Quantitative estimation of vitamin C in some local fruits

No Abstrac

Phytochemical, analgesic and anti-inflammatory studies of the methanol leaf extract of Commiphora mollis (Oliv.) Engl. (Burseraceae)

Introduction: Commiphora mollis is used in African traditional medicine as analgesic, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, anti-fungi, anti-oxidant as well as cytotoxic and cytostatic agent.Objective: To carry out phytochemical, analgesic and anti-inflammatory studies on the methanol leaf extract of Commiphora mollis.Methods: The powdered leaf material of Commiphoral mollis was extracted with methanol and partitioned using hexane, chloroform and ethylacetate. The methanol leaf extract was subjected to preliminary phytochemical screening while the fractions were studied using column chromatography for the isolation of compounds. The structure of the isolated compound was established by spectral analysis using UV, IR, 1D and 2D NMR spectroscopy. The methanol leaf extract was also subjected to acute toxicity, analgesic and anti- inflammatory studies using animal models.Results: The preliminary phytochemical screening of the methanol leaf extract revealed the presence of terpenes, flavonoids, tannins, saponins and carbohydrates. The column chromatography of the chloroform and ethylacetate fractions led to the isolation of a  curcuminiod compound. The results of intrapretoneal LD50 were 1385.64 mg/kg in mice and 3807.8 mg/kg in rats. The analgesic studies were carried out at doses of 75, 150 and 300 mg/kg body weight i.p. using acetic acid-induced writhing and thermally-induced pain in mice. The extract significantly P<0.05 inhibited the acetic acid-induced writhing in mice with highest protection (89.40%) produced at the dose (300 mg/kg) which compare well with the standard drug piroxicam (10 mg/kg). The extract also significantly (P<0.05) increased the reaction time in a dose dependant manner to the thermal stimulus. The extract at 150 mg/kg body weight i.p showed 2.5 ± 0.43 seconds reaction time which was greater than the standard drug pentazocine at 10mg/kg (2.17 ± 0.31 seconds). The carrageenan-induced paw oedema test was employed in investigating the antiinflammatory activity in rats at doses of 150, 300 and 600 mg/kg body weight i.p. The extract inhibited hind paw oedema at all doses tested. The standard drug ketoprofen produces (91.30%) inhibition which is  greater than that of the test groups (40, 50 and 60% respectively).Conclusion: The results indicated that the methanol leaf extract possess significant dose dependant analgesic activity (P < 0.05) and significant (P < 0.05) anti-inflammatory activity. Thus, the traditional use of the plant for treatment of pain and inflammation is justified in this study.Keywords: Curcuminoid, Commiphora mollis, Analgesic, Anti-inflammatory, Phytochemical constituents

Increased left atrial stiffness in patients with atrial fibrillation detected by left atrial speckle tracking echocardiography

AbstractObjectiveThis study was designed to determine the contribution of left atrial (LA) stiffness to atrial fibrillation (AF) progression by comparing AF patients with normal control subjects, and to evaluate whether LA mechanical function is related to the structural changes of LA.BackgroundAbnormalities in the LA structure and function usually develop in patients with AF.Patients and methodsTwenty paroxysmal and 20 persistent AF patients, were included and studied, using standard, tissue Doppler and speckle tracking echocardiography, and were compared with 20 matched controls. LA maximal volume, mitral annular velocities, and global longitudinal LA strain were measured. The ratio of E/e′ to LA strain was used as an index of LA stiffness.ResultsStudy groups were comparable. Paroxysmal and persistent AF patients showed increased LA maximal volume (24.3±3.2, 20.1±5.2 vs. 18.3±1.6, p<0.001) and LV filling pressure (E/e′=9.5±1.1, 7.9±1.2 vs. 6.8±1.1, p<0.001), but decreased mitral annular velocities and LA strain (18.1±2.8, 21.5±4.3 vs. 25.9±2.9, p<0.001). LA stiffness was increased in patients with persistent and paroxysmal AF than in the control subjects (0.55±0.12, 0.36±0.09 vs. 0.26±0.02, p<0.001), and was related with LA diameter and LV filling pressure.ConclusionsPatients with AF have increased LA stiffness in comparison with that of the control subjects and it is higher in persistent than paroxysmal AF. LA volume and LV filling pressure are independent predictors of LA stiffness

A Charged Rotating Black Ring

We construct a supergravity solution describing a charged rotating black ring with S^2xS^1 horizon in a five dimensional asymptotically flat spacetime. In the neutral limit the solution is the rotating black ring recently found by Emparan and Reall. We determine the exact value of the lower bound on J^2/M^3, where J is the angular momentum and M the mass; the black ring saturating this bound has maximum entropy for the given mass. The charged black ring is characterized by mass M, angular momentum J, and electric charge Q, and it also carries local fundamental string charge. The electric charge distributed uniformly along the ring helps support the ring against its gravitational self-attraction, so that J^2/M^3 can be made arbitrarily small while Q/M remains finite. The charged black ring has an extremal limit in which the horizon coincides with the singularity.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figur

Black Rings, Supertubes, and a Stringy Resolution of Black Hole Non-Uniqueness

In order to address the issues raised by the recent discovery of non-uniqueness of black holes in five dimensions, we construct a solution of string theory at low energies describing a five-dimensional spinning black ring with three charges that can be interpreted as D1-brane, D5-brane, and momentum charges. The solution possesses closed timelike curves (CTCs) and other pathologies, whose origin we clarify. These pathologies can be avoided by setting any one of the charges, e.g. the momentum, to zero. We argue that the D1-D5-charged black ring, lifted to six dimensions, describes the thermal excitation of a supersymmetric D1-D5 supertube, which is in the same U-duality class as the D0-F1 supertube. We explain how the stringy microscopic description of the D1-D5 system distinguishes between a spherical black hole and a black ring with the same asymptotic charges, and therefore provides a (partial) resolution of the non-uniqueness of black holes in five dimensions.Comment: 33 pages, 1 figur

Genetic characterization of wild-type measles viruses circulating in suburban Khartoum, 1997-2000

Measles remains endemic in many East African countries, where it is often associated with high morbidity and mortality. We collected clinical specimens from Sudanese measles patients between July 1997 and July 2000. Sequencing of the 3' 456 nucleotides of the nucleoprotein gene from 33 measles virus (MV) isolates and 8 RNA samples extracted from clinical specimens demonstrated the presence of a single endemic MV strain with little sequence variation over time (overall nucleotide divergence of 0 to 1.3%). This was confirmed by sequencing of the complete H gene of two isolates from 1997 and two from 2000, in which the overall divergence ranged between 0 and 0.5%. Comparison with MV reference strains demonstrated that the viruses belonged to clade B, genotype B3, and were most closely related to a set of viruses recently isolated in Nigeria. Our study demonstrates a remarkable genetic stability of an endemically circulating MV strain

Detection of myocardial infarction based on novel deep transfer learning methods for urban healthcare in smart cities

YesOne of the common cardiac disorders is a cardiac attack called Myocardial infarction (MI), which occurs due to the blockage of one or more coronary arteries. Timely treatment of MI is important and slight delay results in severe consequences. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the main diagnostic tool to monitor and reveal the MI signals. The complex nature of MI signals along with noise poses challenges to doctors for accurate and quick diagnosis. Manually studying large amounts of ECG data can be tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, there is a need for methods to automatically analyze the ECG data and make diagnosis. Number of studies has been presented to address MI detection, but most of these methods are computationally expensive and faces the problem of overfitting while dealing real data. In this paper, an effective computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system is presented to detect MI signals using the convolution neural network (CNN) for urban healthcare in smart cities. Two types of transfer learning techniques are employed to retrain the pre-trained VGG-Net (Fine-tuning and VGG-Net as fixed feature extractor) and obtained two new networks VGG-MI1 and VGG-MI2. In the VGG-MI1 model, the last layer of the VGG-Net model is replaced with a specific layer according to our requirements and various functions are optimized to reduce overfitting. In the VGG-MI2 model, one layer of the VGG-Net model is selected as a feature descriptor of the ECG images to describe it with informative features. Considering the limited availability of dataset, ECG data is augmented which has increased the classification performance. A standard well-known database Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) Diagnostic ECG is used for the validation of the proposed framework. It is evident from experimental results that the proposed framework achieves a high accuracy surpasses the existing methods. In terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity; VGG-MI1 achieved 99.02%, 98.76%, and 99.17%, respectively, while VGG-MI2 models achieved an accuracy of 99.22%, a sensitivity of 99.15%, and a specificity of 99.49%.This project was funded by University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (Project number: UJ-02-018-ICGR)

Serological and virological characterization of clinically diagnosed cases of measles in suburban Khartoum

Measles continues to be a major childhood disease in terms of global morbidity and mortality. In the main areas of its endemicity the only available means of diagnosis are based on clinical criteria: the presence of a maculopapular rash and fever accompanied by cough, coryza, and/or conjunctivitis. We have studied 38 clinically diagnosed cases of measles in Khartoum, Sudan, by means of serology, reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) on throat swabs and virus isolation from lymphocytes. On the basis of serology, 28 patients were diagnosed as having an acute measles virus (MV) infection, while in 10 cases the clinical symptoms proved to have other causes. It was shown that in cases with low serum immunoglobulin M (IgM) levels, an additional measurement of IgG or virus-neutralizing antibodies was necessary to discriminate between patients with an acute MV infection sampled during an early stage of the disease and patients who had experienced an MV infection in the more distant past. The serological laboratory diagnosis was validated by an MV-specific RT-PCR: for all confirmed measles cases tested a fragment of the correct size which hybridized with a third MV-specific primer could be amplified, while all serologically negative cases were also RT-PCR negative. MV could be isolated from 17 out of 23 of the serologically confirmed cases, demonstrating that virus isolation is less reliable as a diagnostic tool than serology or RT-PCR. This study stresses the urgent need for a rapid diagnostic field test for measles

Singularity free dilaton-driven cosmologies and pre-little-bang

There are no reasons why the singularity in the growth of the dilaton coupling should not be regularised, in a string cosmological context, by the presence of classical inhomogeneities. We discuss a class of inhomogeneous dilaton-driven models whose curvature invariants are all bounded and regular in time and space. We prove that the non-space-like geodesics of these models are all complete in the sense that none of them reaches infinity for a finite value of the affine parameter. We conclude that our examples represent truly singularity-free solutions of the low energy beta functions. We discuss some symmetries of the obtained solutions and we clarify their physical interpretation. We also give examples of solutions with spherical symmetry. In our scenario each physical quantity is everywhere defined in time and space, the big-bang singularity is replaced by a maximal curvature phase where the dilaton kinetic energy reaches its maximum. The maximal curvature is always smaller than one (in string units) and the coupling constant is also smaller than one and it grows between two regimes of constant dilaton, implying, together with the symmetries of the solutions, that higher genus and higher curvature corrections are negligible. We argue that our examples describe, in a string cosmological context, the occurrence of ``little bangs''(i.e. high curvature phases which never develop physical singularities). They also suggest the possibility of an unexplored ``pre-little-bang'' phase.Comment: 25 pages in LaTex style, 3 encapsulated figure

Impact of circ-0000221 in the pathogenesis of hepatocellular via modulation of miR-661–PTPN11 mRNA axis

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer-related death in Egypt. A deep understanding of the molecular events occurring in HCC can facilitate the development of novel diagnostic and/or therapeutic approaches. In the present study, we describe a novel axis of hsa-circ-0000221–miR-661–PTPN11 mRNA proposed by in silico and in vitro analysis and its role in HCC pathogenesis. We observe a reduction in the expression levels of hsa-circ-0000221 and PTPN11 mRNA in HCC patients’ sera tested compared with control subjects. The reduction occurs with a concomitant increase in the expression of miR-661. Furthermore, the introduction of exogenous hsa-circ-0000221 into Hep-G2 or SNU449 cell lines results in detectable decrease in cellular viability and an increase in apoptotic manifestations that is associated with G1 accumulation and CCDN1 overexpression. Altogether, these findings indicate the tumor-suppressive role of hsa-circ-0000221 in HCC, which acts through miR-661 inhibition, along with a subsequent PTPN11 mRNA increase, where PTPN11 is known to inhibit cell proliferation in many forms of cancer. Our study encourages further investigation of the role of circRNAs in cancer and their potential use as molecular biomarkers