Mechanical properties and drug release behavior of PCL/zein coated 45S5 bioactive glass scaffolds for bone tissue engineering application.

This article presents data related to the research article entitled "The effect of coating type on mechanical properties and controlled drug release of PCL/zein coated 45S5 bioactive glass scaffolds for bone tissue engineering" [1]. We provide data on mechanical properties, in vitro bioactivity and drug release of bioactive glass (BG) scaffolds coated by poly (ε-caprolactone) (PCL) and zein used as a controlled release device for tetracycline hydrochloride (TCH). By coating the BG scaffolds with PCL or PCL/zein blend the mechanical properties of the scaffolds were substantially improved, i.e., the compressive strength increased from 0.004±0.001 MPa (uncoated BG scaffolds) to 0.15±0.02 MPa (PCL/zein coated BG scaffolds). A dense bone-like apatite layer formed on the surface of PCL/zein coated scaffolds immersed for 14 days in simulated body fluid (SBF). The data describe control of drug release and in vitro degradation behavior of coating by engineering the concentration of zein. Thus, the developed scaffolds exhibit attractive properties for application in bone tissue engineering research

Swimming exercise and clove oil can improve memory by molecular responses modification and reduce dark cells in rat model of Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is marked by reduced acetylcholine receptor (AChR) density and an increase in nucleotide oligomerization domain (NOD)-like receptors NLR family, pyrin domain containing 1 (NLRP1). We examined the effect of swimming and consumption of clove supplements on memory, dark cells, and α7nAChR and NLRP1 mRNA and protein expression in the hippocampus of the rat model of AD. Forty-eight rats were divided into six groups: sham (sh), healthy-control (HC), Alzheimer (-control (AC), -training (AT), -training-supplement (ATS), and -supplement (AS)). Alzheimer was induced by injection of amyloid β 1 - 42 (Aβ 1 - 42). Swimming exercise protocol (30 min) and gavaging clove supplement (0.1 mg/kg) were administered daily for three weeks. The results indicated that in response to AD, α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (α7nAChR) mRNA and protein rate (p = 0.001) and memory (p = 0.003) were significantly decreased. In contrast, NLRP1 mRNA and protein rate (p = 0.001) and dark cells (p = 0.001) were significantly increased. This is while exercise and clove supplementation improved Alzheimer-induced changes in α7nAChR, NLRP1, memory, and dark cells (p &lt; 0/05). The present study indicated that exercising and consuming clove supplementation could improve memory by increasing α7nAChR and decreasing NLRP1 and dark cells. </p

Epidemiology of Poisonings in Shahid Beheshti Hospital in Kashan, Iran

Background: Poisoning is a major public health problem and is one of the most common causes of referral to emergency departments. The aim of this study was to evaluate and define clinical and demographic details of poisoned patients who were admitted to Shahid Beheshti Hospital, Kashan, Iran in 2010.Methods: In this descriptive-analytical and retrospective study, necessary data were collected from medical records of admitted poisoned patients and were evaluated prospectively and statistically analyzed and presented in the form of tables and graphs.Results: Of 163 poisoned patients in this study, 47.6% were females and 52.4% were male. 88% of patients were from urban areas and the rest from rural areas. The most common reason of poisoning was suicide 50.6%, while 38.1% were accidental, and 11.3% had a variety of different reasons. Age group of 0-10 years was the most predominant affected group with 26.8% poisoned patients. The most common poisoning agents were clonazepam, acetaminophen, diazepam and methadone. Four patients in the study population died (2.4%).Conclusion: The medications are the leading causes of poisoning, especially in children. Therefore, parents are advised to keep the medicines correctly, out of sight and reach of children, read the label carefully; learn about their safety and the right way of their use. It is also recommended to immediately dispatch the poisoned child to the emergency department. Giving the crucial information about the poisoning to help the medical staff to treat the child effectively and quickly, reduce the hospitalization period, and possibility of child death

The devil is in the decoder

Many machine vision applications require predictions for every pixel of the input image (for example semantic segmentation, boundary detection). Models for such problems usually consist of encoders which decreases spatial resolution while learning a high-dimensional representation, followed by decoders who recover the original input resolution and result in low-dimensional predictions. While encoders have been studied rigorously, relatively few studies address the decoder side. Therefore this paper presents an extensive comparison of a variety of decoders for a variety of pixel-wise prediction tasks. Our contributions are: (1) Decoders matter: we observe significant variance in results between different types of decoders on various problems. (2) We introduce a novel decoder: bilinear additive upsampling. (3) We introduce new residual-like connections for decoders. (4) We identify two decoder types which give a consistently high performance