Pregnant women with bronchial asthma benefit from progressive muscle relaxation: A randomized, prospective, controlled trial

Background: Asthma is a serious medical problem in pregnancy and is often associated with stress, anger and poor quality of life. The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) on change in blood pressure, lung parameters, heart rate, anger and health-related quality of life in pregnant women with bronchial asthma. Methods: We treated a sample of 64 pregnant women with bronchial asthma from the local population in an 8-week randomized, prospective, controlled trial. Thirty-two were selected for PMR, and 32 received a placebo intervention. The systolic blood pressure, forced expiratory volume in the first second, peak expiratory flow and heart rate were tested, and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory and Health Survey (SF-36) were employed. Results: According to the intend-to-treat principle, a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure and a significant increase in both forced expiratory volume in the first second and peak expiratory flow were observed after PMR. The heart rate showed a significant increase in the coefficient of variation, root mean square of successive differences and high frequency ranges, in addition to a significant reduction in low and middle frequency ranges. A significant reduction on three of five State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory scales, and a significant increase on seven of eight SF-36 scales were observed. Conclusions: PMR appears to be an effective method to improve blood pressure, lung parameters and heart rate, and to decrease anger levels, thus enhancing health-related quality of life in pregnant women with bronchial asthma. Copyright (c) 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel

Effect of Body Mass Index on work related musculoskeletal discomfort and occupational stress of computer workers in a developed ergonomic setup

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Work urgency, accuracy and demands compel the computer professionals to spend longer hours before computers without giving importance to their health, especially body weight. Increase of body weight leads to improper Body Mass Index (BMI) may aggravate work related musculoskeletal discomfort and occupational-psychosocial stress. The objective of the study was to find out the effect of BMI on work related musculoskeletal discomforts and occupational stress of computer workers in a developed ergonomic setup.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A descriptive inferential study has been taken to analyze the effect of BMI on work related musculoskeletal discomfort and occupational-psychosocial stress. A total of 100 computer workers, aged 25-35 years randomly selected on convenience from software and BPO companies in Bangalore city, India for the participation in this study. BMI was calculated by taking the ratio of the subject's height (in meter) and weight (in kilogram). Work related musculoskeletal discomfort and occupational stress of the subjects was assessed by Cornell University's musculoskeletal discomfort questionnaire (CMDQ) and occupational stress index (OSI) respectively as well as a relationship was checked with their BMI.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A significant association (p < 0.001) was seen among high BMI subjects with their increase scores of musculoskeletal discomfort and occupational stress.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>From this study, it has been concluded that, there is a significant effect of BMI in increasing of work related musculoskeletal discomfort and occupational-psychosocial stress among computer workers in a developed ergonomic setup.</p

The Cell Ontology 2016: enhanced content, modularization, and ontology interoperability

BACKGROUND: The Cell Ontology (CL) is an OBO Foundry candidate ontology covering the domain of canonical, natural biological cell types. Since its inception in 2005, the CL has undergone multiple rounds of revision and expansion, most notably in its representation of hematopoietic cells. For in vivo cells, the CL focuses on vertebrates but provides general classes that can be used for other metazoans, which can be subtyped in species-specific ontologies. CONSTRUCTION AND CONTENT: Recent work on the CL has focused on extending the representation of various cell types, and developing new modules in the CL itself, and in related ontologies in coordination with the CL. For example, the Kidney and Urinary Pathway Ontology was used as a template to populate the CL with additional cell types. In addition, subtypes of the class ‘cell in vitro’ have received improved definitions and labels to provide for modularity with the representation of cells in the Cell Line Ontology and Reagent Ontology. Recent changes in the ontology development methodology for CL include a switch from OBO to OWL for the primary encoding of the ontology, and an increasing reliance on logical definitions for improved reasoning. UTILITY AND DISCUSSION: The CL is now mandated as a metadata standard for large functional genomics and transcriptomics projects, and is used extensively for annotation, querying, and analyses of cell type specific data in sequencing consortia such as FANTOM5 and ENCODE, as well as for the NIAID ImmPort database and the Cell Image Library. The CL is also a vital component used in the modular construction of other biomedical ontologies—for example, the Gene Ontology and the cross-species anatomy ontology, Uberon, use CL to support the consistent representation of cell types across different levels of anatomical granularity, such as tissues and organs. CONCLUSIONS: The ongoing improvements to the CL make it a valuable resource to both the OBO Foundry community and the wider scientific community, and we continue to experience increased interest in the CL both among developers and within the user community

Formalization, Annotation and Analysis of Diverse Drug and Probe Screening Assay Datasets Using the BioAssay Ontology (BAO)

Huge amounts of high-throughput screening (HTS) data for probe and drug development projects are being generated in the pharmaceutical industry and more recently in the public sector. The resulting experimental datasets are increasingly being disseminated via publically accessible repositories. However, existing repositories lack sufficient metadata to describe the experiments and are often difficult to navigate by non-experts. The lack of standardized descriptions and semantics of biological assays and screening results hinder targeted data retrieval, integration, aggregation, and analyses across different HTS datasets, for example to infer mechanisms of action of small molecule perturbagens. To address these limitations, we created the BioAssay Ontology (BAO). BAO has been developed with a focus on data integration and analysis enabling the classification of assays and screening results by concepts that relate to format, assay design, technology, target, and endpoint. Previously, we reported on the higher-level design of BAO and on the semantic querying capabilities offered by the ontology-indexed triple store of HTS data. Here, we report on our detailed design, annotation pipeline, substantially enlarged annotation knowledgebase, and analysis results. We used BAO to annotate assays from the largest public HTS data repository, PubChem, and demonstrate its utility to categorize and analyze diverse HTS results from numerous experiments. BAO is publically available from the NCBO BioPortal at http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/1533. BAO provides controlled terminology and uniform scope to report probe and drug discovery screening assays and results. BAO leverages description logic to formalize the domain knowledge and facilitate the semantic integration with diverse other resources. As a consequence, BAO offers the potential to infer new knowledge from a corpus of assay results, for example molecular mechanisms of action of perturbagens