AYURVEDIC APPROACH IN ORAL HEALTH & HYGIENE: A REVIEW

Oral diseases continue to be a major health problem world-wide with the incidence of oral cancer and other disorders are on the rise in developing countries. Oral health also reflects the body health. For prevention and the treatment of oral diseases, modern medicine has had only limited success. There is a global need for safe and effective alternative prevention and treatment. Ayurveda is good alternative for that and may lead to the development of novel preventive or therapeutic strategies for oral health. This 5000-year-old system of medicine not only recommends treatments with specific herbs and minerals to cure various oral diseases but also recommends some daily use therapeutic procedures for the prevention of and maintenance of oral health.Recently, there is renewed interest in use of Ayurvedic drugs for oral health. Various Ayurvedic herbs and natural products have been used for their pharmacological applications viz. antiulcer, wound healing, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and antioxidant properties and have been proven to be safe and effective for oral disease and hygiene including various therapeutic Ayurvedic procedures. Scientific validations of the Ayurveda oral health practices could justify their incorporation into modern oral care. In this paper, an attempt has been made to scientific evidence based review various therapeutic procedures for the prevention and maintenance of oral health and hygiene mentioned in Ayurveda.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF KAPAL BHATI AND MEDOHARA ARKA IN THE MANAGEMENT OF STHAULYA (OBESITY)

Obesity is a blessing of the Modern age of Machines and Materialism. The impact of modern civilization has absolutely changed our life styles. Most of the peoples are forced to live a sedentary life. Obesity is a type of disease, which invites many major & minor manifestations. Ayurveda has described one of such disorder as Sthaulya. The parallel in western medicine to this order is “Obesity. It is clinically prove that both Yoga and Ayurveda are mutually supportive and offer many ways to prevent and heal various disorders as well as cleanse and rejuvenate the body. Kapal Bhati is reliable to control the Sthaulya. Medohara Arka is known to exert several beneficial physiological effects including the anti-obesitic influence.Study Design: 90 patients, randomly divided into three groups with 30 patients in each group. In Group A, Kapal bhati was administered twice a day for 15 minutes in morning and evening on empty stomach for 45 days. In Group B, Medohara arka was administered in 30 ml dose with Madhu anupana twice a day for 45 days and in Group C, both Kapal Bhati and Medohara arka was administered as mentioned above.Results & Conclusion: Marked Improvement was not observed in any of the groups. Moderate Improvement was observed in 6.66 % patients in Group A and 3.33% in Group C. Mild Improvement was observed in 80% patients in Group C and 60% patients in Group A & 53.33% in Group B. No improvement was observed as 36.66% in Group B, 33.33% in Group A and 16.66% in Group C. Thus, it can be concluded that the Kapal Bhati along with Medohara Arka is effective in the management of Sthaulya as it is safe, cost effective and free from any side effects

Evaluation of Phytochemical and Antibacterial properties of leaf extract of Cinnamomum tamala oil

Cinnamomum tamala, commonly known as tej patta is widely used as a spice in Indian cuisine for its aroma and flavoring property as the leaves contain essential oil. The essential oil is extracted with the help of the Clevenger apparatus using dry leaves. This oil is mainly used as medicine for releasing gas as well as a carminative agent and diuretic agent.  It also improves the digestive system and helps in increasing appetite. This study aimed to determine the phytochemical properties and antibacterial potential of different extracts (aqueous, methanol, and acetone) and oil of C. tamala leaves. The phytochemical evaluation shows the presence and absence of alkaloids, flavonoids, phenolic compounds, steroids, tannins, glycosides, terpenoids, saponins, proteins, and carbohydrates in the aqueous, methanol, and acetone extracts. The efficacy of antibacterial properties of prepared extracts was examined against E. coli and Salmonella typhi (gram-negative bacteria) and Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtilis (gram-positive bacteria). These bacterial cultures were obtained from IMTech Chandigarh. From the results of the antibacterial study it has become evident that among three extracts, the maximum zone of inhibition was obtained in the aqueous extract which was followed by methanolic and acetone extract. With the help of a Clevenger apparatus, Bay leaf oil was extracted to establish antibacterial properties. Henceforth, to analyze the antibacterial potential of the oil sample, the test was performed against the mentioned bacterial species (E. coli, Salmonella typhi, Staphylococcus aureus, and Bacillus subtilis) and reported significant antibacterial activities. From the outcome of this study, it has become clear that Bay leaf oil has potent antibacterial properties against selected bacterial species

Explainable Causal Analysis of Mental Health on Social Media Data

With recent developments in Social Computing, Natural Language Processing and Clinical Psychology, the social NLP research community addresses the challenge of automation in mental illness on social media. A recent extension to the problem of multi-class classification of mental health issues is to identify the cause behind the user's intention. However, multi-class causal categorization for mental health issues on social media has a major challenge of wrong prediction due to the overlapping problem of causal explanations. There are two possible mitigation techniques to solve this problem: (i) Inconsistency among causal explanations/ inappropriate human-annotated inferences in the dataset, (ii) in-depth analysis of arguments and stances in self-reported text using discourse analysis. In this research work, we hypothesise that if there exists the inconsistency among F1 scores of different classes, there must be inconsistency among corresponding causal explanations as well. In this task, we fine tune the classifiers and find explanations for multi-class causal categorization of mental illness on social media with LIME and Integrated Gradient (IG) methods. We test our methods with CAMS dataset and validate with annotated interpretations. A key contribution of this research work is to find the reason behind inconsistency in accuracy of multi-class causal categorization. The effectiveness of our methods is evident with the results obtained having category-wise average scores of $81.29 \%$ and $0.906$ using cosine similarity and word mover's distance, respectively

Data Augmentation for Mental Health Classification on Social Media

The mental disorder of online users is determined using social media posts. The major challenge in this domain is to avail the ethical clearance for using the user generated text on social media platforms. Academic re searchers identified the problem of insufficient and unlabeled data for mental health classification. To handle this issue, we have studied the effect of data augmentation techniques on domain specific user generated text for mental health classification. Among the existing well established data augmentation techniques, we have identified Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), conditional BERT, and Back Translation (BT) as the potential techniques for generating additional text to improve the performance of classifiers. Further, three different classifiers Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression (LR) are employed for analyzing the impact of data augmentation on two publicly available social media datasets. The experiments mental results show significant improvements in classifiers performance when trained on the augmented data.Comment: 1

Headband technique of reimplantation of a partially amputed finger: a first reported in literature

Background: Reimplantation of a partially amputee finger is a challenging task especially in resource limited country like India. In most of the scenario it lands in total amputation either due to delay in arrival at operative set up or due to lack of plastic surgery facility. Methods: We developed an innovative approach (1st reported in literature) of “headband technique “of reimplantation of such partially amputee fingers and toes. Partially amputee fingers and toes with viability were selected for the operative treatment and for the study. The study was conducted from January 2020 to 2021 with a follow up period for 6 months at our institution. The innovative suturing technique involved a single stitch at the tip of the pulp and rest on adjacent to nail bed securing the neurovascular structures. The patient was in age group of 9 months to 94 years, mostly traumatic injury, with 40 male and 15 female patients. Patients who reported with fully amputee fingers, black escharotic finger were excluded from the study. Results: To our accomplishment out of 55 operated patients, more than 50 have fully recovered. Conclusions: With this simple technique of reimplantation even doctor at PHC’S can save fingers from getting amputed. Our study is with small number of patients; hence we advocate a larger study for to have conclusive evidence for the same

Co-existence of nocardiosis with pulmonary aspergillosis in a single patient

AbstrAct Introduction: Nocardia and Aspergillus are important causes of opportunistic infections in immunocompromised individuals. An aggressive workup is essential since these infections are remediable but potentially mortal. case report: We describe a case of a 50-year-old diabetic female with pulmonary aspergillosis who presented with cough and breathlessness for one and ahalf months. she was given steroids and itraconazole for the same but there was no relief. Later on, bronchoalveolar lavage on Kinyoun stain showed Nocardia. conclusion: this case highlights the importance to look for other causes as well in patients with pulmonary aspergillosis not responding to treatment since delay in diagnosis can be fatal for the patient

Clinical and ultrasonological features of adenomyosis and its histopathological correlation

Background: Adenomyosis is a common gynaecological condition that affects the menstruating women. Uterine enlargement, dysmenorrhoea and HMB are regarded as the cardinal clinical symptoms of adenomyosis. Classically it was thought, compared with ultrasonography, when adenomyosis is suspected, MRI enables more accurate diagnosis of the disease.Methods: 78 subjects were enrolled after an informed consent that had complaints of HMB, Dysparenuia, dysmenorrhea, and chronic pelvic pain. Detailed history of the enrolled subjects was taken, followed by a clinical examination. These patients were then subjected to TVS where myometrial echo texture, presence of myometrial cysts, blurring of endomyometrial junction was noted. After hysterectomy, histopathological diagnosis was obtained.Results: 78 subjects enrolled in the study. The mean age was 44.2 years. 43.5% had parity of 4 or more. HMB was present in 97.8% and dysmenorrhea in 93.48 % of HPE positive patient. Transvaginal sonography had a sensitivity of 89.13%, specificity of 90.62%, positive likelihood ratio of 9.51, negative likelihood ratio of 0.12, positive predictive value of 93.18%, negative predictive value of 85.29% and a diagnostic accuracy of 89.74%.Conclusions: Thus adenomyosis has a prevalence of 30.23%. HMB with dysmenorrhoea and chronic pelvic pain helps in diagnosis. TVS is both sensitive and specific in diagnosing adenomyosis without need for additional diagnostic tool. Endomyometrial junction blurring is the sensitive and specific criteria on TVS

Effect of vitamin D supplementation on insulin kinetics and cardiovascular risk factors in polycystic ovarian syndrome: a pilot study

To assess the effect of vitamin D supplementation on parameters of Insulin Sensitivity/Resistance (IS/IR) and insulin secretion in subjects with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). A prospective double-blind randomized control trial was conducted to assess the effect of vitamin D on insulin kinetics in women with PCOS. The trial was conducted in a tertiary care research hospital. A total of 36 subjects with PCOS, aged 18–35 years, were included in this study. Vitamin D3 4000  IU/day versus placebo was given once a month for 6 months and both groups received metformin. IS (by whole-body IS index or Matsuda index), IR (by homeostasis model assessment IR (HOMA-IR)) and insulin secretion (by insulinogenic index; II30) were the main outcome measures. Secondary outcome included Blood Pressure (BP), lipid profile, Disposition Index (DI) and vascular stiffness. Out of 36 subjects who consented, 32 completed the study. Subjects were randomized into two groups: group A (n = 15; metformin and vitamin D 4000  IU/day) or group B (n = 17; metformin and placebo). Oral glucose tolerance tests with 75 g glucose were carried out at baseline and 6 months after supplementation. Hypovitaminosis D was observed in 93.8% of all subjects with mean serum 25 hydroxy vitamin D level of 7.30 ± 4.45 ng/ml. After 6 months of vitamin D supplementation, there was no significant difference in any of the parameters of IS/IR (area under curve (AUC)–glucose, AUC–insulin, insulin:glucose ratio, HOMA-IR, Matsuda index, insulinogenic index and DI), II30 and cardiovascular risk factors between the two groups. Supplementation of vitamin D, at a dose of 4000  IU/day for 6 months, did not have any significant effect on parameters of IS/IR and insulin secretion in subjects with PCOS

Applications of Nanoproteomics in Biological Systems

The high-throughput techniques used in nanoproteomics generally outperform in comparison to normal proteomics techniques. Approaches like disease biomarker detection in humans are one of the major achievements, which have led to the detection of different biomarkers for autoimmune, infectious, neurodegenerative and cardiovascular disease. The use of novel sensors and different nanoproteomic approaches also helps in identifying biomarkers for different types of cancer and other diseases. In plant biology, nanoproteomic assists in gene transfer, creation of deoxyribonucleic acid crystals and identification and quantification of total protein. It also has application in microbial proteomics research. Using nanoproteomics has also helped in studying allied scientific areas like proteobionics and secretomics. This review article covers the current application and future prospects of nanoproteomics approaches