A Study on Acute Symptomatic Seizures in the Elderly.

Acute symptomatic seizures are those caused or provoked by an acute medical or neurological insult and it is as common as epilepsy in the medical wards. Acute symptomatic seizures differ from epilepsy in several important aspects. First, unlike epilepsy, these seizures have a clearly identifiable proximate cause, to the extent that one can never be certain of a causal association. When one considers the temporal sequence of acute symptomatic seizures (e.g.uremia, head injury, or stroke immediately preceding a seizure), the biologic plausibility (acute disruption of brain integrity or metabolic homeostasis) and in many cases the dose effect (severity of injury correlated with the risk for seizures) all quite compellingly indicate causation. Although a risk ratio for the immediate association between cause and effect has not been calculated, it must be enormous. Second, unlike epilepsy, acute symptomatic seizures are not characterized by a tendency to recur. The risk for subsequent epilepsy may be increased in individuals experiencing such insults; in general, one does not expect seizures to recur unless the underlying condition recurs. The maximum incidence of seizures occurred in the age group of 60 to 70 years in the study. Cerebrovascular disease was the most common etiology observed in our study. Among cerebrovascular disease, ischemic cerebral infarction was the most common cause. Central nervous system infections, was the second most common cause followed by metabolic causes in our study. So all efforts should be taken to evaluate the patients who presented with seizures in the elderly patients to identify the etiology, for accurate management. Partial seizures was the most common seizure type encountered in the study. Immediate non contrast CT brain was useful, for emergency patients, presenting with seizures to guide appropriate acute management. MRI Brain was useful in detecting lesions, which were missed in CT Brain. Both CT Brain and MRI Brain were indispensable in patients with acute symptomatic seizures in the elderly

A Study of serum lipid profile of young adults with acute myocardial infarction

Seventy cases of proved myocardial infarction in patients with 40 years and below were studied. Controls were studied simultaneously. The male to female ratio was 68:2 in the study group and all the controls were males. Age group ranged from 19 years to 40 years of which maximum incidence was noticed between 35-40 years. 12 percent of the study group were smokers, 40 percent were Obese, 11 percent had hypertension, 17 percent were diabetic mellitus 30 percent had family history of CAD. Mean Serum cholesterol, TGL, LDLC were elevated in the study group when compared to controls. There were 50% incidence of hypercholesterolemia , 35.7% incidence of elevated LDLC, 47.14% incidence of elevated TGL, 40% incidence of high risk HDLC in the study group, which all were significant when compared to controls. Obesity, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, smokers showed the pattern of dyslipoproteinemia in the study group Anterior wall MI was seen in 54%, Inferior wall 33%, Posterior wall, 2.85%, combined anterior and inferior wall 86% Incidence of ST elevation MI was 96%. Rythymic disturbances was noted in 40% and features of left ventricular failure were seen in 25.5%. Mortality was 4%. The incidence of left ventricular systolic dysfunction was 35.7%. The results were compared with earlier works in the field. Relevant literature were reviewed

TaLoS: secure and transparent TLS termination inside SGX enclaves

We introduce TaLoS1, a drop-in replacement for existing transport layer security (TLS) libraries that protects itself from a malicious environment by running inside an Intel SGX trusted execution environment. By minimising the amount of enclave transitions and reducing the overhead of the remaining enclave transitions, TaLoS imposes an overhead of no more than 31% in our evaluation with the Apache web server and the Squid proxy

Glamdring: automatic application partitioning for Intel SGX

Trusted execution support in modern CPUs, as offered by Intel SGX enclaves , can protect applications in untrusted environments. While prior work has shown that legacy applications can run in their entirety inside enclaves, this results in a large trusted computing base (TCB). Instead, we explore an approach in which we partition an applica- tion and use an enclave to protect only security-sensitive data and functions, thus obtaining a smaller TCB. We describe Glamdring , the first source-level parti- tioning framework that secures applications written in C using Intel SGX. A developer first annotates security- sensitive application data. Glamdring then automatically partitions the application into untrusted and enclave parts: (i) to preserve data confidentiality, Glamdring uses dataflow analysis to identify functions that may be ex- posed to sensitive data; (ii) for data integrity, it uses back- ward slicing to identify functions that may affect sensitive data. Glamdring then places security-sensitive functions inside the enclave, and adds runtime checks and crypto- graphic operations at the enclave boundary to protect it from attack. Our evaluation of Glamdring with the Mem- cached store, the LibreSSL library, and the Digital Bitbox bitcoin wallet shows that it achieves small TCB sizes and has acceptable performance overheads

Effects of ultrasound on the performance improvement of wastewater microfiltration through a porous ceramic filter

Filtration under an ultrasonic field is a technique that is gaining importance in the wastewater treatment research field, not only due to its ability as a cleaning mechanism, but also as a filtration intensifier. The main objective of this research was the study of the influence of ultrasonic waves on the filtration of theoilfield wastewater (known as produced water) in order to increase the operation performance and filter medium regenerative effectiveness. A 0.016 m2 hollow cylindrical porous ceramic filter was submitted to the filtration of produced water by two mechanisms: conventional filtration under vacuum and filtration under theinfluence of ultrasonic waves. Experiments were carried out using synthetic produced water by analyzing the variables oil and grease content (O&G) and total suspended solids (TSS) for each filtration run. Backwashing of the filter medium with distilled water was also performed to evaluate the regeneration efficiency. During conventional filtration, permeate flux decreased gradually, becoming stable around 0.06 cm3.cm-2.s-1. Furthermore, in the filtration assisted by ultrasound, the permeate flux was around 0.15 cm3.cm-2.s-1. Therefore, ultrasonic waves provided an increase of about 150% in the permeate flux. Moreover, the sonication improved filter medium regeneration effectiveness, even under conditions of high TSS and O&G contents. Taking into consideration the very positive results associated with the application of ultrasonicwaves, this filtration technique is likely to become an important industrial process

Bio-processing of algal bio-refinery: a review on current advances and future perspectives

Microalgae biomass contains various useful bio-active components. Microalgae derived biodiesel has been researched for almost two decades. However, sole biodiesel extraction from microalgae is time-consuming and is not economically feasible due to competitive fossil fuel prices. Microalgae also contains proteins and carbohydrates in abundance. Microalgae are likewise utilized to extract high-value products such as pigments, anti-oxidants and long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids which are useful in cosmetic, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industry. These compounds can be extracted simultaneously or sequentially after biodiesel extraction to reduce the total expenditure involved in the process. This approach of bio-refinery is necessary to promote microalgae in the commercial market. Researchers have been keen on utilizing the bio-refinery approach to exploit the valuable components encased by microalgae. Apart from all the beneficial components housed by microalgae, they also help in reducing the anthropogenic CO2 levels of the atmosphere while utilizing saline or wastewater. These benefits enable microalgae as a potential source for bio-refinery approach. Although life-cycle analysis and economic assessment do not favor the use of microalgae biomass feedstock to produce biofuel and co-products with the existing techniques, this review still aims to highlight the beneficial components of microalgae and their importance to humans. In addition, this article also focuses on current and future aspects of improving the feasibility of bio-processing for microalgae bio-refinery

Heptacarbonyl-1κ3 C,2κ4 C-(4-phenyl­pyridine-1κN)di-μ-phenyltellurido-1:2κ4 Te:Te-dirhenium(I)

In the title complex, [Re2(C6H5Te)2(C11H9N)(CO)7], two Re atoms are coordinated in slightly distorted octa­hedral coordination environments and are bridged by two Te atoms, which are coordinated in trigonal-pyramidal environments. The torsion angle for the Te—Re—Te—Re sequence of atoms is 17.06 (3)°. The crystal structure is stabilized by weak C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π inter­actions. In addition, there are Te⋯Te distances [4.0392 (12) Å] and O⋯O distances [2.902 (19) Å] which are shorter than the sum of the van der Waals radii for these atoms. A short inter­molecular lone pair⋯π distance [C O⋯Cg = 3.31 (2) Å] is also observed

Contextual and Granular Policy Enforcement in Database-backed Applications

Database-backed applications rely on inlined policy checks to process users' private and confidential data in a policy-compliant manner as traditional database access control mechanisms cannot enforce complex policies. However, application bugs due to missed checks are common in such applications, which result in data breaches. While separating policy from code is a natural solution, many data protection policies specify restrictions based on the context in which data is accessed and how the data is used. Enforcing these restrictions automatically presents significant challenges, as the information needed to determine context requires a tight coupling between policy enforcement and an application's implementation. We present Estrela, a framework for enforcing contextual and granular data access policies. Working from the observation that API endpoints can be associated with salient contextual information in most database-backed applications, Estrela allows developers to specify API-specific restrictions on data access and use. Estrela provides a clean separation between policy specification and the application's implementation, which facilitates easier auditing and maintenance of policies. Policies in Estrela consist of pre-evaluation and post-evaluation conditions, which provide the means to modulate database access before a query is issued, and to impose finer-grained constraints on information release after the evaluation of query, respectively. We build a prototype of Estrela and apply it to retrofit several real world applications (from 1000-80k LOC) to enforce different contextual policies. Our evaluation shows that Estrela can enforce policies with minimal overheads

Sustain-Release of Various Drugs from Leucaena Leucocephala Polysaccharide

This study examines the sustained release behavior of both water-soluble (acetaminophen, caffeine, theophylline and salicylic acid) and water-insoluble (indomethacin) drugs from Leucaena leucocephala seed Gum isolated from Leucaena leucocephala kernel powder. It further investigates the effect of incorporation of diluents like microcrystalline cellulose and lactose on release of caffeine and partial cross-linking of the gum (polysaccharide) on release of acetaminophen. Applying exponential equation, the mechanism of release of soluble drugs was found to be anomalous. The insoluble drug showed near case II or zero-order release mechanism. The rate of release was in the decreasing order of caffeine, acetaminophen, theophylline, salicylic acid and indomethacin. An increase in release kinetics of drug was observed on blending with diluents. However, the rate of release varied with type and amount of blend in the matrix. The mechanism of release due to effect of diluents was found to be anomalous. The rate of release of drug decreased on partial cross-linking and the mechanism of release was found to be super case II