Role of regular yoga practice in improvement of various pulmonary parameters in first year medical students

Background: tress at any stage of life virtually produces several respiratory limitations and reduces tolerance to physical efforts, sometimes leading to pulmonary diseases in individuals. Various yoga and Pranayama like Kapalbhati and Nadi-sodhan involves powerful strokes of exhalation, which trains the subject to make full use of diaphragm and abdominal muscles.Methods: This study is performed on 1st yr. medical students whose stress level is in higher side due to academic burden. 55 medical students were selected as participants through counseling and were divided into Yoga group (n= 27) and control group (n=28). Pulmonary functions of subjects were tested using Pony FX advanced desktop spirometer manufactured by Cosmed. Yoga is performed 1 hr/day for 6 days /week for 12 weeks by yoga group.Results: Pulmonary functions tested in Yoga and control group were FVC, FEV1, PEF and FVC/FEV1. There were significant improvements in pulmonary functions in yoga group. In Yoga group (FVC- 5.8% increases, FEV1- 5.2% increase, PEF- 34% increase and FVC/FEV1- 3.15% increase). In control group also, all parameters increased but P value was not significant.Conclusions: This study concludes that practicing Yoga has shown a significant improvement on pulmonary functions in 1st year medical students

Role of yoga and meditation on serum DHEAS level in first year medical students

Background: Dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS), secreted by adrenal cortex, acts in the human body as a neurosteroid, cardio-protective, anti-diabetic, anti-obesity and immune-enhancing agent. It is also reported as a youth hormone. But due to various stimulators of stress, and also as an antagonist of cortisol, DHEAS level decreases. Yoga and meditation regulates the level of hormones and neurotransmitters that affect physiological function.Methods: This study was performed on 1st yr. medical students whose DHEAS level was low due to acute stress. 55 medical students were selected as participants through counseling and were divided into Yoga group (n= 27) and control group (n=28). Their morning serum DHEAS level was assessed and yoga group were instructed to practice Yoga (1hr/day for 12 weeks) under supervision of Yoga instructor. No such instruction was given to control group.Results: As a marker of youth and immunity, increase in DHEAS level decreases susceptibility to infections, reduces aging process as well as improves other functions. Yoga and meditation is documented to increase DHEAS level in regular practitioners. Statistical analysis has shown an increase in morning S. DHEAS level in yoga practitioners. Pre-study and post study values were 3.5±2.48 and 3.61±1.73 respectively in yoga group (overall 3.1% increase, P Value = 0.025, significant at 0.05) whereas 3.36±1.98 and 2.58±1.49 respectively in control group (23.2% decrease, P Value =0.84, not significant).Conclusions: This study concludes that practicing Yoga has significantly raised S. DHEAS level in medical students and improved their immunological status as well as enhances mood and behavior

Effect of yoga and meditation on serum cortisol level in first-year medical students

Background: Yoga is a traditional technique to conserve and purify body, mind and soul. It is a mind-body bridge which involves relaxation, meditation and a set of physical exercises performed in association with breathing. In this new era of evolution, most of the population are depressed or in stress, irrespective of their age and gender.Methods: This study is performed on 1st yr. medical students whose stress level is in higher side due to academic burden. An 55 medical students were selected as participants through counseling and were divided into yoga group (n= 27) and control group (n=28). Their morning serum cortisol level was assessed, and yoga group were instructed to practice yoga (1hr/day for 12 weeks) under supervision of yoga instructor. No such instruction was given to control group.Results: Serum cortisol level is the marker of stress and inflammation. Higher cortisol level means high stress level. Yoga and meditation is documented to reduce stress level in regular practitioners.  Statistical analysis has shown decrease in morning serum cortisol level (572.18±168.03 to 544.98±139.89, 4.8% decrease, P value ˂0.05, significant) in yoga group after study. Control group have shown marked increase in cortisol level (558.89±162.69 to 577.26±254.5, 3.4% increase, P value = 0.74, not significant) after three months of study.Conclusions: This study concludes that practicing Yoga has a significant effect on the reduction of stress and anxiety level in medical students

Understanding EEG signals for subject-wise Definition of Armoni Activities

In a growing world of technology, psychological disorders became a challenge to be solved. The methods used for cognitive stimulation are very conventional and based on one-way communication, which only relies on the material or method used for training of an individual. It doesn't use any kind of feedback from the individual to analyze the progress of the training process. We have proposed a closed-loop methodology to improve the cognitive state of a person with ID (Intellectual disability). We have used a platform named 'Armoni', for providing training to the intellectually disabled individuals. The learning is performed in a closed-loop by using feedback in the form of change in affective state. For feedback to the Armoni, an EEG (Electroencephalograph) headband is used. All the changes in EEG are observed and classified against the change in the mean and standard deviation value of all frequency bands of signal. This comparison is being helpful in defining every activity with respect to change in brain signals. In this paper, we have discussed the process of treatment of EEG signal and its definition against the different activities of Armoni. We have tested it on 6 different systems with different age groups and cognitive levels.Comment: Submitted to SN Computer Science journa

Regime-Dependent Good and Bad Volatility of Bitcoin

This paper analyzes high-frequency estimates of good and bad realized volatility of Bitcoin. We show that volatility asymmetry depends on the volatility regime and the forecast horizon. For one-day ahead forecasts, good volatility commands a stronger impact on future volatility than bad volatility on average and in extreme volatility regimes but not across all quantiles and volatility regimes. For 7-day ahead forecasting horizons the asymmetry is similar to that observed in stock markets and becomes stronger with increasing volatility. Compared with stock markets, the persistence and predictability of volatility is low indicating high variations of volatility

Evidence of Antibiotic Resistance and Virulence Factors in Environmental Isolates of <i>Vibrio</i> Species

The outbreak of waterborne diseases such as cholera and non-cholera (vibriosis) is continuously increasing in the environment due to fecal and sewage discharge in water sources. Cholera and vibriosis are caused by different species of Vibrio genus which are responsible for acute diarrheal disease and soft tissue damage. Although incidences of cholera and vibriosis have been reported from the Vaishali district of Bihar, India, clinical or environmental strains have not been characterized in this region. Out of fifty environmental water samples, twelve different biochemical test results confirmed the presence of twenty Vibrio isolates. The isolates were found to belong to five different Vibrio species, namely V. proteolyticus, V. campbellii, V. nereis, V. cincinnatiensis, and V. harveyi. From the identified isolates, 65% and 45% isolates were found to be resistant to ampicillin and cephalexin, respectively. Additionally, two isolates were found to be resistant against six and four separately selected antibiotics. Furthermore, virulent hlyA and ompW genes were detected by PCR in two different isolates. Additionally, phage induction was also noticed in two different isolates which carry lysogenic phage in their genome. Overall, the results reported the identification of five different Vibrio species in environmental water samples. The isolates showed multiple antibacterial resistance, phage induction, and virulence gene profile in their genome

Role of yoga and meditation on serum DHEAS level in first year medical students

Background: Dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS), secreted by adrenal cortex, acts in the human body as a neurosteroid, cardio-protective, anti-diabetic, anti-obesity and immune-enhancing agent. It is also reported as a youth hormone. But due to various stimulators of stress, and also as an antagonist of cortisol, DHEAS level decreases. Yoga and meditation regulates the level of hormones and neurotransmitters that affect physiological function.Methods: This study was performed on 1st yr. medical students whose DHEAS level was low due to acute stress. 55 medical students were selected as participants through counseling and were divided into Yoga group (n= 27) and control group (n=28). Their morning serum DHEAS level was assessed and yoga group were instructed to practice Yoga (1hr/day for 12 weeks) under supervision of Yoga instructor. No such instruction was given to control group.Results: As a marker of youth and immunity, increase in DHEAS level decreases susceptibility to infections, reduces aging process as well as improves other functions. Yoga and meditation is documented to increase DHEAS level in regular practitioners. Statistical analysis has shown an increase in morning S. DHEAS level in yoga practitioners. Pre-study and post study values were 3.5±2.48 and 3.61±1.73 respectively in yoga group (overall 3.1% increase, P Value = 0.025, significant at 0.05) whereas 3.36±1.98 and 2.58±1.49 respectively in control group (23.2% decrease, P Value =0.84, not significant).Conclusions: This study concludes that practicing Yoga has significantly raised S. DHEAS level in medical students and improved their immunological status as well as enhances mood and behavior

Introducing Urdu Digits Dataset with Demonstration of an Efficient and Robust Noisy Decoder-Based Pseudo Example Generator

In the present work, we propose a novel method utilizing only a decoder for generation of pseudo-examples, which has shown great success in image classification tasks. The proposed method is particularly constructive when the data are in a limited quantity used for semi-supervised learning (SSL) or few-shot learning (FSL). While most of the previous works have used an autoencoder to improve the classification performance for SSL, using a single autoencoder may generate confusing pseudo-examples that could degrade the classifier’s performance. On the other hand, various models that utilize encoder–decoder architecture for sample generation can significantly increase computational overhead. To address the issues mentioned above, we propose an efficient means of generating pseudo-examples by using only the generator (decoder) network separately for each class that has shown to be effective for both SSL and FSL. In our approach, the decoder is trained for each class sample using random noise, and multiple samples are generated using the trained decoder. Our generator-based approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art SSL and FSL approaches. In addition, we released the Urdu digits dataset consisting of 10,000 images, including 8000 training and 2000 test images collected through three different methods for purposes of diversity. Furthermore, we explored the effectiveness of our proposed method on the Urdu digits dataset by using both SSL and FSL, which demonstrated improvement of 3.04% and 1.50% in terms of average accuracy, respectively, illustrating the superiority of the proposed method compared to the current state-of-the-art models