A histopathological study of sebaceous neoplasms and related lesions at a tertiary care centre

Background: Sebaceous lesions have intrigued pathologists and dermatologist alike causing a great deal of diagnostic confusion. Tumors and tumor like conditions of the sebaceous glands include sebaceous hyperplasia, Nevus sebaceus of Jadassohn, sebaceous adenoma, sebaceoma and sebaceous carcinoma.Methods: A three-year study of all lesions with sebaceous differentiation was carried out in the histopathology section of a tertiary care hospital to study the spectrum of lesions showing sebaceous differentiation. Patient records were noted, and paraffin embedded sections stained with haematoxylin and eosin were examined for histopathological diagnosis. Clinical correlation was done in all the cases.Results: The spectrum of lesions encountered included sebaceous carcinoma, Nevus sebaceous, sebaceous hyperplasia, sebaceous adenoma among others. Eyelid was the most common site followed by scalp. Clinicopathological correlation was found to be poor in these lesions with clinical examination failing to correctly identify most of the cases.Conclusions: Sebaceous neoplasms were seen to be rarer in our population as compared to other adnexal tumors. Histopathology, in the presence of typical features, is the mainstay of diagnosis with immunohistochemistry aiding in certain doubtful cases

MRKH syndrome: a review of literature

Primary amenorrhea is defined as failure to achieve menarche till age of 14 years in absence of normal secondary sexual characters or till 16 years irrespective of secondary sexual characters. The most common cause of primary amenorrhea is gonadal pathology followed by Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH syndrome). MRKH syndrome is a rare congenital disorder characterised by uterine and vaginal aplasia. It occurs due to failure of development of Müllerian duct. Its incidence is 1 per 4500 female births. Mostly girls present with primary amenorrhea. It is characterised by presence of normal secondary sexual characteristics, normal 46 XX genotype, normal ovarian function in most of the cases and absent or underdeveloped uterus and upper part (2/3) of vagina. It is of two types: type A is isolated type while type B is associated with other renal/skeletal/cardiac anomalies. Treatment includes psychological counselling and vaginoplasty. Vaginoplasty can be done by various non-surgical and surgical techniques. The authors hereby review the literature of MRKH syndrome regarding its embryology, etiopathogenesis, approach to work up and management

Going deeper than words

Art can provide kids with an easier way to express themselves since children are more naturally artistic and creative. Most children with special needs have innate visual powers. A question and answer type of format can be daunting and intimidating for a child, especially when they have to try and explain themselves with their already limited vocabulary

Community-based production and organic certification of aromatic & medicinal crops in India

India has been one of the leading producers of essential oils for Industrial applications. The journey first began from Lemongrass Oil in 19th Century to Menthol and Mint-based derivatives in recent years. As the consumer is demanding more traceability, community-based projects in the country are reaching out for organic certification and fair trade carving a niche for them. The article covers the journey of these marginalized communities and the ways in which they are keeping up with the changing consumer preferences and regulatory requirements.                Essential-oil production from perennial aromatic crops became a challenge after the green revolution which laid emphasis on food production. Once India’s food production targets were met in 2002, the government launched the National Horticulture Mission. This mission aimed at increasing the production of horticulture products. Since fruit trees had a gestation time of 4-5 years, the aromatics crops became the preferred choice. Intercropping aromatic crops in fruit orchards thus gained popularity. On similar lines, ‘Wadi Project’ gained momentum in the 90’s. India’s tribal population is concentrated in the Central region comprising the States of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa. These states, being sparsely populated and economically backward, provided an ambient environment for the development of essential oils.                More recently these communities have been going organic by getting their clusters certified. As India had National standards for Organic Production and equivalence agreements with EU their produce found seamless access to the global markets. In 2013 when the import authorization system threatened to jeopardize exports of certified organic products from India, it was their combined strength which found back and restored the trade. Alongside essential oils, this region has been an important source of medicinal herbs for the Ayurvedic Industry and joint forest management programs have been in place for the collection of wild herbs for over 20 years. These ‘van-samiti’ (Translates Van=Forest, Samiti= Committee) which consists of members of the rural community and forest authorities serve as just the right kind of network for sustainable collection of medicinal herbs in the wild. At present, over 50 community-based projects spread across 3000 hectares are engaged in essential-oil production. The strength of these projects lies in the use of spent biomass to fuel distillation units. These projects are backed by Government programs and implemented by non-governmental organizations along with marketing tie-up with the Industry

A Study on an Analysis of Impact of Basel II in India: A Qualitative Approach

Abstract Banks are at the epicentre of countries financial needs. Regulators like the central bank of a country feel the need for an indirect regulatory and monitoring system. Credit risks, market risks and operational risks are the three main criterions on which the Basel system is based. Developing countries like India that are in the boom stage of it���¢��������s financial sector require a system like Basel II which would provide the banks an opportunity to reduce their credit risk weights as well as reduce their required regulatory capital. The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct a research into the impact of Basel II in India. This was to know why a developing country like India would want to develop a system like Basel II for the sole purpose of upgrading its banking sector to international standards. A comprehensive literature review highlighted that all the banks wanted to adopt international standards so that they can complete at international level. This led Indian banks as well to adopt Basel II. Not much of the research has been carried out regarding the impact of Basel II in India. To investigate further, questionnaires were distributed to the banks. A semi structured questionnaire was conducted in order to know the impact of Basel II and what benefits did the banks gain out of it. Moreover the findings from the research also matched quiet closely with those mentioned in the literature review. This study provided strong evidence to suggest that there should be further research in this field

Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Networks of LLM-based Agents

Accurately simulating human opinion dynamics is crucial for understanding a variety of societal phenomena, including polarization and the spread of misinformation. However, the agent-based models (ABMs) commonly used for such simulations often over-simplify human behavior. We propose a new approach to simulating opinion dynamics based on populations of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our findings reveal a strong inherent bias in LLM agents towards producing accurate information, leading simulated agents to consensus in line with scientific reality. This bias limits their utility for understanding resistance to consensus views on issues like climate change. After inducing confirmation bias through prompt engineering, however, we observed opinion fragmentation in line with existing agent-based modeling and opinion dynamics research. These insights highlight the promise and limitations of LLM agents in this domain and suggest a path forward: refining LLMs with real-world discourse to better simulate the evolution of human beliefs

The Wisdom of Partisan Crowds: Comparing Collective Intelligence in Humans and LLM-based Agents

Human groups are able to converge on more accurate beliefs through deliberation, even in the presence of polarization and partisan bias -- a phenomenon known as the "wisdom of partisan crowds." Generated agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human collective behavior, yet few benchmarks exist for evaluating their dynamics against the behavior of human groups. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the wisdom of partisan crowds emerges in groups of LLM-based agents that are prompted to role-play as partisan personas (e.g., Democrat or Republican). We find that they not only display human-like partisan biases, but also converge to more accurate beliefs through deliberation as humans do. We then identify several factors that interfere with convergence, including the use of chain-of-thought prompt and lack of details in personas. Conversely, fine-tuning on human data appears to enhance convergence. These findings show the potential and limitations of LLM-based agents as a model of human collective intelligence

Atypical Flexibility in Dynamic Functional Connectivity Quantifies the Severity in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Resting-state functional connectivity (FC) analyses have shown atypical connectivity in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as compared to typically developing (TD). However, this view emerges from investigating static FC overlooking the whole brain transient connectivity patterns. In our study, we investigated how age and disease influence the dynamic changes in functional connectivity of TD and ASD. We used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data stratified into three cohorts: children (7–11 years), adolescents (12–17 years), and adults (18+ years) for the analysis. The dynamic variability in the connection strength and the modular organization in terms of measures such as flexiblity, cohesion strength, and disjointness were explored for each subject to characterize the differences between ASD and TD. In ASD, we observed significantly higher inter-subject dynamic variability in connection strength as compared to TD. This hyper-variability relates to the symptom severity in ASD. We also found that whole-brain flexibility correlates with static modularity only in TD. Further, we observed a core-periphery organization in the resting-state, with Sensorimotor and Visual regions in the rigid core; and DMN and attention areas in the flexible periphery. TD also develops a more cohesive organization of sensorimotor areas. However, in ASD we found a strong positive correlation of symptom severity with flexibility of rigid areas and with disjointness of sensorimotor areas. The regions of the brain showing high predictive power of symptom severity were distributed across the cortex, with stronger bearings in the frontal, motor, and occipital cortices. Our study demonstrates that the dynamic framework best characterizes the variability in ASD

Hypomorphic PCNA mutation underlies a novel human DNA repair disorder

A number of human disorders, including Cockayne syndrome, UV-sensitive syndrome, xeroderma pigmentosum and trichothiodystrophy, result from the mutation of genes encoding molecules important for nucleotide excision repair. Here, we describe a novel syndrome in which the cardinal clinical features include postnatal growth retardation, hearing loss, premature aging, telangiectasia, neurological signs and photosensitivity, resulting from a homozygous missense (p.Ser228Ile) sequence alteration of the proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA). PCNA is a highly conserved sliding clamp protein essential for DNA replication and repair. Due to this fundamental role, mutations in PCNA that profoundly impair protein function would be incompatible with life. Interestingly, while the p.Ser228Ile alteration appears to have no effect on protein levels or DNA replication, patient cells exhibit significant abnormalities in response to UV irradiation displaying substantial reductions in both UV survival and RNA synthesis recovery. The p.Ser228Ile change also profoundly alters PCNA’s interaction with Flap endonuclease 1 and DNA Ligase 1, DNA metabolism enzymes. Taken together our findings detail the first mutation of PCNA in humans, associated with a unique neurodegenerative disease displaying clinical and molecular features common to other DNA repair disorders, which we show to be attributable to a hypomorphic amino acid alteration