Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness in People with Diabetes; Biomarkers and Nutritional Supplementation

Exercise is important for controlling hemoglobin A1c, and maintaining proper glycemic control in people with diabetes. Exercise also increases the diabetics overall insulin sensitivity, and decreases their dependency on diabetes medication. However, people with diabetes are faced with metabolic and endothelial impairment, which could result in a prolonged sensation of muscle soreness following exercise. This would make it difficult for these people to sustain exercise regimes. Delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is a common problem in healthy individuals and in people who have diabetes. DOMS is a painful sensation experienced by individuals who have been recently inactive and then over-exercise. Yet, because people with diabetes usually have neuropathies, they may not feel this soreness appropriately, leading to premature return to exercise and causing further injuries. Therefore, this investigation assessed the differences in DOMS between people with diabetes, and healthy individuals, at 2 different body regions. However, DOMS is mainly measured with subjective scales, but we wanted to establish a new objective measure. Infra-red (IR) thermal imaging was used as one of the biomarkers in this assessment, and after expanding on this technique, it was considered a valid and relaible tool for detecting and quantifying delayed onset muscle soreness after an intense exercise session. Once muscle soreness in people with diabetes was determined, and a new novel biomarker was established, another focus of this dissertation was to examine whether DOMS could be attenuated by ingesting a nutritional supplement. Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAA) have been shown to be effective in promoting muscle recovery following exercise; however, the effects of this supplement have not been investigated amongst diabetic individuals. The results of this experiment showed that people with diabetes get sorer than healthy individuals. It was also found that IR thermal imaging may be a valuable technique for identifying which muscles are sore after exercising. Thus, thermal imaging would be an efficient and painless way of quantifying DOMS in both healthy individuals and in people with diabetes. Furthermore, this investigation showed that BCAA significantly reduced muscle soreness and enhanced healing in subjects with diabetes. However, in the healthy control group this supplement had minimal effects

Neural Network Model of Estimation of Body Mass Index Based on Indirect Input Factors

A well-prepared One of the main concerns of people in developing and developed societies is increasing the Body Mass Index (BMI) level. BMI, in fact can be considered as an indicator of overall health condition. Genetic aspects aside, the BMI level is affected by different factors, such as socio-economic, environmental, and physical activity level. This study investigated the effect of different factors on the BMI level of a sample population of 470 adults of three residential neighborhoods in Shiraz, Iran. The Pearson correlation coefficient, independent sample T-test and One Way ANOVA were used to extract the variables which significantly influenced the BMI. The statistical analysis showed that despite the apparent association of BMI with physical activity level, it is influenced by several factors such as age, residence record, number of children, distance to bus or taxi stop, indoor or sport exercise. Then, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was applied to predict the level of personal BMI. Artificial Neural Network-based methodology results showed that the generalized estimating ANN model was satisfactory in estimating the BMI based on the introduced pattern

Improved defect detection using adaptive leaky NLMS filter in guided-wave testing of pipelines

Ultrasonic guided wave (UGW) testing of pipelines allows long range assessments of pipe integrity from a single point of inspection. This technology uses a number of arrays of transducers, linearly placed apart from each other to generate a single axisymmetric wave mode. The general propagation routine of the device results in a single time domain signal, which is then used by the inspectors to detect the axisymmetric wave for any defect location. Nonetheless, due to inherited characteristics of the UGW and non-ideal testing conditions, non-axisymmetric (flexural) waves will be transmitted and received in the tests. This adds to the complexity of results’ interpretation. In this paper, we implement an adaptive leaky normalized least mean square (NLMS) filter for reducing the effect of non-axisymmetric waves and enhancement of axisymmetric waves. In this approach, no modification in the device hardware is required. This method is validated using the synthesized signal generated by a finite element model (FEM) and real test data gathered from laboratory trials. In laboratory trials, six different sizes of defects with cross-sectional area (CSA) material loss of 8% to 3% (steps of 1%) were tested. To find the optimum frequency, several excitation frequencies in the region of 30–50 kHz (steps of 2 kHz) were used. Furthermore, two sets of parameters were used for the adaptive filter wherein the first set of tests the optimum parameters were set to the FEM test case and, in the second set of tests, the data from the pipe with 4% CSA defect was used. The results demonstrated the capability of this algorithm for enhancing a defect’s signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).NSIRC and Brunel Universit

RV’04 Preliminary Version Program Instrumentation and Run-Time Analysis of Scoped Memory in Java

We present a method to analyze, monitor and control dynamic memory allocation in Java. It first consists in performing pointer and escape analysis to detect memory scopes. This information is used to automatically instrument Java programs in such a way memory is allocated and freed by a region-based memory manager. Our source code instrumentation fully exploits the result of scope analysis by dynamically mapping allocation places to the region stack at runtime via a registering mechanism. Moreover, it allows executing the same transformed program with different implementations of scoped-memory managers and perform different run-time analysis without changing the transformed code. In particular, we consider a class of managers that handle variable-size regions composed of fixed-size memory blocks for which we provide analytical models for the intra- and inter-region fragmentation. These models can be used to observe and control fragmentation at run-time with negligible overhead. We describe a prototype tool that implements our approach

Serological evidence of natural exposure of camels (Camelus dromedaries) to foot and mouth disease virus

The World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) Code chapter on FMD includes camelids as being susceptible species to FMD similar to cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. A total of 376 field camel sera, collected from different regions of Riyadh and Al-Qassim Province in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, were screened for the presence of antibodies produced against 3ABC non-structural proteins (NSP) of FMDV using a commercially available kit, PrioCHECK FMDV NS. Sera that tested positive on NSP were screened for serotype-specific antibodies towards the seven serotypes of FMD virus using liquid phase blocking ELISA. Only 24 out of 376 (6.3%) serum samples were positive for antibodies against NSP. All sera that tested positive o