A comparative study on anti-hyperalgesia effect of MTA and Ketoprofen in inflammatory pain

INTRODUCTION: Mineral trioxide aggregate (MTA) is an endodontic material with different clinical applications e.g. root-end filling, pulp capping and perforation repair.  It has been reported to possess antimicrobial and antifungal activities. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of White MTA on formalin-induced hyperalgesia in a rat with inflammatory pain. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Inflammatory pain was induced by subcutaneous (SC) injection of formalin (40 µL, 2.5%) into the rat upper lip. The nociceptive behavioral responses i.e. shaking of the lower jaw and face rubbing were quantified. 40 µL of eugenol (50 mg/kg), WMTA (20 mg/0.2 mL) or ketoprofen were injected solely or in combination with formalin 2.5% and the behavioral responses were compared with those observed after formalin treatment alone. One-way ANOVA, Tukey were used for analysis of data. RESULTS: Formalin 2.5% provoked a biphasic nociceptive response, with an early and short lasting first tonic phase followed by a second phase. Solely SC injection of either WMTA or ketoprofen (a non steroidal anti-inflammatory drug) did not stimulate any significant nociceptive behaviour. However, injection of eugenol (a pain relieving agent) induced the early phase not the tonic phase of nociceptive response. WMTA, eugenol or ketoprofen injection 20 min before formalin injection attenuated the first phase but somehow prevented the induction of the second phase of nociceptive responses which were produced by formalin. Behavioural nociceptive responses including shaking of the lower jaw and face rubbing were significantly reduced when the subject was pretreated with either WMTA or ketoprofen (P<0.001). CONCLUSION: In this study, WMTA induced pain reduction by suppression of the formalin-induced nociceptive response

Impaired IL-23-dependent induction of IFN-gamma underlies mycobacterial disease in patients with inherited TYK2 deficiency

Human cells homozygous for rare loss-of-expression (LOE) TYK2 alleles have impaired, but not abolished, cellular responses to IFN-alpha/beta (underlying viral diseases in the patients) and to IL-12 and IL-23 (underlying mycobacterial diseases). Cells homozygous for the common P1104A TYK2 allele have selectively impaired responses to IL-23 (underlying isolated mycobacterial disease). We report three new forms of TYK2 deficiency in six patients from five families homozygous for rare TYK2 alleles (R864C, G996R, G634E, or G1010D) or compound heterozygous for P1104A and a rare allele (A928V). All these missense alleles encode detectable proteins. The R864C and G1010D alleles are hypomorphic and loss-of-function (LOF), respectively, across signaling pathways. By contrast, hypomorphic G996R, G634E, and A928V mutations selectively impair responses to IL-23, like P1104A. Impairment of the IL-23-dependent induction of IFN-gamma is the only mechanism of mycobacterial disease common to patients with complete TYK2 deficiency with or without TYK2 expression, partial TYK2 deficiency across signaling pathways, or rare or common partial TYK2 deficiency specific for IL-23 signaling.ANRS Nord-Sud ; CIBSS ; CODI ; Comité para el Desarrollo de la Investigación ; Fulbright Future Scholarshi

Mapping 123 million neonatal, infant and child deaths between 2000 and 2017

Since 2000, many countries have achieved considerable success in improving child survival, but localized progress remains unclear. To inform efforts towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3.2—to end preventable child deaths by 2030—we need consistently estimated data at the subnational level regarding child mortality rates and trends. Here we quantified, for the period 2000–2017, the subnational variation in mortality rates and number of deaths of neonates, infants and children under 5 years of age within 99 low- and middle-income countries using a geostatistical survival model. We estimated that 32% of children under 5 in these countries lived in districts that had attained rates of 25 or fewer child deaths per 1,000 live births by 2017, and that 58% of child deaths between 2000 and 2017 in these countries could have been averted in the absence of geographical inequality. This study enables the identification of high-mortality clusters, patterns of progress and geographical inequalities to inform appropriate investments and implementations that will help to improve the health of all populations

Mapping local patterns of childhood overweight and wasting in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2017

A double burden of malnutrition occurs when individuals, household members or communities experience both undernutrition and overweight. Here, we show geospatial estimates of overweight and wasting prevalence among children under 5 years of age in 105 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from 2000 to 2017 and aggregate these to policy-relevant administrative units. Wasting decreased overall across LMICs between 2000 and 2017, from 8.4% (62.3 (55.1–70.8) million) to 6.4% (58.3 (47.6–70.7) million), but is predicted to remain above the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025. Prevalence of overweight increased from 5.2% (30 (22.8–38.5) million) in 2000 to 6.0% (55.5 (44.8–67.9) million) children aged under 5 years in 2017. Areas most affected by double burden of malnutrition were located in Indonesia, Thailand, southeastern China, Botswana, Cameroon and central Nigeria. Our estimates provide a new perspective to researchers, policy makers and public health agencies in their efforts to address this global childhood syndemic

Understanding lexical and orthographic processing of Persian : the role of age of acquisition

The primary aim of this thesis is to understand the mechanism of word processing in an Indo-European language (i.e. Persian) with a borrowed Semitic script (i.e. Arabic) using a psycholinguistic approach. This research reports fresh psycholinguistic norms for the psycholinguistic properties of object (picture) names and written word stimuli for Persian for the first time and investigates the effect of these properties on lexical retrieval and more specifically oral reading for both normal and impaired Persian speakers. The main hypothesis studied is whether there is an independent effect of the age of acquisition (AoA) of a word on lexical retrieval in Persian and the locus of this effect on adult lexical processing using behavioural, event related potential (ERP) and neuro-linguistic experiments. The predictions tested are that (a) words learnt earlier in life have a processing advantage i.e. faster processing time and fewer errors in lexical retrieval (b) AoA leaves a neural signature on lexical processing and (c) and that AoA preserves lexical retrieval in Persian speakers who have brain damage. The results of the study broadly confirmed these predictions. The key finding is that although AoA has an effect on lexical retrieval in Persian (Z =9.25, p < .00001), the effect of this variable is more pronounced when the mapping between input and output is more arbitrary such as for oral reading of written words with relatively opaque spellings (Z =-2.00, p < .05). Normal and aphasic speakers of Persian both read opaque words less efficiently than transparent words (Z =3.93, p < .0001), especially when these words are acquired later in life (Z =2.48, p < .05). Crucially, the evidence from patients with aphasia revealed that oral reading in Persian requires both semantic and nonsemantic routes due to varying degrees of orthography to phonology transparency in Persian. The theoretical implications of the thesis are (1) AoA has an independent and durable effect on lexical retrieval during both spoken and written word processing tasks for Persian speakers (2) AoA clusters with psycholinguistic properties that have a semantic quality rather than simply reflecting token frequency of exposure and (3) a semantic locus for the effect of AoA was confirmed using ERPs suggesting a neural signature of the AoA effect located in the (semantic) N400 F(1,22) = 9.35, p < .01 and LPC components F(1,22) = 21.18, p <.0001. The primary conclusion is that AoA has an effect on spoken and written word processing in Persian a prototypical example of an Indo-European language with a Semitic script.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesDoctoralDoctor of Philosoph

Mehdi Bakhtiar's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

Exogenous verbal response inhibition in adults who do and do not stutter

Introduction: Behavioral and questionnaire-based studies suggest that children who stutter (CWS) exhibit poorer response inhibition than children who do not stutter (CWNS). However, the behavioral findings in adults who stutter (AWS) are less unequivocal and mainly based on manual response inhibition. Further study is therefore needed, especially given the lack of studies on verbal response inhibition among these groups.Methods: Thirteen AWS and 14 adults who do not stutter (AWNS) participated in a verbal stop signal task (SST) in which they were asked to read aloud six Chinese characters as fast as possible during the go-signal and ignore-signal trials and refrain from naming them during the stop-signal trials.Results: The two groups showed a comparable response reaction time in the go-signal and ignore -signal trial conditions. Furthermore, there were no significant differences in terms of the stop -signal reaction time (SSRT) and accuracy. However, a significant positive correlation was found between SSRT and the frequency of stuttering in conversation but not in reading.Conclusion: Current findings seem to provide additional support that exogenously triggered response inhibition among AWS does not differ from AWNS. The association between stuttering frequency and SSRT seems to suggest that individuals with more severe stuttering in conversa-tional speech have reduced exogenous response inhibition. However, this finding needs to be further explored in future studies using different measures of stuttering severity

Dissociations between word and picture naming in Persian speakers with aphasia

Studies of patients with aphasia have found dissociations in their ability to read words and name pictures (Hillis & Caramazza, 1995; Hillis & Caramazza, 1991). Persian orthography is characterised by nearly regular orthography-phonology (OP) mappings however, the omission of some vowels in the script makes the OP mapping of many words less predictable. The aim of this study was to compare the predictive lexico-semantic variables across reading and picture naming tasks in Persian aphasia while considering the variability across participants and items using mixed modeling. Methods and Results A total of 21 brain-injured Persian-speaking patients suffering from aphasia were asked to name 200 normalized Snodgrass object pictures and words taken from Bakhtiar, Nilipour and Weekes (2013) in different sessions. The results showed that word naming performance was significantly better than object naming in Persian speakers with aphasia (p<0.0001). Applying McNemar’s test to examine individual differences found that 18 patients showed significantly better performance in word reading compared to picture naming, 2 patients showed no difference between naming and reading (i.e. case 1 and 10), and one patient (i.e. case 5) showed significantly better naming compared to reading χ (1)=10.23, p< 0.01 (see also Figure 1). A mixed-effect logistic regression analysis revealed that the degree of spelling transparency (i.e. the number of letters in a word divided by the number of its phonemes) had an effect on word naming (along with frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability) and picture naming (along with image agreement, AoA, word length, frequency and name agreement) with a much stronger effect on the word naming task (b= 1.67, SE= 0.41, z= 4.05, p< 0.0001) compared to the picture naming task (b= -0.64, SE= 0.32, z= 2, p< 0.05). Conclusion The dissociation between word naming and picture naming shown by many patients suggests at least two routes are available for lexical access for phonological output: a semantic route for picture naming and a route for mapping orthography to phonology directly. The main effect of spelling transparency along with other lexico-semantic variables (such as frequency, imageability and AoA) on word naming suggests an interaction between these routes (Bi, Han, Weekes, & Shu, 2007; Hillis & Caramazza, 1995), which makes the word naming less challenging than the picture naming task for most speakers with aphasia. However, the result from case 5 could suggest that the direct route for reading can be selectively impaired. Moreover, the mild effect of spelling transparency on picture naming even after other lexico-semantic variables (e.g. AoA, frequency, imageability, name agreement, imageability, and word length) have been explained, indicates that objects with more transparent spellings have a greater probability of being named accurately in aphasia. This finding raises the possibility that orthographic representations are activated to some degree during picture naming to help access the phonology of the word as long as the spelling of the word is transparent. This explanation is compatible with the summation account of lexical access in aphasia (Hillis & Caramazza, 1995)