Daily versus weekly iron supplementation and prevention of iron deficiency anaemia in lactating women

Objective: To demonstrate the effectiveness and social feasibility of weekly versus daily iron supplementation in preventing and treating iron deficiency anaemia among anaemic mothers. Design: A longitudinal in nature. Setting: Seven urban slum communities in Teklehaimanot Wereda, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Subjects: Two hundred seven eligible mothers were assigned to the daily supplementation, weekly supplementation or control groups following randomisation between March and May 2001. The daily supplemented groups (n=71) received 60 mg of elemental iron containing 300 mg ferrous sulphate and 400 µg folic acid from monday to friday. The weekly group (n=68) received one tablet once a week every monday supervised while the control group (n=68) was advised to take no medications without the knowledge of the investigators until the completion of the study. To eliminate a major source of variation, subjects participating in the study were de-wormed at the beginning of the study. Main outcome measures: Haemoglobin and serum ferritin concentrations were compared before and after the intervention among the groups. Results: The mean haemoglobin (Hgb), and serum ferritin concentration (SFC) at baseline were practically similar among the groups. Haemoglobin levels significantly increased at the end of the study in all the groups and the proportion of anaemia decreased from 6.9% to 1.6% in the daily, 6.7% to 1.7% in the weekly supplemented and 6.7% to 6.1% in the control groups. The difference noted between the daily and weekly supplemented groups was not significant. The improvement of SFC concentration was better in the daily than the weekly group but not statistically significant. Daily supplementation schedule caused more side effects and lower compliance level than the weekly supplementation schedule. Conclusion: Weekly supplementation is simple, comparable to daily supplementation and economically advantageous. Thus, it is recommended to adopt the strategy for controlling anaemia. Further because of higher compliance rate and lower side effects, it is deemed to be socially feasible. (East African Medical Journal: 2003 80(1): 11-16

Modeling of the Substrate Coupling Path for Direct Power Injection in Integrated Circuits

International audienc

Ultra-Low Energy CNFET-Based Ternary Combinational Circuits Designs

The embedded systems, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and portable electronic devices spread very quickly recently. Most of them depend on batteries to operate. The target of this work is to decrease energy consumption by (1) using Multiple-valued logic (MVL) that shows notable enhancements regarding energy consumption over binary circuits and (2) using carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFET) that show better performance than CMOS. This work proposes ternary combinational circuits using 32 nm CNFET: Ternary Half Adder (THA) with 36 transistors and Ternary Multiplier (TMUL) with 23 transistors. To reduce energy consumption by utilizing the unary operator of the ternary system and employing two voltage supplies (Vdd and Vdd/2). The result of extensive HSPICE simulations regarding PVT (Process, Voltage, and Temperatures) variations and Noise Immunity Curve (NIC) show the improvements of the proposed designs up to 25% in transistors count and up to 98% in energy consumption reductions. Further, increasing the robustness of process variations and the noise tolerance compared to recent similar designs. CCBYScopu

Evaluation of the virtual source/virtual destination-technique for available bit rate traffic in ATM-networks

Studies have shown that estrogen replacement therapy and estrogen plus progestin replacement therapy alter serum levels of total, LDL and HDL cholesterol levels. However, HDL cholesterol levels in women vary considerably in response to hormone replacement therapy (HRT). A significant portion of the variability of these levels has been attributed to genetic factors. Therefore, we investigated the influence of estrogen receptor-alpha (ESR1) gene polymorphisms on HDL levels in response to postmenopausal HRT. We performed a prospective cohort study on 54 postmenopausal women who had not used HRT before the study and had no significant general medical illness. HRT consisted of conjugated equine estrogen and medroxyprogesterone acetate continuously for 1 year. The lipoprotein levels were measured from blood samples taken before the start of therapy and after 1 year of HRT. ESR1 polymorphism (MspI C>T, HaeIII C>T, PvuII C>T, and XbaI A>G) frequencies were assayed by restriction fragment length polymorphism. A general linear model was used to describe the relationships between HDL levels and genotypes after adjusting for age. A significant increase in HDL levels was observed after HRT (P = 0.029). Women with the ESR1 PvuII TT genotype showed a statistically significant increase in HDL levels after HRT (P = 0.032). No association was found between other ESR1 polymorphisms and HDL levels. According to our results, the ESR1 PvuII TT genotype was associated with increased levels of HDL after 1 year of HRT.Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Escola Paulista de Medicina Departamento de GinecologiaUniversidade de São Paulo Faculdade de Medicina Departamento de Obstetrícia e GinecologiaUNIFESP, EPM, Depto. de GinecologiaFAPESP: 03/04533-1FAPESP: 04/05281-9SciEL

Precise measurement of near-barrier 8^{8}He+208^{208}Pb elastic scattering: Comparison with 6^{6}He

Expérience GANILInternational audienceDramatic differences in the elastic scattering of the neutron rich nuclei 6He and 8He are found when new highquality data for the 8He+208Pb system are compared with previously published 6He+208Pb data at the samelaboratory frame incident energy. The new 8He data are of the same level of detail as for stable beams. Whencomparing them with those previously obtained for 6He+208Pb at the same energy, it is possible to determinefrom the data alone that 6He has a much longer range absorption than 8He. However, both nuclei show significantabsorption beyond their strong absorption radii. While it has been known for a long time that elastic scattering atenergies around the barrier only determines the optical potential over a small distance in radial space, typically±0.5 fm or so, both the 6He and the 8He imaginary potentials obtained from various optical model fits to thesedata are the same over a much wider range of ±1.5 fm