Widespread use of herbal medicines by people living with human immunodeficiency virus and contamination of herbal medicines with antiretrovirals in Nigeria.

Herbal medication use amongst people living with human immunodeficiency virus (PLWH) is widespread and understudied. This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of herbal medicine use amongst PLWH and possible contamination with antiretrovirals (ARVs). Countrywide collection of herbal samples sold by street vendors in Nigeria for the following indications: human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), acquired immune deficiency syndrome, fever and general weakness. Samples were screened using a validated liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry method for the presence of the following ARVs: efavirenz, nevirapine, lopinavir, darunavir, ritonavir, atazanavir, emtricitabine, tenofovir and lamivudine. A survey was conducted among 742 PLWH attending four HIV clinics in Nigeria. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire and analysed using IBM SPSS statistics version 22.0 (IBM Corp., 2013, Armond, NY). Of the 138 herbal medicines sampled, three (2%) contained detectable levels of tenofovir, emtricitabine and/or lamivudine. Additionally, of the 742 PLWH surveyed, 310 (41.8%) reported herbal medicine use. Among the users, 191 (61.6%) started taking herbals after commencing HIV therapy while herbal medicine use preceded ARVs treatment in 119 (38.4%) PLWH. We found herbal use to be widespread among PLWH in Nigeria, with increasing use after commencing ARV. Three herbal preparations were also found to contain detectable levels of ARVs. This is a concern and should be studied widely across the region and countries where herbal medicine use is prevalent and poorly regulated

Early-life stress biases responding to negative feedback and increases amygdala volume and vulnerability to later-life stress

Early-life stress (ELS) or adversity, particularly in the form of childhood neglect and abuse, is associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes in adulthood. However, whether these relationships are mediated by the consequences of ELS itself or by other exposures that frequently co-occur with ELS is unclear. To address this question, we carried out a longitudinal study in rats to isolate the effects of ELS on regional brain volumes and behavioral phenotypes relevant to anxiety and depression. We used the repeated maternal separation (RMS) model of chronic ELS, and conducted behavioral measurements throughout adulthood, including of probabilistic reversal learning (PRL), responding on a progressive ratio task, sucrose preference, novelty preference, novelty reactivity, and putative anxiety-like behavior on the elevated plus maze. Our behavioral assessment was combined with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for quantitation of regional brain volumes at three time points: immediately following RMS, young adulthood without further stress, and late adulthood with further stress. We found that RMS caused long-lasting, sexually dimorphic biased responding to negative feedback on the PRL task. RMS also slowed response time on the PRL task, but without this directly impacting task performance. RMS animals were also uniquely sensitive to a second stressor, which disproportionately impaired their performance and slowed their responding on the PRL task. MRI at the time of the adult stress revealed a larger amygdala volume in RMS animals compared with controls. These behavioral and neurobiological effects persisted well into adulthood despite a lack of effects on conventional tests of 'depression-like' and 'anxiety-like' behavior, and a lack of any evidence of anhedonia. Our findings indicate that ELS has long-lasting cognitive and neurobehavioral effects that interact with stress in adulthood and may have relevance for understanding the etiology of anxiety and depression in humans

Widespread Presence of Human BOULE Homologs among Animals and Conservation of Their Ancient Reproductive Function

Sex-specific traits that lead to the production of dimorphic gametes, sperm in males and eggs in females, are fundamental for sexual reproduction and accordingly widespread among animals. Yet the sex-biased genes that underlie these sex-specific traits are under strong selective pressure, and as a result of adaptive evolution they often become divergent. Indeed out of hundreds of male or female fertility genes identified in diverse organisms, only a very small number of them are implicated specifically in reproduction in more than one lineage. Few genes have exhibited a sex-biased, reproductive-specific requirement beyond a given phylum, raising the question of whether any sex-specific gametogenesis factors could be conserved and whether gametogenesis might have evolved multiple times. Here we describe a metazoan origin of a conserved human reproductive protein, BOULE, and its prevalence from primitive basal metazoans to chordates. We found that BOULE homologs are present in the genomes of representative species of each of the major lineages of metazoans and exhibit reproductive-specific expression in all species examined, with a preponderance of male-biased expression. Examination of Boule evolution within insect and mammalian lineages revealed little evidence for accelerated evolution, unlike most reproductive genes. Instead, purifying selection was the major force behind Boule evolution. Furthermore, loss of function of mammalian Boule resulted in male-specific infertility and a global arrest of sperm development remarkably similar to the phenotype in an insect boule mutation. This work demonstrates the conservation of a reproductive protein throughout eumetazoa, its predominant testis-biased expression in diverse bilaterian species, and conservation of a male gametogenic requirement in mice. This shows an ancient gametogenesis requirement for Boule among Bilateria and supports a model of a common origin of spermatogenesis

Validation of the religious commitment inventory among women religious

This study validates the instrument Commitment to the Religious Life Questionnaire (CRLQ).This study was descriptive in nature. It was conducted to describe the characteristics of an instrument that measured one\u27s commitment to the religious life. The study consisted of three phases. The first was devoted to the re-examination of the content domain of the instrument. The second was the investigation of the reliability and the validity of the Religious Commitment Inventory (RCI). The third was the construction of norms and the refinement of the inventory that included instruction, scoring, and interpretation. The subjects were 204 women religious who came from fifteen different religious congregations in the Philippines. Sixty-three of them were seniors, 75 were juniors and 66 were novices. The instruments used were the Religious Commitment Inventory (RCI) and the Religious Motivation Questionnaire (RMQ). The latter was administered in order to test concurrent validity. The data gathered were subjected to statistical analyses-item, factor, and correlational analyses. The total number of items of the RCI was 46. Out of 46, 36 items were retained. Nine items were garnered from each of the four components. The reliability coefficients obtained ranged from 0.5633 to 0.8234. Through factor analysis, 32 items which loaded meaningfully on the five factors were selected. Four items were discarded. The identified factors of CRLQ were: Factor 1 - Prayer Life, Factor 2 - Commitment to Neighbor, Factor 3 - Vowed Life, Factor 4 - Community Life, and Factor 5 - Apostolic Life. In order to establish the concurrent validity of the CRLQ, the results of the Questionnaire were correlated with another questionnaire (RMQ). Using Pearson r, a significant correlation coefficient (p .01) was found. ANOVA was computed to assess the commitment level of the three groups - the novices, juniors, and seniors. Results showed that there was a significant difference (p .05) in the level of commitment of the novices and the seniors. However, there was no significant difference in the level of commitment between the novices and the juniors, as well as that between the juniors and the seniors. Based on the data gathered from the 204 respondents, the norms for novices, juniors, seniors and the total sample were constructed in percentile rank

Enhancement on route discovery mechanism of THE AODV routing protocol for MANET

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a decentralized network of mobile devices connected together wirelessly to be able to communicate with each other. This kind of wireless network is expected to be adaptable to frequent topology and location change. Mobile devices (nodes) that compose a MANET are equipped with wireless transmitters and receivers using antennas. This kind of network is deployed in fast-paced operations such as emergncy/rescue operations and in military terms that need a reliable network for better communication. One of the most well-known routing protocols for MANET\u27s is Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV). AODV is a reactive protocol that searches for routes only on-demand and therefore it does not send regular advertisements to update routing tables like what proactive protocols do but instead it floods Route Request Packets (RREQ) to other nodes and passes those requests to its adjacent neighbours until the request reaches its destination. The design of AODV however, is that the flooding mechanism for route discovery contributes to large delays and overheads when data needs to be transmitted. This causes a problem for large and mobile networks during military or rescue operations that need data with minimum delay. Thus, this study aims to make the AODV routing protocol scalable for large mobile networks by implementing a clustering scheme called the K-CONID. This cluster scheme elects the cluster head based on the number of neighbour nodes. The enhancement of AODV also includes controlling RREQ on how it broadcasts throughout the network. This way, the flooding in the network will be reduced which results to lower route discovery delay, higher throughput, higher packet success rate, lower control overhead, and higher path optimally and lower energy consumption compared to the original AODV protocol scheme

Value-based utility implementation in software-defined testbed for sensor data traffic management

Data transmitted among wireless sensor nodes are generated from sensing physical events with diverse traffic types. These data have to reach their destinations with a specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirement. With the increasing usage of sensors in various Internet of Things applications, there is a need to address the traffic management for handling these critical data while satisfying their respective QoS requirements. In this work, we implemented a traffic management mechanism using Value-based Utility (VBU) model that utilizes network packet statistics to cope with QoS requirement of each sensor data. The mechanism ensures that the demands of each sensor data are satisfied by allocating queue resources based on a utility function. The function defines an expectation range and the state where minimal requirements are met for each sensor. We evaluated the performance of the mechanism over a simple low-cost software-defined testbed with different sensor data type having different QoS requirements. Results show that each sensor node achieved the level of satisfaction based on their required utility function both in an ideal testbed scenario and in an actual indoor deployment. © 2019 Elsevier B.V