of a user friendly and affordable UWB system for early breast can-cer detection utilizing Artificial Neural Network (ANN). A feed-forward back propagation Neural Network (NN) with 'feedforwardnet' function is utilized to detect the cancer existence, size as well as location in 3-dimension (3D). The hardware incorporates UWB transceiver and a pair of pyramidal shaped patch antenna to transmit and receive the UWB signals. The extracted features from the received signals have been fed into the NN module to train, validate, and test. The average system‟s performance efficiency in terms of tumor/cancer ex-istence, size and location are approximately 100%, 92.43% and 91.31 % respec-tively. Here, in our system, use of „feedforwardnet‟ function; detection-combination of tumor/cancer existence, size and location in 3D along with im-proved performance is a new addition compared to other related researches and/or existing systems. This may become as a promising user-friendly system in near future for early breast cancer detection in domestic environment with low cost and to save precious life