Formulation and optimization of Retapamulin loaded PLGA nanoparticles for burn wounds

In the present study, PLGA nanoparticles (PLGA-NP) of retapamulin (RP) were prepared and optimized by studying the effect of various formulation and process variables for effective delivery at burn wound site. Drug loaded PLGA-NP were successfully prepared and characterized by TEM, XRD and DSC study. Formulation and process variables like surfactant concentration, drug concentration, polymer concentration etc. showed significant effect on the particle size, entrapment efficiency and drug loading. PLGA-NP exhibited prolonged drug release following Higuchi release kinetics (R2= 0.9907). In vitro study demonstrated systemic escape of drug from PLGA-NP which might eliminate side effects associated with topical exposure through conventional treatment. Further retention of activity of entrapped drug was confirmed by in vitro antimicrobial assay. Optimized PLGA nanoparticle of Retapamulin was incorporated into PVA-Chitosan hydrogel slurry and casted into film to prepare multiphase hydrogel.Thus, present optimized system can be effectively used for delivery of drug at burn wound site in especially compromised wounds.&nbsp

Global injury morbidity and mortality from 1990 to 2017 : results from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Correction:Background Past research in population health trends has shown that injuries form a substantial burden of population health loss. Regular updates to injury burden assessments are critical. We report Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 Study estimates on morbidity and mortality for all injuries. Methods We reviewed results for injuries from the GBD 2017 study. GBD 2017 measured injury-specific mortality and years of life lost (YLLs) using the Cause of Death Ensemble model. To measure non-fatal injuries, GBD 2017 modelled injury-specific incidence and converted this to prevalence and years lived with disability (YLDs). YLLs and YLDs were summed to calculate disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Findings In 1990, there were 4 260 493 (4 085 700 to 4 396 138) injury deaths, which increased to 4 484 722 (4 332 010 to 4 585 554) deaths in 2017, while age-standardised mortality decreased from 1079 (1073 to 1086) to 738 (730 to 745) per 100 000. In 1990, there were 354 064 302 (95% uncertainty interval: 338 174 876 to 371 610 802) new cases of injury globally, which increased to 520 710 288 (493 430 247 to 547 988 635) new cases in 2017. During this time, age-standardised incidence decreased non-significantly from 6824 (6534 to 7147) to 6763 (6412 to 7118) per 100 000. Between 1990 and 2017, age-standardised DALYs decreased from 4947 (4655 to 5233) per 100 000 to 3267 (3058 to 3505). Interpretation Injuries are an important cause of health loss globally, though mortality has declined between 1990 and 2017. Future research in injury burden should focus on prevention in high-burden populations, improving data collection and ensuring access to medical care.Peer reviewe

Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 354 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2017: A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Background: The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017) includes a comprehensive assessment of incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) for 354 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. Previous GBD studies have shown how the decline of mortality rates from 1990 to 2016 has led to an increase in life expectancy, an ageing global population, and an expansion of the non-fatal burden of disease and injury. These studies have also shown how a substantial portion of the world's population experiences non-fatal health loss with considerable heterogeneity among different causes, locations, ages, and sexes. Ongoing objectives of the GBD study include increasing the level of estimation detail, improving analytical strategies, and increasing the amount of high-quality data. Methods: We estimated incidence and prevalence for 354 diseases and injuries and 3484 sequelae. We used an updated and extensive body of literature studies, survey data, surveillance data, inpatient admission records, outpatient visit records, and health insurance claims, and additionally used results from cause of death models to inform estimates using a total of 68 781 data sources. Newly available clinical data from India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Nepal, China, Brazil, Norway, and Italy were incorporated, as well as updated claims data from the USA and new claims data from Taiwan (province of China) and Singapore. We used DisMod-MR 2.1, a Bayesian meta-regression tool, as the main method of estimation, ensuring consistency between rates of incidence, prevalence, remission, and cause of death for each condition. YLDs were estimated as the product of a prevalence estimate and a disability weight for health states of each mutually exclusive sequela, adjusted for comorbidity. We updated the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary development indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and total fertility rate. Additionally, we calculated differences between male and female YLDs to identify divergent trends across sexes. GBD 2017 complies with the Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting. Findings: Globally, for females, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and haemoglobinopathies and haemolytic anaemias in both 1990 and 2017. For males, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and tuberculosis including latent tuberculosis infection in both 1990 and 2017. In terms of YLDs, low back pain, headache disorders, and dietary iron deficiency were the leading Level 3 causes of YLD counts in 1990, whereas low back pain, headache disorders, and depressive disorders were the leading causes in 2017 for both sexes combined. All-cause age-standardised YLD rates decreased by 3·9% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·1-4·6) from 1990 to 2017; however, the all-age YLD rate increased by 7·2% (6·0-8·4) while the total sum of global YLDs increased from 562 million (421-723) to 853 million (642-1100). The increases for males and females were similar, with increases in all-age YLD rates of 7·9% (6·6-9·2) for males and 6·5% (5·4-7·7) for females. We found significant differences between males and females in terms of age-standardised prevalence estimates for multiple causes. The causes with the greatest relative differences between sexes in 2017 included substance use disorders (3018 cases [95% UI 2782-3252] per 100 000 in males vs 1400 [1279-1524] per 100 000 in females), transport injuries (3322 [3082-3583] vs 2336 [2154-2535]), and self-harm and interpersonal violence (3265 [2943-3630] vs 5643 [5057-6302]). Interpretation: Global all-cause age-standardised YLD rates have improved only slightly over a period spanning nearly three decades. However, the magnitude of the non-fatal disease burden has expanded globally, with increasing numbers of people who have a wide spectrum of conditions. A subset of conditions has remained globally pervasive since 1990, whereas other conditions have displayed more dynamic trends, with different ages, sexes, and geographies across the globe experiencing varying burdens and trends of health loss. This study emphasises how global improvements in premature mortality for select conditions have led to older populations with complex and potentially expensive diseases, yet also highlights global achievements in certain domains of disease and injury

Global, regional, and national age-sex-specific mortality and life expectancy, 1950-2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Background: Assessments of age-specific mortality and life expectancy have been done by the UN Population Division, Department of Economics and Social Affairs (UNPOP), the United States Census Bureau, WHO, and as part of previous iterations of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD). Previous iterations of the GBD used population estimates from UNPOP, which were not derived in a way that was internally consistent with the estimates of the numbers of deaths in the GBD. The present iteration of the GBD, GBD 2017, improves on previous assessments and provides timely estimates of the mortality experience of populations globally. Methods: The GBD uses all available data to produce estimates of mortality rates between 1950 and 2017 for 23 age groups, both sexes, and 918 locations, including 195 countries and territories and subnational locations for 16 countries. Data used include vital registration systems, sample registration systems, household surveys (complete birth histories, summary birth histories, sibling histories), censuses (summary birth histories, household deaths), and Demographic Surveillance Sites. In total, this analysis used 8259 data sources. Estimates of the probability of death between birth and the age of 5 years and between ages 15 and 60 years are generated and then input into a model life table system to produce complete life tables for all locations and years. Fatal discontinuities and mortality due to HIV/AIDS are analysed separately and then incorporated into the estimation. We analyse the relationship between age-specific mortality and development status using the Socio-demographic Index, a composite measure based on fertility under the age of 25 years, education, and income. There are four main methodological improvements in GBD 2017 compared with GBD 2016: 622 additional data sources have been incorporated; new estimates of population, generated by the GBD study, are used; statistical methods used in different components of the analysis have been further standardised and improved; and the analysis has been extended backwards in time by two decades to start in 1950. Findings: Globally, 18·7% (95% uncertainty interval 18·4–19·0) of deaths were registered in 1950 and that proportion has been steadily increasing since, with 58·8% (58·2–59·3) of all deaths being registered in 2015. At the global level, between 1950 and 2017, life expectancy increased from 48·1 years (46·5–49·6) to 70·5 years (70·1–70·8) for men and from 52·9 years (51·7–54·0) to 75·6 years (75·3–75·9) for women. Despite this overall progress, there remains substantial variation in life expectancy at birth in 2017, which ranges from 49·1 years (46·5–51·7) for men in the Central African Republic to 87·6 years (86·9–88·1) among women in Singapore. The greatest progress across age groups was for children younger than 5 years; under-5 mortality dropped from 216·0 deaths (196·3–238·1) per 1000 livebirths in 1950 to 38·9 deaths (35·6–42·83) per 1000 livebirths in 2017, with huge reductions across countries. Nevertheless, there were still 5·4 million (5·2–5·6) deaths among children younger than 5 years in the world in 2017. Progress has been less pronounced and more variable for adults, especially for adult males, who had stagnant or increasing mortality rates in several countries. The gap between male and female life expectancy between 1950 and 2017, while relatively stable at the global level, shows distinctive patterns across super-regions and has consistently been the largest in central Europe, eastern Europe, and central Asia, and smallest in south Asia. Performance was also variable across countries and time in observed mortality rates compared with those expected on the basis of development. Interpretation: This analysis of age-sex-specific mortality shows that there are remarkably complex patterns in population mortality across countries. The findings of this study highlight global successes, such as the large decline in under-5 mortality, which reflects significant local, national, and global commitment and investment over several decades. However, they also bring attention to mortality patterns that are a cause for concern, particularly among adult men and, to a lesser extent, women, whose mortality rates have stagnated in many countries over the time period of this study, and in some cases are increasing

The Terminal Heat Stress and its Effect on Yield and Yield Contributing Traits of Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) Genotypes

An experiment was conducted with wheat genotypes NWL-14, K-9162, NWL-1014, NWL-12-2, NWL-12-4, NWL-10-4, K-910-30, NWL-4035, DBW-16, DBW-187, NWL-12 (3) T, Halna, HD-2967 to evaluate heat tolerant in wheat at instructional farm and in the laboratory of Crop Physiology & Plant Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering, Acharya Narendra Deva University of Agriculture and Technology, Kumarganj, Ayodhya, India, during rabi season of 2021-2022. Heat stress was induced by delayed sowing 45 days from normal date of sowing (02 December 2022)-(17 January 2023) so that delay sown wheat genotypes could experience heat stress at reproductive stage. Heat tolerant wheat genotypes screened on the basis of Relative Water Content, Catalase activity, plant height, tiller number, number of grains per spike, test weight and grain yield per plant over control under heat stress condition. Heat stress reduces the the growth and yield irrespective of wheat genotypes but heat tolerant genotypes Halna, NWL-1293)T, NWL 10-2 and NWL-12-4 showed less reduction over susceptible ones. Relative water content, proline and catalase activity can be used as a physiological screening indices for heat tolerant genotypes

Adaptive energy-aware algorithms for minimizing energy consumption and SLA violation in cloud computing

In cloud computing, high energy consumption and service-level agreements (SLAs) violation are the challenging issues considering that the demand for computational power is growing rapidly, thereby requiring large-scale cloud data centers. Although, there are many existing energy-aware approaches focusing on minimizing energy consumption while ignoring the SLA violation at the time of a virtual machine (VM) selection from overloaded hosts. Also, they do not consider that the current network traffic causes performance degradation and thus may not really reduce SLA violation under a variety of workloads. In this context, this paper proposes three adaptive models, namely, gradient descent-based regression (Gdr), maximize correlation percentage (MCP), and bandwidth-aware selection policy (Bw), that can significantly minimize energy consumption and SLA violation. Energy-aware methods for overloaded host detection and VM selection from an overloaded host are necessary to improve the energy efficiency and SLA violation of a cloud data center after migrating all VM from underloaded host turn to idle host, which switch to energy-saving mode is also beneficial. Gdr and MCP are adaptive energy-aware algorithms based on the robust regression model, for overloaded host detection. A Bw dynamic VM selection policy selects VM according to the network traffic from the overloaded host under SLAs. Experimental results on the real workload traces show that the proposed algorithms reduce energy consumption while maintaining the required performance levels in a cloud data center using a CloudSim simulator to validate the proposed algorithms

Effect of Acupressure on Pain during Inferior Alveolar Nerve Block Injection in Children Aged 5-10 Years Old - An Experimental Study

Background : Acupressure, which is related to acupuncture, is a noninvasive therapy suitable for use in children. However, data examining acupressure’s effects on the pain of local anesthetic injection in children are sparse. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate acupressure’s effects on the pain of local anesthetic injection in children. Methods : This randomized, double-blind, parallel-group clinical study included 37 5- to 10-year-olds who had an inferior alveolar nerve block (IANB) for a mandibular extraction and were randomized to one of two groups: acupressure (study group) or non-acupressure (control group). The Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale (WBFPS) and the Sound, Eye, Motor (SEM) scale were utilized for subjective and objective pain assessment during injection. Results : The objective and subjective assessment of pain during injection significantly differed between the groups, with the acupressure group displaying lower scores. Conclusion : Acupressure at the extra one point (EX-HN1) reduced pain during IANB injection in 5- to 10-year-olds and can be used as an adjunct to conventional measures like topical anesthesia to reduce pain

Adsorption of Patent Blue V from Textile Industry Wastewater Using Sterculia alata Fruit Shell Biochar: Evaluation of Efficiency and Mechanisms

Biochar prepared from Sterculia alata fruit shell showed a better performance for dye removal than the biomass from Sterculia alata fruit shell. The important process parameters—namely the pH, the amount of biochar, the initial dye concentration and the contact time—were optimized in order to maximize dye removal using biochar of Sterculia alata fruit shell as the bio-sorbent. The results from this study showed that the maximum adsorption of dye on the biochar was obtained at a biochar dosage of 40 g/L, at a contact time of 5 h, and an initial dye concentration of 500 mg/L (pH 2.0; temperature 30 ± 5 °C). The increase in the rate adsorption with temperature and the scanning electron microscopic (SEM) images indicated the possibility of multilayer type adsorption which was confirmed by better fit of the Freundlich adsorption isotherm with the experimental data as compared to the Langmuir isotherm. The values n and R2 in the Freundlich isotherm were found to be 4.55 and 0.97, respectively. The maximum adsorption capacity was found to be 11.36 mg/g. The value of n > 1 indicated physical nature of the adsorption process. The first and second order kinetics were tested, and it was observed that the adsorption process followed the first-order kinetics (R2 = 0.911)

Bacteriological profile of neonatal sepsis and antibiotic susceptibility pattern of isolates admitted at Kanti Children’s Hospital, Kathmandu, Nepal

Abstract Objective Neonatal sepsis is a major cause of morbidity and mortality of newborns (< 1 month of age). Septicemia and drug resistance is a predominant issue for neonatal death in Nepal. This study is intended to find bacteriological profile of neonatal sepsis and antibiotic susceptibility pattern of the isolates from neonates at Kanti Children’s Hospital, Kathmandu, Nepal. Results Out of 350 suspected cases of neonatal sepsis, 59 (16.9%) cases showed positive blood culture. The prevalent of positive blood culture with different neonatal risk factors (sex, age, birth weight, gestational age, and delivery mode) showed highest positive bacterial growth in male (52.3%); 3 or above 3 days age (71.2%); low birth weight (62.7%); preterm gestational age (31.4%); and caesarean delivery mode (63.3%). Among positive cases, the bacteriological profile was found highest for Staphylococcus aureus (35.6%) followed by Klebsiella pneumoniae (15.3%). The most sensitive and resistive antibiotics among Gram-positive isolates were gentamicin (93%) and ampicillin (78%), respectively. Meropenem and imipenem showed highest 100% effective and cefotaxime was least (28%) sensitive among Gram-negative isolates. This concludes broad ranges of bacteria are associated with neonatal sepsis and revealed variation in antibiotic susceptibility pattern among bacterial isolates