Down-regulation of the transcription factor snail in the placentas of patients with preeclampsia and in a rat model of preeclampsia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Placental malfunction in preeclampsia is believed to be a consequence of aberrant differentiation of trophoblast lineages and changes in utero-placental oxygenation. The transcription factor Snail, a master regulator molecule of epithelial-mesenchymal transition in embryonic development and in cancer, is shown to be involved in trophoblast differentiation as well. Moreover, Snail can be controlled by oxidative stress and hypoxia. Therefore, we examined the expression of Snail and its downstream target, e-cadherin, in human normal term, preterm and preeclamptic placentas, and in pregnant rats that developed preeclampsia-like symptoms in the response to a 20-fold increase in sodium intake.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Western blotting analysis was used for comparative expression of Snail and e- cadherin in total protein extracts. Placental cells expressing Snail and e-cadherin were identified by immunohistochemical double-labeling technique.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The levels of Snail protein were decreased in human preeclamptic placentas by 30% (<it>p < 0.01) </it>compared to normal term, and in the rat model by 40% (<it>p < 0.001) </it>compared to control placentas. In preterm placentas, the levels of Snail expression varied, yet there was a strong trend toward statistical significance between preterm and preeclamptic placentas. In humans, e-cadherin protein level was 30% higher in preeclamptic <it>(p < 0.05) </it>placentas and similarly, but not significantly <it>(p = 0.1)</it>, high in the preterm placentas compared to normal term. In the rat model of preeclampsia, e-cadherin was increased by 60% (<it>p < 0.01)</it>. Immunohistochemical examination of human placentas demonstrated Snail-positive staining in the nuclei of the villous trophoblasts and mesenchymal cells and in the invasive trophoblasts of the decidua. In the rat placenta, the majority of Snail positive cells were spongiotrophoblasts of the junctional zone, while in the labyrinth, Snail-positive sinusoidal giant trophoblasts cells were found in some focal areas located close to the junctional zone.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We demonstrated that human preeclampsia and the salt-induced rat model of preeclampsia are associated with the reduced levels of Snail protein in placenta. Down-regulation of the transcription factor Snail in placental progenitor cell lineages, either by intrinsic defects and/or by extrinsic and maternal factors, may affect normal placenta development and function and thus contribute to the pathology of preeclampsia.</p

Gender score development in the Berlin Aging Study II: A retrospective approach

In addition to biological sex, gender, defined as the sociocultural dimension of being a woman or a man, plays a central role in health. However, there are so far few approaches to quantify gender in a retrospective manner in existing study datasets. We therefore aimed to develop a methodology that can be retrospectively applied to assess gender in existing cohorts. We used baseline data from the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II), obtained in 2009-2014 from 1869 participants aged 60 years and older. We identified 13 gender-related variables and used them to construct a gender score by using primary component and logistic regression analyses. Of these, nine variables contributed to a gender score: chronic stress, marital status, risk-taking behaviour, personality attributes: agreeableness, neuroticism, extraversion, loneliness, conscientiousness, and level of education. Females and males differed significantly in the distribution of the gender score, but a significant overlap was also found. Thus, we were able to develop a gender score in a retrospective manner from already collected data that characterized participants in addition to biological sex. This approach will allow researchers to introduce the notion of gender retrospectively into a large number of studies

Scintillator counters with WLS fiber/MPPC readout for the side muon range detector (SMRD)of the T2K experiment

The T2K neutrino experiment at J-PARC uses a set of near detectors to measure the properties of an unoscillated neutrino beam and neutrino interaction cross-sections. One of the sub-detectors of the near-detector complex, the side muon range detector (SMRD), is described in the paper. The detector is designed to help measure the neutrino energy spectrum, to identify background and to calibrate the other detectors. The active elements of the SMRD consist of 0.7 cm thick extruded scintillator slabs inserted into air gaps of the UA1 magnet yokes. The readout of each scintillator slab is provided through a single WLS fiber embedded into a serpentine shaped groove. Two Hamamatsu multi-pixel avalanche photodiodes (MPPC's) are coupled to both ends of the WLS fiber. This design allows us to achieve a high MIP detection efficiency of greater than 99%. A light yield of 25-50 p.e./MIP, a time resolution of about 1 ns and a spatial resolution along the slab better than 10 cm were obtained for the SMRD counters.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; talk at TIPP09, March 12-17, Tsukuba, Japan; to be published in the conference proceeding

Childhood tuberculosis deskguide and monitoring: An intervention to improve case management in Pakistan

Background: Childhood tuberculosis (TB) has been a neglected area in national TB control programme (NTCP) in high burden countries. The NTP Pakistan adapted the global approaches by developing and piloting its policy guideline on childhood TB in ten districts of the country. We developed an intervention package including a deskguide and a monitoring tool and tested with the ongoing childhood TB care in a district. The objective of our study was to measure effectiveness of intervention package with deskguide and monitoring tool by comparing TB case finding and treatment outcomes among districts in 2008, and performance assessment in intervention district. Method: An intervention study with cohort design within a routine TB control programme comparing case findings and treatment outcomes before and after the intervention, and in districts with and without intervention. We enrolled all children below 15 years registered at all nine public sector hospitals in three districts of Pakistan. The data was collected from hospital TB records. Results: In eight months during 2007 there were 164 childhood TB cases notified, and after intervention in 2008 a total of 194 cases were notified. In intervention district case finding doubled (110% increase) and correct treatment practice significantly increased in eight months. Successful outcomes were significantly higher in intervention district (37,100%) compared to control district A (18, 18%, p < 0.05) and control district B (41, 72%, p < 0.05). Conclusion: Childhood TB deskguide and structured monitoring was associated with improved case management and it augmented NTP policy. More development and implementation in all health services of the district are indicated.publishedVersio

Android malware detection through generative adversarial networks

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Mobile and cell devices have empowered end users to tweak their cell phones more than ever and introduce applications just as we used to with personal computers. Android likewise portrays an uprise in mobile devices and personal digital assistants. It is an open-source versatile platform fueling incalculable hardware units, tablets, televisions, auto amusement frameworks, digital boxes, and so forth. In a generally shorter life cycle, Android also has additionally experienced a mammoth development in application malware. In this context, a toweringly large measure of strategies has been proposed in theory for the examination and detection of these harmful applications for the Android platform. These strategies attempt to both statically reverse engineer the application and elicit meaningful information as features manually or dynamically endeavor to quantify the runtime behavior of the application to identify malevolence. The overgrowing nature of Android malware has enormously debilitated the support of protective measures, which leaves the platforms such as Android feeble for novel and mysterious malware. Machine learning is being utilized for malware diagnosis in mobile phones as a common practice and in Android distinctively. It is important to specify here that these systems, however, utilize and adapt the learning-based techniques, yet the overhead of hand-created features limits ease of use of such methods in reality by an end user. As a solution to this issue, we mean to make utilization of deep learning–based algorithms as the fundamental arrangement for malware examination on Android. Deep learning turns up as another way of research that has bid the scientific community in the fields of vision, speech, and natural language processing. Of late, models set up on deep convolution networks outmatched techniques utilizing handmade descriptive features at various undertakings. Likewise, our proposed technique to cater malware detection is by design a deep learning model making use of generative adversarial networks, which is responsible to detect the Android malware via famous two-player game theory for a rock-paper-scissor problem. We have used three state-of-the-art datasets and augmented a large-scale dataset of opcodes extracted from the Android Package Kit bytecode and used in our experiments. Our technique achieves F1 score of 99% with a receiver operating characteristic of 99% on the bytecode dataset. This proves the usefulness of our technique and that it can generally be adopted in real life

Structure Preserving Splitting Techniques for Ebola Reaction–Diffusion Epidemic System

In this paper, we deal with the numerical solution of the reaction–diffusion Ebola epidemic model. The diffusion which is an important phenomenon for the epidemic model is included in the model. This inclusion has made the model more comprehensive for studying the disease dynamics in the human population. The quantities linked with the model indicate the population sizes which are taken as absolute, therefore, the numerical schemes utilized to solve the underlying Ebola epidemic system should sustain the positivity. The numerical approaches used to solve the underlying epidemic models are explicit nonstandard finite difference operator splitting (ENSFD-OS) and implicit nonstandard finite difference operator splitting (INSFD-OS) techniques. These schemes preserve all the physical features of the state variables, i.e. projected schemes hold the positive solution acquired by the Ebola diffusive epidemic model. The underlying epidemic model illustrates two stable steady states, a virus-free state, and a virus existence state. The suggested approaches retain the stability of each of the steady states possessed by the assumed epidemic model. A numerical example and simulations for validation of all the characteristics of suggested techniques are also investigated

The T2K Side Muon Range Detector

The T2K experiment is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment aiming to observe the appearance of {\nu} e in a {\nu}{\mu} beam. The {\nu}{\mu} beam is produced at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC), observed with the 295 km distant Super- Kamiokande Detector and monitored by a suite of near detectors at 280m from the proton target. The near detectors include a magnetized off-axis detector (ND280) which measures the un-oscillated neutrino flux and neutrino cross sections. The present paper describes the outermost component of ND280 which is a side muon range detector (SMRD) composed of scintillation counters with embedded wavelength shifting fibers and Multi-Pixel Photon Counter read-out. The components, performance and response of the SMRD are presented.Comment: 13 pages, 19 figures v2: fixed several typos; fixed reference

Seroprevalence of hepatitis C in type 2 diabetes: evidence for a positive association

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There is a growing body of literature on the relationship of Hepatitis C virus infection (HCV) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). However, there are certain gaps in literature and the data is inconclusive. This study was, therefore, carried out to determine the prevalence of HCV infection in diabetic patients and to elucidate the presence of any possible relationship between HCV and T2DM in this region.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Serologic testing for anti-HCV antibody was done on a sample of 3000 individuals with T2DM visiting Diabetes Clinic of Nishtar Medical College Hospital, Multan and 10,000 volunteer blood donors visiting blood bank of the same hospital during the study period using Accurate rapid immunochromatographic kits which was later confirmed by using Chemelex S.A third generation ELISA kit for positive cases. Data about various variables was collected from diabetic patients using a structured questionnaire after taking informed consent.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Prevalence rate of 13.7% for HCV infection was recorded among subjects having T2DM with seropositivity rate of 4.9% among the control group of volunteer blood donors without diabetes. The patients with T2DM were more likely to have HCV infection as compared to the control group (OR = 3.03, 95%CI = 2.64-3.48, p = 0.001). Diabetic patients with age above 55 years had higher prevalence rate as compared to younger individuals. Male patients had significantly high seropositivity as compared to female patients (15.3% vs. 12.4%, p = 0.02). Those with duration of diabetes 11 years and above and the ones with good glycemic control had higher seroprevalence rates of 18.2% and 18.7% respectively. There was no statistically significant difference among subjects when the distribution of HCV was studied on the basis of marital status, locality, or family history of diabetes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results show that there is a strong association between HCV and T2DM in the region as evident from significantly higher prevalence of HCV infection in diabetics as compared to the control group in the present study.</p