Nebivolol might be Beneficial in Osteoporosis Treatment: A Hypothesis

Nebivolol is a β-blocker that is highly selective for β1-adrenergic receptors with vasodilating properties. This property can be attributed to an endothelial release of nitric oxide (NO). It has been reported that nebivolol also reduces intracellular oxidative stress. There are some studies conducted in humans and animal models which have shown that NO is an important regulator of bone metabolism. However, oxidative stress and antioxidant systems may play important roles in the pathogenesis of osteoporosis. In this paper, we hypothesized that nebivolol may have beneficial effects via nitric oxide and antioxidant action in osteoporosis treatment

Short-Term Outcome of Combined Corticosteriod and Local Anaestetic Therapy with Home-Based Exercıse Programme in Painful Shoulder Conditions

Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of combined local corticosteroid and anaestethic therapy with home exercise programme in the treatment of painful shoulder conditions. Methods: 40 mg Depomedrol® (methylprednisolone acetate) + 120 mg Citanest® (procaine hydrochloride) were parenterally administered into the subacromial region of 28 patients (17 female, mean age: 48 years; 11 male, mean age: 52 years) from a group of patients who have been suffering from shoulder pain for a period of at least two months and had received no benefit from previous treatments. Simultaneously, they were placed on a home-based shoulder exercise programme. The patients were seen two months later and questioned about their conditions. The data were evaluated together with clinical findings based on the range of motion (ROM) of the shoulder. Results: Twenty of 28 patients (71.42%) reported complete relief from pain, 5 patients or 17.85% stated that they had only partial relief of pain, and 3 patients (10.71%) said that the level of pain remained essentially the same. Nineteen of 28 patients (67.85%) had good to excellent ROM while 3 (10.71%) still manifested poor ROM. Conclusion: Local corticosteroid plus local anaestethic therapy together with home exercise programme was found to be an economic, effective and safe short-term treatment in the management of painful shoulder conditions arising from certain disorders. Keywords: Painful shoulder, Local corticosteroid, Local anaesthetic, Home exercise programe, Range of motion.Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research Vol. 7(4) 2008: pp. 1123-112

Pancytopenýa and Sepsýs due to Meropenem: A Case Report

Meropenem is one of the most commonly used antibacterial agents with relatively few side effects. Serious adverse reactions reported with meropenem are rare with an incidence of 1 %. Recently we came across two rare adverse effects of meropenem in one patient with acute renal failure. There was pancytopenia and sepsis, respectively. To the best of ourknowledge, a only few cases have been reported in the literature that document an association between meropenem administration and pancytopenia, and about half of these cases were sepsis. With the use of meropenem becoming more widespread, these two rare but fatal complications of meropenem should be borne in mind.Keywords: Meropenem, Pancytopenia, Sepsis, Fatal complication

MnOx-Promoted PdAg Alloy Nanoparticles for the Additive-Free Dehydrogenation of Formic Acid at Room Temperature

Formic acid (HCOOH) has a great potential as a safe and a convenient hydrogen carrier for fuel cell applications. However, efficient and CO-free hydrogen production through the decomposition of formic acid at low temperatures (<363 K) in the absence of additives constitutes a major challenge. Herein, we present a new heterogeneous catalyst system composed of bimetallic PdAg alloy and MnOx nanoparticles supported on amine-grafted silica facilitating the liberation of hydrogen at room temperature through the dehydrogenation of formic acid in the absence of any additives with remarkable activity (330 mol H2·mol catalyst-1·h-1) and selectivity (>99%) at complete conversion (>99%). Moreover this new catalytic system enables facile catalyst recovery and very high stability against agglomeration, leaching, and CO poisoning. Through a comprehensive set of structural and functional characterization experiments, mechanistic origins of the unusually high catalytic activity, selectivity, and stability of this unique catalytic system are elucidated. Current heterogeneous catalytic architecture presents itself as an excellent contender for clean hydrogen production via room-temperature additive-free dehydrogenation of formic acid for on-board hydrogen fuel cell applications. © 2015 American Chemical Society

Development of an in-vivo active reversible butyrylcholinesterase inhibitor

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by severe basal forebrain cholinergic deficit, which results in progressive and chronic deterioration of memory and cognitive functions. Similar to acetylcholinesterase, butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) contributes to the termination of cholinergic neurotransmission. Its enzymatic activity increases with the disease progression, thus classifying BChE as a viable therapeutic target in advanced AD. Potent, selective and reversible human BChE inhibitors were developed. The solved crystal structure of human BChE in complex with the most potent inhibitor reveals its binding mode and provides the molecular basis of its low nanomolar potency. Additionally, this compound is noncytotoxic and has neuroprotective properties. Furthermore, this inhibitor moderately crosses the blood-brain barrier and improves memory, cognitive functions and learning abilities of mice in a model of the cholinergic deficit that characterizes AD, without producing acute cholinergic adverse effects. Our study provides an advanced lead compound for developing drugs for alleviating symptoms caused by cholinergic hypofunction in advanced AD

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe