Nasal Drug Delivery Systems: An Overview

Since ancient times, drugs have been administered via the nasal route for therapeutic and recreational purposes. The interest in, and importance, of the systemic effects of drugs administered through the nasal route, have expanded over recent decades. Intra-nasal administration of drugs offers an interesting alternative for achieving systemic therapeutic effects of drugs that are comparable to the parenteral route, which can be inconvenient at times or oral administration, which can result in unacceptably low drug bioavailability. So, it is important to understand the potential and limitations of various nasal drug delivery systems. Therefore, the aim of this review article is to discuss the various pharmaceutical dosage forms that have the potential to be utilised for local or systemic drug administration. It is intuitively expected that this review will help to understand and further to develop suitable intra-nasal formulations to achieve specific therapeutic objectives

Predicting the minimum liquid surface tension activity of pseudomonads expressing biosurfactants

Bacteria produce a variety of biosurfactants capable of significantly reducing liquid (aqueous) surface tension (γ) with a range of biological roles and biotechnological uses. In order to determine the lowest achievable surface tension (γMin), we tested a diverse collection of Pseudomonas-like isolates from contaminated soil and activated sludge, and identified those expressing biosurfactants by drop-collapse assay. Liquid surface tension reducing ability was quantitatively determined by tensiometry, with 57 isolates found to significantly lower culture supernatant surface tensions to 24.5 – 49.1 mN m−1. Differences in biosurfactant behaviour determined by foaming, emulsion and oil-displacement assays, was also observed amongst isolates producing surface tensions of 25 – 27 mN m−1, suggesting that a range of structurally-diverse biosurfactants were being expressed. Individual distribution identification (IDI) analysis was used to identify the theoretical probability distribution that best fitted the surface tension data, which predicted a γMin of 24.24 mN m−1. This was in agreement with predictions based on earlier work of published mixed–bacterial spp. data, suggesting a fundamental limit to the ability of bacterial biosurfactants to reduce surface tensions in aqueous systems. This implies a biological restriction on the synthesis and export of these agents or a physical-chemical restriction on their functioning once produced

Deployment of Mobile Ad-hoc Network Ticket Based QoS Routing Protocol for Healthcare

A Mobile Adhoc Network comprises of set of portable hosts which are equipped for corresponding with one another with no aid of base stations. MANET are quick evolving topology, broad exploration is going ahead to outline directing conventions for MANETs. The Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector convention concerns with most limited way steering and changing the courses powerfully in work space. Quality of Service (QoS) prerequisite issues are less tended to in MANETs and the motivation behind this paper is to address QoS directing in a MANET domain and concentrate principally on ticket based QoS steering convention to figure out course fulfilling certain data transmission and delay obliges. The essential thought is to utilize tickets to keep the quantity of route searching packets to abstain from flooding and to make courses progressively to accomplish proficient Quality of Service

Analysis of Subsea Energy Supply Systems for Improved Maintenance Using ANFIS and TOPSIS

The maintenance plan for the subsea energy supply system during the operation was optimized by firstly training the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) model with historical data of process variables of the system such as voltage, current, power, and pressure in MATLAB software and then predicting the optimum output of the process using the trained model, which showed a good prediction of operational data after two cycles of computational analysis. The outputs from the trained model, coupled with expert opinions on historical data, were used to develop a Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) multi-criteria algorithm to select the best maintenance strategy. The reliability-centred maintenance, with a performance score of 0.811, ranked best amongst the maintenance strategies under the studied scenario. The result shows that the procedure could be applied in condition monitoring of operational subsea energy supply systems to predict impending faults through deviation error and prevent failure by the application of an appropriate maintenance strategy. Keywords: ANFIS, TOPSIS, Maintenance plan, Fault prediction and Subsea power supply systems DOI: 10.7176/ISDE/12-2-02 Publication date: April 30th 202

Coverage of hospital-based cataract surgery and barriers to the uptake of surgery among cataract blind persons in nigeria: the Nigeria National Blindness and Visual Impairment Survey.

PURPOSE: To determine cataract surgical coverage, and barriers to modern cataract surgery in Nigeria. METHODS: Multistage stratified cluster random sampling was used to identify a nationally representative sample of 15,027 persons aged 40+ years. All underwent visual acuity testing, frequency doubling technology visual field testing, autorefraction, and measurement of best corrected vision if <6/12 in one or both eyes. An ophthalmologist examined the anterior segment and fundus through an undilated pupil for all participants. Participants were examined by a second ophthalmologist using a slit lamp and dilated fundus examination using a 90 diopter condensing lens if vision was <6/12 in one or both eyes, there were optic disc changes suggestive of glaucoma, and 1 in 7 participants regardless of findings. All those who had undergone cataract surgery were asked where and when this had taken place. Individuals who were severely visually impaired or blind from unoperated cataract were asked to explain why they had not undergone surgery. RESULTS: A total of 13,591 participants were examined (response rate 89.9%). Prevalence of cataract surgery was 1.6% (95% confidence interval 1.4-1.8), significantly higher among those aged ≥70 years. Cataract surgical coverage (persons) in Nigeria was 38.3%. Coverage was 1.7 times higher among males than females. Coverage was only 9.1% among women in the South-South geopolitical zone. Over one third of those who were cataract blind said they could not afford surgery (36%). CONCLUSIONS: Cataract surgical coverage in Nigeria was among the lowest in the world. Urgent initiatives are necessary to improve surgical output and access to surgery

Net Worth Predicts Symptom Burden at the End of Life

Objectives: To explore the predictors of symptom burden at the end of life. Design: Observational, secondary analysis of Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data. Setting: USA. Participants: Two thousand six hundred four deceased, older adults. Methods: Multivariate Poisson and logistic regression to explore the relationship between sociodemographic and clinical factors with symptoms. Results: Fatigue, pain, dyspnea, depression, and anorexia were common and severe; 58% of participants experienced more than 3 of these during their last year of life. Sociodemographic and clinical factors were associated with the number of symptoms as well as the presence of pain, depression, and dyspnea alone. Decedents in the highest quartile of net worth had fewer symptoms (incident rate ratio [IRR] 0.90, confidence interval [CI] 0.85–0.96) and less pain (odds ratio [OR] 0.66, CI 0.51–0.85) than comparisons did. Patients with cancer experienced more pain (OR 2.02, CI 1.62–2.53) and depression (OR 1.31, CI 1.07–1.61). Patients experienced more depression (OR 2.37, CI 1.85–3.03) and dyspnea (OR 1.40, CI 1.09–1.78). Limitation: Use of proxy reports for primary data. Conclusion: Older Americans experience a large symptom burden in the last year of life, largely with treatable symptoms such as pain, dyspnea, and depression. The adequacy of symptom control relates to clinical factors as well as net worth. This association between symptoms and wealth suggests that access to health care and other social services beyond those covered by Medicare may be important in decreasing symptom burden at the end of life.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63106/1/jpm.2005.8.827.pd

Optimising Fault Tolerance in Real-time Cloud Computing IaaS Environment

YesFault tolerance is the ability of a system to respond swiftly to an unexpected failure. Failures in a cloud computing environment are normal rather than exceptional, but fault detection and system recovery in a real time cloud system is a crucial issue. To deal with this problem and to minimize the risk of failure, an optimal fault tolerance mechanism was introduced where fault tolerance was achieved using the combination of the Cloud Master, Compute nodes, Cloud load balancer, Selection mechanism and Cloud Fault handler. In this paper, we proposed an optimized fault tolerance approach where a model is designed to tolerate faults based on the reliability of each compute node (virtual machine) and can be replaced if the performance is not optimal. Preliminary test of our algorithm indicates that the rate of increase in pass rate exceeds the decrease in failure rate and it also considers forward and backward recovery using diverse software tools. Our results obtained are demonstrated through experimental validation thereby laying a foundation for a fully fault tolerant IaaS Cloud environment, which suggests a good performance of our model compared to current existing approaches.Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF

Recent Trends in Image Encryption: A Review

Security of multimedia data is gaining acceptance owing to the growth and acceptability of images in various applications and in telecommunication. Encryption is one of the ways to ensure high security of images as they are used in many fields such as in secure medical imaging services, military intelligence, internet and intranet communication, e-banking etc. These images are stored or transmitted through a network; hence the security of such image data is important. In this work, recently developed encryption techniques are studied and analyzed to promote further development of more encryption methods to ensure additional security and versatility. All the techniques reviewed came into existence within the last five years (2011-2015) and are found to be useful for the present day encryption applications. Each technique is unique in its own way, which might be suitable for different applications. As time goes on, new encryption techniques are evolving. Hence, fast and secure conventional encryption techniques will always be needed in applications requiring high rate of security

Phytosociological attributes of aquatic weeds of Kano-Hadejanguru wetlands

A survey was conducted during dry and rainy seasons of 2011 in order to determine the phytosociological attributes of acquatic weeds of Kano-Hadeja-Nguru wetlands. Random quadrat method was adopted for the phytosociological studies. The study areas consisted of communities from Kano, Jigawa and Yobe States. In each state, six communities were randomly selected. In each community20 quadrats of 4 m2 size were laid down and hence sum of 120 quadrats were randomly thrown for each state. Within each quadrat area, weeds were identified, counted and weed cover scores were recorded. Weeds were cut at ground level, fresh and dry weights were determined. Typha grass was the most dominant species in the wetlands of Jigawa (21.195 and 22.5%) compared to either Kano (9.345 and 5.27%) or Yobe (12.73 and12.135%) states. Weed density, weed cover scores as well as fresh and dry weight of weed samples from Kano were observed to be higher than the other two states. Morphological characteristics of Typha spp found in Kano State were taller with more leaves than the other two states. The study suggested that there is strong need to start an Integrated Typha management in the study areas.Keywords: Phytosocioloy, aquatic weed, wetlands, Typha morpholog