Effects of melatonin supplementation on hormonal, inflammatory, genetic, and oxidative stress parameters in women with polycystic ovary syndrome

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to evaluate the effect of melatonin administration on clinical, hormonal, inflammatory, and genetic parameters in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Methods: The present randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial was conducted among 56 patients with PCOS, aged 18�40 years old. Subjects were randomly allocated to take either 5 mg melatonin supplements (n = 28) or placebo (n = 28) twice a day for 12 weeks. Results: Melatonin administration significantly reduced hirsutism (β �0.47; 95 CI, �0.86, �0.09; P = 0.01), serum total testosterone (β �0.11 ng/mL; 95 CI, �0.21, �0.02; P = 0.01), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) (β �0.61 mg/L; 95 CI, �0.95, �0.26; P = 0.001), and plasma malondialdehyde (MDA) levels (β �0.25 μmol/L; 95 CI, �0.38, �0.11; P < 0.001), and significantly increased plasma total antioxidant capacity (TAC) levels (β 106.07 mmol/L; 95 CI, 62.87, 149.28; P < 0.001) and total glutathione (GSH) (β 81.05 μmol/L; 95 CI, 36.08, 126.03; P = 0.001) compared with the placebo. Moreover, melatonin supplementation downregulated gene expression of interleukin-1 (IL-1) (P = 0.03) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) (P = 0.01) compared with the placebo. Conclusions: Overall, melatonin administration for 12 weeks to women with PCOS significantly reduced hirsutism, total testosterone, hs-CRP, and MDA, while increasing TAC and GSH levels. In addition, melatonin administration reduced gene expression of IL-1 and TNF-α. Copyright © 2019 Jamilian, Foroozanfard, Mirhosseini, Kavossian, Aghadavod, Bahmani, Ostadmohammadi, Kia, Eftekhar, Ayati, Mahdavinia and Asemi

A hierarchical kinetic theory of birth, death, and fission in age-structured interacting populations

We study mathematical models describing the evolution of stochastic age-structured populations. After reviewing existing approaches, we develop a complete kinetic framework for age-structured interacting populations undergoing birth, death and fission processes in spatially dependent environments. We define the full probability density for the population-size age chart and find results under specific conditions. Connections with more classical models are also explicitly derived. In particular, we show that factorial moments for non-interacting processes are described by a natural generalization of the McKendrick-von Foerster equation, which describes mean-field deterministic behavior. Our approach utilizes mixed-type, multidimensional probability distributions similar to those employed in the study of gas kinetics and with terms that satisfy BBGKY-like equation hierarchies

Largest ancient fortress of South-West Asia and the western world?:Recent fieldwork at Sasanian Qaleh Iraj at Pishva, Iran

The article presents recent works at Qale Iraj, near Varamin, Iran. My short contribution is on the Middle Persian ostraka found at the site

Computational Approaches and Analysis for a Spatio-Structural-Temporal Invasive Carcinoma Model

Spatio-temporal models have long been used to describe biological systems of cancer, but it has not been until very recently that increased attention has been paid to structural dynamics of the interaction between cancer populations and the molecular mechanisms associated with local invasion. One system that is of particular interest is that of the urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) wherein uPA binds uPA receptors on the cancer cell surface, allowing plasminogen to be cleaved into plasmin, which degrades the extracellular matrix and this way leads to enhanced cancer cell migration. In this paper, we develop a novel numerical approach and associated analysis for spatio-structuro-temporal modelling of the uPA system for up to two-spatial and two-structural dimensions. This is accompanied by analytical exploration of the numerical techniques used in simulating this system, with special consideration being given to the proof of stability within numerical regimes encapsulating a central differences approach to approximating numerical gradients. The stability analysis performed here reveals instabilities induced by the coupling of the structural binding and proliferative processes. The numerical results expound how the uPA system aids the tumour in invading the local stroma, whilst the inhibitor to this system may impede this behaviour and encourage a more sporadic pattern of invasion.PostprintPeer reviewe

MOBAS: identification of disease-associated protein subnetworks using modularity-based scoring

Network-based analyses are commonly used as powerful tools to interpret the findings of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in a functional context. In particular, identification of disease-associated functional modules, i.e., highly connected protein-protein interaction (PPI) subnetworks with high aggregate disease association, are shown to be promising in uncovering the functional relationships among genes and proteins associated with diseases. An important issue in this regard is the scoring of subnetworks by integrating two quantities: disease association of individual gene products and network connectivity among proteins. Current scoring schemes either disregard the level of connectivity and focus on the aggregate disease association of connected proteins or use a linear combination of these two quantities. However, such scoring schemes may produce arbitrarily large subnetworks which are often not statistically significant or require tuning of parameters that are used to weigh the contributions of network connectivity and disease association. Here, we propose a parameter-free scoring scheme that aims to score subnetworks by assessing the disease association of interactions between pairs of gene products. We also incorporate the statistical significance of network connectivity and disease association into the scoring function. We test the proposed scoring scheme on a GWAS dataset for two complex diseases type II diabetes (T2D) and psoriasis (PS). Our results suggest that subnetworks identified by commonly used methods may fail tests of statistical significance after correction for multiple hypothesis testing. In contrast, the proposed scoring scheme yields highly significant subnetworks, which contain biologically relevant proteins that cannot be identified by analysis of genome-wide association data alone. We also show that the proposed scoring scheme identifies subnetworks that are reproducible across different cohorts, and it can robustly recover relevant subnetworks at lower sampling rates

The role of probiotics on controlling diabetes mellitus: An umbrella review

Background and purpose: There are some evidences about the effects of probiotics on controlling different types of diabetes and reviewing these studies could be of great help in clarifying the efficacy of these dietary supplements in management of diabetes. Thus, we aimed to review the role of probiotics on glycemic control and other biochemical parameters in patients with diabetes. Materials and methods: An umbrella review of systematic reviews, meta-analyses, systematic reviews and meta-analysis in English and Persian were performed by thorough search in PubMed and Scopus. Eligible studies on the effects of probiotics in patients with diabetes published up to 30 September 2020 were selected. Results: Thirty one eligible papers were identified. In these studies, the effects of probiotic supplements or probiotic food products on glycemic status (n=18), lipid profile (n=12), inflammatory and oxidative stress factors (n=11), blood pressure (n=4), and Body Mass Index (n=2) in patients with type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes were investigated. Conclusion: Findings revealed positive effects of probiotic supplements on glycemic status, lipid profile, blood pressure, oxidative stress and inflammation in patients with type 2 diabetes, and gestational diabetes. However, due to high heterogeneity in some parameters, further high quality double-blind clinical trials can shed light on the effectiveness of these supplements. © 2021, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved