Maternal and perinatal outcome of acute pancreatitis during pregnancy: a 5 year experience at a tertiary care centre

Background: Acute pancreatitis in pregnancy (APIP) is rare and occurs in approximately 1 in 1000 to 1 in 4000 births. The most common symptom of acute pancreatitis is epigastric pain radiating to the back which is accompanied by nausea, vomiting and fever. The aim of the study was to evaluate the maternal and perinatal outcome of acute pancreatitis during pregnancy.Methods: Six antenatal mothers identified with acute pancreatitis at St. John’s Medical College Hospital, Bengaluru from June 2011 to March 2016 were followed up in the antenatal, postnatal period and their outcomes were evaluated.Results: There were six cases of acute pancreatitis, with 11,053 deliveries during this 5 year study. Incidence was 1 in 1831. All patients presented with epigastric pain, vomiting and required repeated episodes of admission. There were 14 episodes of acute pancreatitis in these 6 patients. Pancreatitis was severe in 3 patients, with most attacks occurring in third trimester. Etiology was biliary pancreatitis (gallstones) in 2 patients, preeclampsia in 2, idiopathic 1 and hypertriglyceridemia in one patient. Five patients delivered preterm. There were no abortions, fetal loss, maternal and neonatal mortality.Conclusions: The course of acute pancreatitis in pregnancy is usually mild and self-limiting. But, it can be rapidly progressive and fulminant with complications like electrolyte imbalance, ARDS and DIC. Most patients delivered preterm. Conservative management till delivery by multidisciplinary team lead to good maternal and perinatal outcome

Sleep Deprivation and Neurological Disorders

Sleep plays an important role in maintaining neuronal circuitry, signalling and helps maintain overall health and wellbeing. Sleep deprivation (SD) disturbs the circadian physiology and exerts a negative impact on brain and behavioural functions. SD impairs the cellular clearance of misfolded neurotoxin proteins like α-synuclein, amyloid-β, and tau which are involved in major neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer\u27s disease and Parkinson\u27s disease. In addition, SD is also shown to affect the glymphatic system, a glial-dependent metabolic waste clearance pathway, causing accumulation of misfolded faulty proteins in synaptic compartments resulting in cognitive decline. Also, SD affects the immunological and redox system resulting in neuroinflammation and oxidative stress. Hence, it is important to understand the molecular and biochemical alterations that are the causative factors leading to these pathophysiological effects on the neuronal system. This review is an attempt in this direction. It provides up-to-date information on the alterations in the key processes, pathways, and proteins that are negatively affected by SD and become reasons for neurological disorders over a prolonged period of time, if left unattended

Sleep deprivation and neurological disorders

Sleep plays an important role in maintaining neuronal circuitry, signalling and helps maintain overall health and wellbeing. Sleep deprivation (SD) disturbs the circadian physiology and exerts a negative impact on brain and behavioural functions. SD impairs the cellular clearance of misfolded neurotoxin proteins like α-synuclein, amyloid-β, and tau which are involved in major neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. In addition, SD is also shown to affect the glymphatic system, a glial-dependent metabolic waste clearance pathway, causing accumulation of misfolded faulty proteins in synaptic compartments resulting in cognitive decline. Also, SD affects the immunological and redox system resulting in neuroinflammation and oxidative stress. Hence, it is important to understand the molecular and biochemical alterations that are the causative factors leading to these pathophysiological effects on the neuronal system. This review is an attempt in this direction. It provides up-to-date information on the alterations in the key processes, pathways, and proteins that are negatively affected by SD and become reasons for neurological disorders over a prolonged period of time, if left unattended

Suitability of p-type conditions for ferromagnetism in GaN : Mn

Mn doping in GaN results in the generation of deep acceptor levels in the band gap of GaN. In the absence of any extrinsic doping, these levels are partially occupied and result in a ferromagnetic state being stabilized. In this work we show that strongly p-type conditions generated by the presence of Ga vacancies can destroy the ferromagnetic state. This is because the shallow acceptor levels generated by the p-type conditions depopulate the Mn associated deep band gap impurity levels resulting in a reduction of the exchange splitting and, hence, destroy ferromagnetism. In addition we find a Hund’s rule type of mechanism which makes the Ga vacancies favor spin polarized configurations. The exchange splittings are as large as 0.5–1eV. As the host material is changed from GaN to GaP and GaAs, we find that the spin polarization of the vacancy level decreases

Bearing Health Condition Monitoring: Wavelet Decomposition

Background/Objectives: Condition monitoring is one of the important functions to be carried out in the maintenance of any machine. In condition monitoring, there are several techniques among which the most commonly used technique for rotating machines is the vibration analysis. Methods/Statistical analysis: Discrete Wavelet Transform is used to decompose the vibration signal into 9 levels. For each level, mean ±std (standard deviation) are computed for both approximated and detailed coefficients. Findings: Bearing data obtained from the bearing test rig of Case Western Reserve University are used to test the algorithm. The standard of coefficients in level to 3 shows distant classification of faults. The levels which show clear classification among the bearings are those frequency bands in which the characteristic defect frequencies of faults occur. It is inferred that, the wavelet decomposition classifies the ball defect clearly than the frequency domain methods. Application/Improvements: Wavelet based bearing health condition monitoring technique can be used for bearing fault diagnosis and it can be extended for prognosis

Semen preparation techniques in intrauterine insemination: A comparison of non-temperature and temperature controlled centrifugation in cases of unexplained infertility

Aim: The aim of the following study is to compare pregnancy rates between the use of non-temperature and temperature controlled centrifugation on semen preparation technique in intrauterine insemination. Materials and Methods: The retrospective study was conducted on 671 patients of idiopathic infertility who underwent homologous artificial insemination at Fertility Research Center from the period of January 2007 to September 2012. The couples were randomized into two groups namely, Group A-patients (n = 303) being treated with sperm prepared by using non-temperature controlled centrifuge and Group B-Patients (n = 368) being treated with sperm prepared by temperature (37°C) controlled centrifuge. Results and Conclusion: The clinical pregnancy rate Group A was 13.86% and Group B was 12.77%. The clinical pregnancy fetal loss rate between the two groups was 38% and 42% respectively. The delivery rate per transfer was 62% and 58% respectively. No statistically significant difference was found between these two groups

Successful birth of South India's first twins after preimplantation genetic screening of embryos

We report the first documented successful birth of twins following preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) of cleavage stage embryos by array comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) technology, in South India. The case was a 28-year-old woman with the previous history of preclinical pregnancy and a miscarriage in two attempted in vitro fertilization cycles. Day 3 cleavage stage embryos were generated by conventional long protocol with the use of a gonadotropin-releasing hormone analog and a combination of recombinant folliculotropins and human menopausal gonadotropins. Intracytoplasmic sperm injection of oocytes thus obtained was performed, and 10 selected embryos underwent PGS using the array CGH technique. Two normal blastocysts were transferred to the patient, and she conceived twins. She delivered at 35 weeks of gestation by elective cesarean on November 19, 2014. She delivered a healthy male and female baby weighing 2.19 kg and 2.26 kg, respectively. Postnatal evaluation of babies was also normal, and the hospital course was uneventful. PGS has a definitive indication in assisted reproductive technology programs and can be utilized to improve pregnancy rates significantly

Stress detection from EEG using power ratio.

Stress correlates itself as a mental conscious and emotion within a person that influences mental ability and decision-making skills, which results in an inappropriate work. Studies have recently developed to detect the stress in a person while performing different tasks. One of the methods is through Electroencephalograph (EEG). These are the bioelectrical signals generated in a human body while performing the tasks and thus describes the activity of the brain. Any action taken by a person changes the properties of these signals. This present work focuses on the classification of baseline (relax) and stress detection using EEG sub-band power ratio as features. Support vector machine (SVM) classifier with different kernel function parameters and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier with a different number of neighbors with holdout and 10-fold cross-validation technique were used to classify power ratio features in order to detect stress. To evaluate the classifier performance various performance metrics were used. It is observed that KNN with a number of neighbors as one, with Euclidean distance gives better performance in both validation techniques and also anterior frontal channel Fpl that is placed at the left side of the brain itself gives a good accuracy of 99.42%. The performance of the proposed method is verified on a publicly available mental arithmetic dataset where stress is induced while performing the mental cognitive workload i.e., mental serial subtraction

Synthesis, Spectroscopic Characterization and Biological Activities of Transition Metal Complexes Derived from a Tridentate Schiff Base

A new series of Cu (II), Ni (II), Co (II) and Zn (II) complexes have been synthesized from the Schiff base derived from 4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzylidine-4-aminoantipyrine and 2-aminophenol. The structural features have been determined from their elemental analysis, magnetic susceptibility, molar conductance, Mass, IR, UV-Vis, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR and ESR spectral studies. The redox behavior of the copper complex has been studied by cyclic voltammetry. The data confirm that the complexes have composition of ML2 type. The electronic absorption spectral data of the complexes propose an octahedral geometry around the central metal ion. All the metal complexes with DNA structure were guided by the presence of inter-molecular C–H⋯O and C–H⋯N hydrogen bonds. The biological activity of the synthesized compounds were tested against the bacterial species such as Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus, Proteus vulgaris and fungal species such as Candida albicans by the well-diffusion method

Maternal and perinatal outcome of acute pancreatitis during pregnancy: a 5 year experience at a tertiary care centre

Background: Acute pancreatitis in pregnancy (APIP) is rare and occurs in approximately 1 in 1000 to 1 in 4000 births. The most common symptom of acute pancreatitis is epigastric pain radiating to the back which is accompanied by nausea, vomiting and fever. The aim of the study was to evaluate the maternal and perinatal outcome of acute pancreatitis during pregnancy.Methods: Six antenatal mothers identified with acute pancreatitis at St. John’s Medical College Hospital, Bengaluru from June 2011 to March 2016 were followed up in the antenatal, postnatal period and their outcomes were evaluated.Results: There were six cases of acute pancreatitis, with 11,053 deliveries during this 5 year study. Incidence was 1 in 1831. All patients presented with epigastric pain, vomiting and required repeated episodes of admission. There were 14 episodes of acute pancreatitis in these 6 patients. Pancreatitis was severe in 3 patients, with most attacks occurring in third trimester. Etiology was biliary pancreatitis (gallstones) in 2 patients, preeclampsia in 2, idiopathic 1 and hypertriglyceridemia in one patient. Five patients delivered preterm. There were no abortions, fetal loss, maternal and neonatal mortality.Conclusions: The course of acute pancreatitis in pregnancy is usually mild and self-limiting. But, it can be rapidly progressive and fulminant with complications like electrolyte imbalance, ARDS and DIC. Most patients delivered preterm. Conservative management till delivery by multidisciplinary team lead to good maternal and perinatal outcome