Comparison of causes and manifestations of pain in Parkinson’s disease patients to healthy controls

Objective To assess the manifestations of pain in PD (Parkinson’s disease ) patients versus healthy controls.Methods Data on pain was collected from 127 patients and an equivalent number of controls using two self-report questionnaires: the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI) and a custom-made questionnaire focusing on specific details not covered by the former. Additional analysis was conducted within the patient group only to analyze the potential effects of factors relating to PD on the various measure of interest relating to pain.Results Parkinson disease patients had lower odds of experiencing pain in both arms (ExpB=0.061, p<0.001), greater probability of demonstrating pain in both legs (ExpB=2.409, p=0.024), and an increase difficulty in localizing pain (ExpB=2.958, p=0.030). There was no relationship between duration of pain (F=12.414, p=0.001) or arthritis (ExpB=0.724, p=0.309) and pain in PD. The likelihood of experiencing nagging pain (ExpB=3.533, p=0.028), but not other forms, was much more strongly associated with PD patients than normal controls. When all other types of pain were controlled for, pain in PD is more likely associated with akathesic pain (ExpB=9.046, p<0.001).Conclusion There are major differences between pain in PD patients and pain in normal controls, which could have implications on the pathophysiology and adequate management of pain in different populations.Key words: Healthy controls, movement disorders, pain, Parkinson’s diseas

Yield Performances and Cup Quality of Some BTRI Test Clones of Tea

A long term experiment was conducted to investigate the yield and quality performances of four vegetative propagated test clones of tea coded as A/8/01, A/17/22, A/22/27 and A/22/40 at Bangladesh Tea Research Institute (BTRI) farm during 1996-2010. A standard clone BT1 was considered as control. Cuttings of the test clones were collected from the selected bushes of Amo tea estates and were raised at BTRI nursery. Then saplings were put to long term yield and quality trial following Latin Square Design (LSD) with 3 replications. The green leaf was harvested at weekly interval during the plucking season starting from mid March to mid December throughout the experimental period. Yield data were recorded and analyzed statistically using MSTAT programme. Results of the experiment revealed that among the test clones A/22/40 gave the highest significant yield of 3509.1 kg ha-1 of made tea followed by BT1 (3203.69 kg ha-1), A/8/01 (2912.24 kg ha-1), A/17/22 (2817.76 kg ha-1) and A/22/27 (2278.78 kg ha-1) from the average of 9 years (2002-2010) at mature stage. At immature stage i.e. 1st year to 5th year after plantation yield difference was insignificant. The overall cup quality of the test clones was assessed by conventional organoleptic test. The cup quality of A/8/01, A/17/22, A/22/40 as well as the standard clone BT1 was found to be above average (AA) while the cup quality of A/22/27 was average (A). Considering the yield and quality potentials, the test clone A/22/40 has appeared quite promising to be released as a standard clone. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/ijarit.v1i1-2.13925 Int. J. Agril. Res. Innov. & Tech. 1 (1&2): 24-28, December, 201

Evaluation of Antihypertensive Effect of Aqueous Methanol Extract of Caralluma tuberculata N.E.Br in Sprauge Dawley Rats

Purpose: To evaluate the phytochemical profile and antihypertensive effect of Caralluma tuberculata N.E.Br (AMECT).Methods: The antihypertensive effect of the aqueous methanol extract of (AMECT) was evaluated in both normotensive and hypertensive rats. In normotensive rats, various doses (100, 300 and 500 mg/kg body weight, p.o.) were administered at 0, 1, 3 and 6 hr intervals. Anti-hypertensive activity of the crude extract was investigated in three experimental hypertensive models, viz, egg-fed diet, glucose-induced and cadmium-induced hypertensive rats. Cardiovascular parameters, including systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), mean blood pressure (MBP) and heart rate (HR) were measured by tail cuff method using non-invasive blood pressure apparatus (NIBP) attached. AMECT was also investigated for its phytochemical profile.Results: The results indicate that AMECT produced a dose-dependent, significant (p < 0.05) decrease in SBP, DBP, MBP, and HR (p < 0.01) of normotensive rats, when compared to control groups, at all test doses. The 500 mg/kg dose produced a highly significant effect (mm Hg, p < 0.001) in SBP (85.9 ± 7.2), DBP (71.86 ± 12.1), MBP (75.1 ± 11.7) and HR (238.08 ± 8.3 beats/min), in comparison to 100 and 300 mg/kg doses; therefore, 500 mg/kg was selected for antihypertensive test in egg-fed, glucose-induced and cadmium-treated hypertensive rats. Significant (p < 0.05) antihypertensive and negative chronotropic effects were observed in hypertensive models compared to their respective normal controls. Phytochemical analysis revealed the presence of tannins, alkaloids, phenolic compounds, cardiac glycosides and flavonoids.Conclusion: The findings indicate that Caralluma tuberculata possesses significant anti-hypentensive activity in rats.Keywords: Phytochemical profile, Antihypertensive, Cardiovascular, Caralluma tuberculata N.E.Br, Blood pressur

In silico data mining of large-scale databases for the virtual screening of human interleukin-2 inhibitors

Interleukin-2 (IL-2) is involved in the activation and differentiation of T-helper cells. Uncontrolled activated T cells play a key role in the pathophysiology by stimulating inflammation and autoimmune diseases like arthritis, psoriasis and Crohn’s disease. T cells activation can be suppressed either by preventing IL-2 production or blocking the IL-2 interaction with its receptor. Hence, IL-2 is now emerging as a target for novel therapeutic approaches in several autoimmune disorders. This study was carried out to set up an effective virtual screening (VS) pipeline for IL-2. Four docking/scoring approaches (FRED, MOE, GOLD and Surflex-Dock) were compared in the re-docking process to test their performance in producing correct binding modes of IL-2 inhibitors. Surflex-Dock and FRED were the best in predicting the native pose in its top-ranking position. Shapegauss and CGO scoring functions identified the known inhibitors of IL-2 in top 1, 5 and 10 % of library and differentiated binders from non-binders efficiently with average AUC of > 0.9 and > 0.7, resp. The applied docking protocol served as a basis for the VS of a large database that will lead to the identification of more active compounds against IL-2

Empirical Investigation of Critical Requirements Engineering Practices for Global Software Development

There is a need to identify requirements engineering (RE) practices that are important to global software development (GSD) project success. The objective of this paper is to report our recent empirical study results which aimed to identify the RE practices that are important to GSD projects. This study used an online survey questionnaire to elicit data from 56 RE experts of GSD projects. The survey included 66 RE practices identified by Sommerville et al. for non-GSD projects. The participants were asked to rank each RE practice on a four-point scale to determine the degree of importance of each practice in the context of GSD projects. This research identified a set of six key RE practices that mainly focuses on GSD project stakeholders, scope, standards and requirements traceability management. One common theme that is evident from the RE experts' feedback analysis is the standardization of requirements documents to reduce requirements inconsistencies and improve communication in diverse and distributed GSD project environments Our results show that not all 66 RE best practices are important for GSD projects. We believe that a good understanding of the identified RE practices is vital in developing and implementing the situation-specific RE processes for GSD projects

Correlation of Group C Meningococcal Conjugate Vaccine Response with B- and T-Lymphocyte Activity

Despite the success of conjugate vaccination against meningococcal group C (MenC) disease, post-vaccination, some individuals still exhibit rapid waning of initially protective bactericidal antibody levels. The mechanism of this relative loss of humoral protection remains undetermined. In this report we have investigated the relationship between T- and B-cell activation and co-stimulation and the loss of protective antibody titers. We have found that healthy volunteers who lose protective MenC antibody levels one year after receipt of glycoconjugate vaccine exhibit no detectable cellular defect in polyclonal B- or T-cell activation, proliferation or the B-memory pool. This suggests that the processes underlying the more rapid loss of antibody levels are independent of defects in either initial T- or B-cell activation

De novo design of transmembrane β-barrels

Transmembrane b-barrel proteins (TMBs) are of great interest for single-molecule analytical technologies because they can spontaneously fold and insert into membranes and form stable pores, but the range of pore properties that can be achieved by repurposing natural TMBs is limited. We leverage the power of de novo computational design coupled with a “hypothesis, design, and test” approach to determine TMB design principles, notably, the importance of negative design to slow b-sheet assembly. We design new eight-stranded TMBs, with no homology to known TMBs, that insert and fold reversibly into synthetic lipid membranes and have nuclear magnetic resonance and x-ray crystal structures very similar to the computational models. These advances should enable the custom design of pores for a wide range of applications