Honey as a potent natural supplement for diverse human ailments

Abstract The use of natural honey (NH) as a medicinal agent is associated with a vast range of health benefits and therapeutic promises. The tradition of using honey as a potent food supplementation and medicinal component exist in several countries cutting across traditions and civilizations. This review revisits the wide spectrum of medicinal properties that are associated with honey in the light of modern research and attempts to impart the much needed data required to provide this natural food the status of evidence based medicine. Subjects as diverse as diabetes, cardiology and ophthalmology were covered where beneficial medical properties of honey has been demonstrated and the review was concluded by identifying few safety aspects that are required to be known while using natural, unprocessed honey

Rare e14a3 (b3a3) BCR-ABL Fusion in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia in India: The Threats and Challenges in Monitoring Minimal Residual Disease (MRD)

Objective: The primary objective of this work was to confirm the occurrence of rare BCR ABL fusion variant involving the a3 region of the ABL gene in a patient positive for t(9;22) translocation but negative for common major and minor breakpoint cluster regions and the challenges and threats that it poses in a routine laboratory setting which use commercial kits for monitoring the minimal residual disease

Development, validation and clinical evaluation of a low cost in-house HIV-1 drug resistance genotyping assay for Indian patients.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) drug resistance genotyping assay is a part of clinical management of HIV-1 positive individuals under treatment with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). Routine monitoring of drug resistance mutations in resource limited settings like India is not possible due to high cost of commercial drug resistance assays. In this study we developed an in-house, cost effective HIV-1 drug resistance genotyping assay for Indian patients and validated it against the US-FDA-approved ViroSeq HIV-1 drug resistance testing system. A reference panel of 20 clinical samples was used to develop and validate the assay against ViroSeq HIV-1 drug resistance testing system which was subsequently used to genotype a clinical panel of 225 samples. The Stanford HIV database was used to identify drug resistant mutations. The analytical sensitivity of the assay was 1000 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml of plasma sample while precision and reproducibility was 99.68 ± 0.16% and 99.76 ± 0.18% respectively. One hundred and one drug resistant mutations were detected by the in-house assay compared to 104 by ViroSeq system in the reference panel. The assay had 91.55% success rate in genotyping the clinical panel samples and was able to detect drug resistant mutations related to nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI), non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) as well as protease inhibitor (PI) classes of antiretroviral drugs. It was found to be around 71.9% more cost effective compared to ViroSeq genotyping system. This evaluation of the assay on the clinical panel demonstrates its potential for monitoring clinical HIV-1 drug resistance mutations and population-based surveillance in resource limited settings like India

A robust HIV-1 viral load detection assay optimized for Indian sub type C specific strains and resource limiting setting

BACKGROUND: Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) viral load testing at regular intervals is an integral component of disease management in Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) patients. The need in countries like India is therefore an assay that is not only economical but efficient and highly specific for HIV-1 sub type C virus. This study reports a SYBR Green-based HIV-1 real time PCR assay for viral load testing and is designed for enhanced specificity towards HIV-1 sub type C viruses prevalent in India. RESULTS: Linear regression of the observed and reference concentration of standards used in this study generated a correlation coefficient of 0.998 (p 0.5 log value, a figure that is considered clinically significant by physicians. CONCLUSION: The HIV-1 viral load assay reported in this study was found to be robust, reliable, economical and effective in resource limited settings such as those existing in India. PCR probes specially designed from HIV-1 Subtype C-specific nucleotide sequences originating from India imparted specificity towards such isolates and demonstrated superior results when compared to two similar commercial assays widely used in India

Demographic characteristics and laboratory results of the clinical panel.

<p>IQR: Interquartile range; MSM: Men who have Sex with Men; MTC: Mother to Child Transmission; AZT: Zidovudine; 3TC: Lamivudine; EFV: Efavirenz; NVP: Nevirapine; ATV/r: Atazanavir/r; LPV/r: Lopinavir/r.</p><p>Demographic characteristics and laboratory results of the clinical panel.</p

Assay sensitivity results using a dilution series from 5 reference panel samples, each tested in triplicate.

<p>“+”: Positive amplification; “–”: Negative amplification.</p><p>Assay sensitivity results using a dilution series from 5 reference panel samples, each tested in triplicate.</p

Comparison of drug resistance mutations identified by ViroSeq gentyping system and the in-house assay.

<p>The discordant mutations are shown in bold and underlined letters.</p><p>Comparison of drug resistance mutations identified by ViroSeq gentyping system and the in-house assay.</p

NRTI, NNRTI and PI Mutations.

<p>Frequency of Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitor-related drug resistance mutations [A], Frequency of Non Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors-related drug resistance mutations [B] and Frequency of Protease Inhibitors-related drug resistance mutations (including PI major and PI minor drug resistance mutations) [C] in 206 patients successfully genotyped from the clinical panel failing 1^st line antiretroviral therapy.</p

Phylogenetic tree of clinical panel samples.

<p>Phylogenetic analysis of sequences obtained from clinical panel samples. The construction of phylogenetic tree is described in the text. All HIV-1 subtype reference sequences used to construct the tree were obtained from Los Alamos National Laboratory HIV sequence database (<a href="http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/index" target="_blank">http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/index</a>). The reference sequence IDs shown in the tree are in the following sequence: subtype.country of origin.isolate number.accession number.</p