Impact of Knowledge and Attitude on Saudis’ Physical Activity Practice and Inactivity Barriers: A Questionnaire-based Study

BACKGROUND: Community participation in physical activity is considered a major public health preference of WHO. Saudi Arabia in the last decades faced many tremendous economic changes leading to adoption of western dietary habits associated with sedentary lifestyle. AIM: We aimed to study the relationship between both physical activity knowledge and attitude of community to the practice of individuals. METHODS: We used a questionnaire consists of a mixture of closed-ended questions. Participants were recruited through direct meetings in local markets, schools, and workplaces. Seven hundred and sixty six individuals agreed to participate. RESULTS: Overall correct answers to questions about importance of physical activity were 76.58%. The predominance of participants’ attitude was to establish public places for physical activity in each neighborhood (92.1%). Participants acknowledged that they exercise to improve their health (47.5%). Participants mainly perform light exercises (47.2%) on basis of 1–3 times weekly (48.9%). About 90.8% of participants admitted that they like to increase duration of their physical activity. CONCLUSIONS: Overall physical activity practice of participants’ needs encourage overcoming obstacles that prevent individuals from practicing especially lack of time

Elucidating the clinical and immunological value of m6A regulator-mediated methylation modification patterns in adrenocortical carcinoma

N6-methyladenosine methylation (m6A) is a common type of epigenetic alteration that prominently affects the prognosis of tumor patients. However, it is unknown how the m6A regulator affects the tumor microenvironment (TME) cell infiltration in adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) and how it affects the prognosis of ACC patients yet. The m6A alteration patterns of 112 ACC patients were evaluated, furthermore, the association with immune infiltration cell features was investigated. The unsupervised clustering method was applied to typify the m6A alteration patterns of ACC patients. The principal component analysis (PCA) technique was taken to create the m6A score to assess the alteration pattern in specific malignancies. We found two independent patterns of m6A alteration in ACC patients. The TME cell infiltration features were significantly in accordance with phenotypes of tumor immune-inflamed and immune desert in both patterns. The m6Ascore also served as an independent predictive factor in ACC patients. The somatic copy number variation (CNV) and patients prognosis can be predicted by m6A alteration patterns. Moreover, the ACC patients with high m6A scores had better overall survival (OS) and higher efficiency in immune checkpoint blockade therapy. Our work demonstrated the significance of m6A alteration to the ACC patients immunotherapy. The individual m6A alteration patterns analysis might contribute to ACC patients prognosis prediction and immunotherapy choice

The Impact of Antiepileptic Drugs on Thyroid Function in Children with Epilepsy: New Versus Old

 Abstract ObjectivesTo investigate the effects of traditional antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) versus newer AEDs on the thyroid hormone profile of children with epilepsy.Materials & MethodsA total of 80 children with epilepsy were included in this study and were divided into two groups. Group 1 included 40 children with epilepsy on traditional AEDs, and group 2 included 40 children with epilepsy on newer AEDs. Forty healthy children were also included as the control group (group 3). We analyzed the serum levels of free triiodothyronine (FT3), free thyroxine (FT4), and thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH).Results: Epileptic children treated with traditional drugs showed a statistically significant decrease in the serum fT4 and increase in TSH concentrations compared to the control group (P < 0.001). Whereas epileptic children treated with newer drugs showed no statistically significant changes in the serum fT3, fT4 and TSH concentrations compared to the control group Conclusions: Traditional AEDs have a significant impact in the thyroid hormone profile compared to the newer AEDs

Elucidating the clinical and immunological value of m6A regulator-mediated methylation modification patterns in adrenocortical carcinoma

N6-methyladenosine methylation (m6A) is a common type of epigenetic alteration that prominently affects the prognosis of tumor patients. However, it is unknown how the m6A regulator affects the tumor microenvironment (TME) cell infiltration in adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) and how it affects the prognosis of ACC patients yet. The m6A alteration patterns of 112 ACC patients were evaluated, furthermore, the association with immune infiltration cell features was investigated. The unsupervised clustering method was applied to typify the m6A alteration patterns of ACC patients. The principal component analysis (PCA) technique was taken to create the m6A score to assess the alteration pattern in specific malignancies. We found two independent patterns of m6A alteration in ACC patients. The TME cell infiltration features were significantly in accordance with phenotypes of tumor immune-inflamed and immune desert in both patterns. The m6Ascore also served as an independent predictive factor in ACC patients. The somatic copy number variation (CNV) and patients prognosis can be predicted by m6A alteration patterns. Moreover, the ACC patients with high m6A scores had better overall survival (OS) and higher efficiency in immune checkpoint blockade therapy. Our work demonstrated the significance of m6A alteration to the ACC patients immunotherapy. The individual m6A alteration patterns analysis might contribute to ACC patients prognosis prediction and immunotherapy choice

Brain tumor segmentation based on a hybrid clustering technique

Image segmentation refers to the process of partitioning an image into mutually exclusive regions. It can be considered as the most essential and crucial process for facilitating the delineation, characterization, and visualization of regions of interest in any medical image. Despite intensive research, segmentation remains a challenging problem due to the diverse image content, cluttered objects, occlusion, image noise, non-uniform object texture, and other factors. There are many algorithms and techniques available for image segmentation but still there needs to develop an efficient, fast technique of medical image segmentation. This paper presents an efficient image segmentation approach using K-means clustering technique integrated with Fuzzy C-means algorithm. It is followed by thresholding and level set segmentation stages to provide an accurate brain tumor detection. The proposed technique can get benefits of the K-means clustering for image segmentation in the aspects of minimal computation time. In addition, it can get advantages of the Fuzzy C-means in the aspects of accuracy. The performance of the proposed image segmentation approach was evaluated by comparing it with some state of the art segmentation algorithms in case of accuracy, processing time, and performance. The accuracy was evaluated by comparing the results with the ground truth of each processed image. The experimental results clarify the effectiveness of our proposed approach to deal with a higher number of segmentation problems via improving the segmentation quality and accuracy in minimal execution time

Improving the quality properties of soybean oil by using rice bran oil

Abstract This study aims to study the effect of substituting soybean oil (SO) with rice bran oil (RBO) at different levels (25%, 50%, and 75%) on the physical and chemical properties, fatty acid composition, and oxidative stability of SO, also, study the effect of storing SO, RBO, and their blend oils at ambient temperature for a period of 12 months on the content of free fatty acids (% FFA), peroxide value (PV), and thiobarbituric acid (TBA). RBO demonstrated good quality, as evidenced by its initial low values of % FFA, PV, and TBA. Furthermore, RBO was found to be an excellent source of γ-oryzanol, whereas the other oils lacked this compound. Consequently, increasing the proportion of RBO in SO resulted in the least degradation, while pure SO exhibited the highest degree of degradation. Moreover, the blend oils demonstrated an inhibitory effect against oxidation, allowing for a prolonged storage period without the use of industrial antioxidants. Throughout the entire storage period, the % FFA and PV of all tested blend oil samples remained within the limits recommended for human consumption. TBA exhibited a similar trend to PV. However, an incremental increase in TBA values was observed as the storage period of the oils extended. In SO, TBA levels increased from 0.533 mg malonaldehyde/kg oil at the beginning to 1.446 mg malonaldehyde/kg oil after 12 months of storage. In RBO, TBA levels increased from 0.336 mg malonaldehyde/kg oil at the beginning to 0.882 mg malonaldehyde/kg oil after 12 months of storage

Recent advances of RAF (rapidly accelerated fibrosarcoma) inhibitors as anti-cancer agents

Frequent oncogenic mutations have been identified in MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase) signaling pathway components. As a result, MAPK pathway is associated with human cancer initiation, in particular RAF (rapidly accelerated fibrosarcoma) component. The mutation in RAF component leads to auto-activation of MAPK signaling pathway, stimulating the uncontrolled cell growth and proliferation. In last few years, diverse chemical scaffolds have been identified as RAF inhibitors. Most of these scaffolds show potent anti-cancer activity. The present review highlights the recent investigations of RAF inhibitors during the last five years

Anticancer profile of newly synthesized BRAF inhibitors possess 5-(pyrimidin-4-yl)imidazo[2,1-b]thiazole scaffold

In this work, a new series of imidazo[2,1-b]thiazole was designed and synthesized. The new compounds are having 3-fluorophenyl at position 6 of imidazo[2,1-b]thiazole and pyrimidine ring at position 5. The pyrimidine ring containing either amide or sulphonamide moiety attached to a linker (ethyl or propyl) at position 2 of the pyrimidine ring. The final compounds were selected by NCI for in vitro cytotoxicity screening. Most derivatives showed cytotoxic activity against colon cancer and melanoma cell lines. In addition, IC 50 s of the target compounds were determined over A375 and SK-MEL-28 cell lines using sorafenib as positive control. Compounds12b, 12c, 12e, 12f, 15a, 15d, 15f, 14g and 15h exhibited superior activity when compared to sorafenib. The most potent compounds were tested against wild type BRAF, v600e BRAF, and CRAF. Compound 15h exhibited a potential inhibitory effect against V600E BRAF (IC 50 = 9.3 nM)

Design, synthesis, in vitro anticancer evaluation, kinase inhibitory effects, and pharmacokinetic profile of new 1,3,4-triarylpyrazole derivatives possessing terminal sulfonamide moiety

The present work describes the design and synthesis of a novel series of 1,3-diaryl-4-sulfonamidoarylpyrazole derivatives 1a–q and 2a–q and their in vitro biological activities. The target compounds were evaluated for antiproliferative activity against NCI-60 cell line panel. Compounds 1c, 1g, 1k–m, 1o, 2g, 2h, 2k–m, 2o, and 2q showed the highest mean inhibition percentages at 10 µM single-dose testing and were selected to be tested at 5-dose mode. The ICs50 of the most potent compounds were determined over the 60 cell lines. Compound 2l exhibited the strongest activity against different cell lines with IC50 0.33 µM against A498 renal cancer cell line. Compound 2l was tested over a panel of 20 kinases to determine its molecular target(s), and its IC50 values over the most sensitive kinases were defined. In vitro stability and in vivo pharmacokinetic profile of compound 2l was also investigated