PILOT STUDY ON PHARMACEUTICAL PROCESS OF MAMSA ARKA - A FORGOTTEN AMBROSIA

Arka kalpana (distillation) is a unique preparation of Bhaishajya kalpana. Mamsa Arka (meat distillate) among Arka kalpana is not much popular these days. It is practically forgotten and not practiced in modern Ayurveda. In classical literature Mamsa Arka is compared to ambrosia and best of all Arka formulations. Its properties are Maha Swadu (relishing) and Adhika rochana (enhances taste). It is also specifically given to certain patients having aversion to meat. Present study focuses on the pharmaceutical preparation of Mamsa Arka with special reference to Arka prakasa and performing organoleptic tests on the sample obtained. Experiment was done on a household stove to specify that Mamsa Arka can be prepared in small scale by the practitioner himself with ease. Simple distillation apparatus was used for the procedure. Temperature was maintained around 1200 to 1300 Celsius throughout the process with the help of thermometer which lasted for 1 ½ hour. The resultant distillate obtained was 1/3rd (33.3 % approx.) of the total liquid content in the mixture. Mamsa Arka is a colourless liquid with a specific odour dominated by Lavanga and Karpura. It is a palatable product with Madhura (Sweet), Tikta (Bitter) and slightly Katu (Pungent) Rasa (taste). Mamsa Arka is considered Laghu (light in digestion), Balya (strength promoting) and fast acting.

CRITICAL REVIEW OF MEDHYA RASAYANA DRUGS MENTIONED IN AYURVEDA - TRADITIONAL INDIAN MEDICINE

Ayurvedic system of medicine has mentioned several medicinal preparations under the category 'Medhya'. By virtue of inducing mental upliftment as major influence several medicinal plants mentioned as 'Rasayana drugs' in Ayurveda are primarily claimed as 'Medhya'. Further there is a special class of Rasayana drugs called 'Medhya Rasayana' which is supposed to be having specific influence on brain functions. Cognitive deficits like memory disorders are found in high prevalence among the aged. In Ayurvedic literature, impairment of memory is mentioned as Smriti bhramsha which occurs due to vitiation of Rajo and Tamo doshas. It has been noted that cognitive functions are thoroughly affected due to stress and other related psychological disorders. It is clearly emphasized that Medha (intellect) and Buddhi (wisdom) deteriorate in these conditions. People's lifestyle also has an additional influence on the intellectual capacity. Several Medhya Rasayana drugs mentioned in Ayurveda have multi-dimensional actions having influence on memory. They not only enhance the intellectual capacity but also rejuvenate the whole system and their pathways.&nbsp

Prevalence of sensory peripheral neuropathy in diabetic patients at diabetes care centre: a cross sectional study

Background: Diabetic neuropathy is a nerve damaging disorder associated with diabetes; result from micro vascular injury involving small blood vessels that supply to the nerve (vas nervorum) in addition to macro vascular condition that can culminate in diabetic neuropathy. By the year 2025 hundreds of people were estimated to become diabetic. The rates of prevalence of neuropathy increasing worldwide which is directly related to the nonmodifiable risks like age, duration of diabetes, obesity, alcoholism, gender.Methods: A cross sectional interventional study was conducted on diabetic patients. Questionnaire, instruments and demographic details were used to collect data from patients. The diabetic neuropathy is conformed in patients by using biothesiometric analysis, tuning fork, monofilament, NSS and NDS.Results: Total 331 subjects included in the study, 200 cases diagnosed with DPN according to biothesiometry and prevalence percentage was found to be 60.4% and incidence was found to be 8.76% respectively. A significant greater proportion of males reported neuropathy more than females. The association between the obesity and the DPN was (r2=0.7922) low positive correlation. High positive correlation was confirmed with NSS, NDS respectively.Conclusions: It was concluded that there is a higher prevalence (60.4%) and incidence (8.76%) of neuropathy among the diabetic subjects and it may go on increasing as the age progress

Finite element computation of multi-physical micropolar transport phenomena from an inclined moving plate in porous media

Non-Newtonian flows arise in numerous industrial transport processes including materials fabrication systems. Micropolar theory offers an excellent mechanism for exploring the fluid dynamics of new non-Newtonian materials which possess internal microstructure. Magnetic fields may also be used for controlling electrically-conducting polymeric flows. To explore numerical simulation of transport in rheological materials processing, in the current paper, a finite element computational solution is presented for magnetohydrodynamic (MHD), incompressible, dissipative, radiative and chemically-reacting micropolar fluid flow, heat and mass transfer adjacent to an inclined porous plate embedded in a saturated homogenous porous medium. Heat generation/absorption effects are included. Rosseland’s diffusion approximation is used to describe the radiative heat flux in the energy equation. A Darcy model is employed to simulate drag effects in the porous medium. The governing transport equations are rendered into non-dimensional form under the assumption of low Reynolds number and also low magnetic Reynolds number. Using a Galerkin formulation with a weighted residual scheme, finite element solutions are presented to the boundary value problem. The influence of plate inclination, Eringen coupling number, radiation-conduction number, heat absorption/generation parameter, chemical reaction parameter, plate moving velocity parameter, magnetic parameter, thermal Grashof number, species (solutal) Grashof number, permeability parameter, Eckert number on linear velocity, micro-rotation, temperature and concentration profiles. Furthermore, the influence of selected thermo-physical parameters on friction factor, surface heat transfer and mass transfer rate is also tabulated. The finite element solutions are verified with solutions from several limiting cases in the literature. Interesting features in the flow are identified and interpreted

Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Background Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for death and disability, but its overall association with health remains complex given the possible protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption on some conditions. With our comprehensive approach to health accounting within the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016, we generated improved estimates of alcohol use and alcohol-attributable deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 195 locations from 1990 to 2016, for both sexes and for 5-year age groups between the ages of 15 years and 95 years and older. Methods Using 694 data sources of individual and population-level alcohol consumption, along with 592 prospective and retrospective studies on the risk of alcohol use, we produced estimates of the prevalence of current drinking, abstention, the distribution of alcohol consumption among current drinkers in standard drinks daily (defined as 10 g of pure ethyl alcohol), and alcohol-attributable deaths and DALYs. We made several methodological improvements compared with previous estimates: first, we adjusted alcohol sales estimates to take into account tourist and unrecorded consumption; second, we did a new meta-analysis of relative risks for 23 health outcomes associated with alcohol use; and third, we developed a new method to quantify the level of alcohol consumption that minimises the overall risk to individual health. Findings Globally, alcohol use was the seventh leading risk factor for both deaths and DALYs in 2016, accounting for 2.2% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 1.5-3.0) of age-standardised female deaths and 6.8% (5.8-8.0) of age-standardised male deaths. Among the population aged 15-49 years, alcohol use was the leading risk factor globally in 2016, with 3.8% (95% UI 3.2-4-3) of female deaths and 12.2% (10.8-13-6) of male deaths attributable to alcohol use. For the population aged 15-49 years, female attributable DALYs were 2.3% (95% UI 2.0-2.6) and male attributable DALYs were 8.9% (7.8-9.9). The three leading causes of attributable deaths in this age group were tuberculosis (1.4% [95% UI 1. 0-1. 7] of total deaths), road injuries (1.2% [0.7-1.9]), and self-harm (1.1% [0.6-1.5]). For populations aged 50 years and older, cancers accounted for a large proportion of total alcohol-attributable deaths in 2016, constituting 27.1% (95% UI 21.2-33.3) of total alcohol-attributable female deaths and 18.9% (15.3-22.6) of male deaths. The level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero (95% UI 0.0-0.8) standard drinks per week. Interpretation Alcohol use is a leading risk factor for global disease burden and causes substantial health loss. We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero. These results suggest that alcohol control policies might need to be revised worldwide, refocusing on efforts to lower overall population-level consumption.Peer reviewe

RNA-sequencing elucidates the regulation of behavioural transitions associated with mating in honey bee queens

This study was funded by a BBSRC ISIS grant BB/J019453/1, a Royal Holloway Research Strategy Fund Grant, and a Leverhulme Grant F/07537/AK to MJFB. BPO was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery grants DP150100151 and DP120101915. FM was supported by a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IIF-625487 to MJFB. We would like to thank Dave Galbraight (Penn State) and Alberto Paccanaro (RHUL) for support with analysis of RNAseq data and four anonymous reviewers for providing thoughtful insights that helped to improve the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A distributed primarysegmented backup scheme for dependable real-time communication in multihop networks

Several distributed real-time applications require faulttolerance apart from guaranteed timeliness, at acceptable levels of overhead. These applications require hard guarantees on recovery delays, due to network component failures, which cannot be ensured in traditional datagram services. Several schemes exist which attempt to guarantee failure recovery in a timely and resource efficient manner. These methods center around a priori reservation of network resources called spare resources along a backup channel, in addition to each primary communication channel. This backup channel is usually routed along a path disjoint with the primary channel. In this paper, we propose a distributed method of segmented backups for dependable realtime communication in multihop networks, which improves upon existing methods in terms of network resource utilization, average call acceptance rate, scalability and provides better QoS guarantees on bounded failure recovery time and propagation delays, without any compromise in faulttolerance levels. The distributed algorithm is one of finding a “minimal path ” based on flooding with a cut-out mechanism that does not relay messages if they came along longer paths than those known. We further show that the complexity of the distributed algorithm is bounded and acceptable.

A Rearrangeable Algorithm for the Construction of Delay-Constrained Dynamic Multicast Trees

With the proliferation of multimedia group applications, the construction of multicast trees satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements is becoming a problem of prime importance. Many of the multicast applications (such as video broadcasts and teleconferencing) require the network to support dynamic multicast sessions wherein the membership of the multicast group changes with time