Roles of regulatory T cells in endometriosis-associated infertility

Endometriosis is a gynaecological condition which is characterised by the presence of endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus. Endometriosis is a leading cause of infertility. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) are a group of immuno-suppressive lymphocytes. Previous studies suggest disturbed numbers of Tregs in women with endometriosis. The numbers of Tregs may be inadequate in unexplained infertility but their precise roles in endometriosis-associated infertility are yet unclear. This project aimed to investigate the numbers of Tregs in women with endometriosis and associated infertility. In this project, blood and endometrial samples from fertile and infertile women with and without endometriosis were collected. Flow cytometry (n = 50) and immunohistochemistry (n = 88) were performed to analyse immune cell numbers throughout the menstrual cycle. Overall, the numbers of lymphocytes in blood and the endometrium increased in women with endometriosis, infertility and endometriosis-associated infertility compared to controls before the window of implantation. Interestingly, endometrial Treg proportions were also significantly decreased during the proliferative phase in infertile compared to fertile women. Increased survival of lymphocytes before embryo implantation, possibly secondary to altered Treg count in infertile women, may contribute to an inflammatory endometrial environment and to endometriosis and infertility

Vitamin D Deficiency and Its Associated Factors among Female Migrants in the United Arab Emirates

Vitamin D is important for bone health, and vitamin D deficiency could be linked to noncommunicable diseases, including cardiovascular disease. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency and its associated risk factors among female migrants from Philippines, Arab, and South Asian countries residing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We used a cross-sectional study to recruit a random sample (N = 550) of female migrants aged 18 years and over in the city of Al Ain, UAE. Vitamin D deficiency was defined as serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations ≤20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L). We used multivariable logistic regression analysis to identify risk factors associated with vitamin D deficiency. The mean age of participants was 35 years (SD ± 10). The overall prevalence rate of vitamin D deficiency was 67% (95% CI 60–73%), with the highest rate seen in Arabs (87%), followed by South Asians (83%) and the lowest in Filipinas (15%). Multivariate analyses showed that low physical activity (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 4.59; 95% CI 1.98, 10.63), having more than 5 years duration of residence in the UAE (aOR = 4.65; 95% CI: 1.31, 16.53) and being obese (aOR = 3.56; 95% CI 1.04, 12.20) were independently associated with vitamin D deficiency, after controlling for age and nationality. In summary, vitamin D deficiency was highly prevalent among female migrants, especially Arabs and South Asians. It is crucial that health professionals in the UAE become aware of this situation among this vulnerable subpopulation and provide intervention strategies aiming to rectify vitamin D deficiency by focusing more on sun exposure, physical activity, and supplementation

Morphogenetic characterization of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia infecting white stripe disease of rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Rice is a major cereal crop which ensure food security to more than half of the global population. Several biotic factors impact rice grain quality and its final production. White stripe disease, caused by pathogen Stenotrophomonas maltophilia is considered among the major limiting factor for reducing rice yields and quality. Present study was performed to understand the white stripe disease, which has been frequently misdiagnosed as bacterial leaf blight (BLB) due to similar symptoms. A survey was carried out based on accessibility and farmer participation to monitor incidence and sample collection. The survey was conducted in districts Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sheikhupura, and Hafizabad, these districts were selected for their importance for rice cultivation in Pakistan. The total sample size was around 500 leaves distributed evenly throughout each study area. The results of study indicated presence of new pathogen of rice. These isolates were biochemically identified and confirmed by gram staining negative, 3% KOH positive, 5% salt tolerance positive, oxidase test negative, catalase test positive, starch hydrolysis test negative, nitrate reductase test positive, indole test negative, lactose test positive, maltose test positive, methyl red test negative, Voges-prokauer test negative and urea hydrolysis test negative. The pathogenicity test was confirmed that pathogen and the Sialkot isolate were the most aggressive isolate among the five isolates collected form the studied areas. The molecular characterization was accomplished by PCR and sequencing. The results of the phylogenetic study indicate that this pathogen belongs to a distinct group, as it is distantly related to Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo). This study provides important findings into a novel clade of pathogen causing white stripe disease in rice

A Comprehensive Study on One Health Strategy and Public Health Effects of Salmonella

Salmonella poses a significant public health challenge due to its antibiotic resistance, zoonotic transmission, and diverse clinical manifestations. Over 60 % of human diseases are zoonotic, influenced by ecological dynamics and human activities such as land use changes, population growth, and international travel. Foodborne diseases, particularly those caused by Salmonella spp., have a substantial global impact, especially in low-income countries. Salmonella is divided into two species, Salmonella enterica and Salmonella bongori, with more than 2000 serotypes and six subspecies within S. enterica. This bacterium is highly adaptable, surviving extreme conditions such as drying, high salt concentrations, and acidic environments. Detection methods typically involve pre-enrichment, followed by specific enrichment, plating, and identification through serological and molecular techniques like PCR. Severe cases, especially in vulnerable populations, often require antimicrobial treatment. Salmonella’s pathogenicity is driven by its ability to invade, persist, and replicate within host cells, facilitated by Salmonella pathogenicity islands (SPIs) and type III secretion systems. Epidemiological data reveal a global distribution of enteric fever, with high incidence and mortality rates in Africa, Asia, and South America, while lower rates are reported in developed regions, often linked to international travel. This study adopts a One Health approach, examining Salmonella\u27s resistance, zoonotic transmission, and public health impact, while suggesting innovative strategies for detection and control to mitigate its global effects

Deep Learning Assisted Automated Assessment of Thalassaemia from Haemoglobin Electrophoresis Images

Haemoglobin (Hb) electrophoresis is a method of blood testing used to detect thalassaemia. However, the interpretation of the result of the electrophoresis test itself is a complex task. Expert haematologists, specifically in developing countries, are relatively few in number and are usually overburdened. To assist them with their workload, in this paper we present a novel method for the automated assessment of thalassaemia using Hb electrophoresis images. Moreover, in this study we compile a large Hb electrophoresis image dataset, consisting of 103 strips containing 524 electrophoresis images with a clear consensus on the quality of electrophoresis obtained from 824 subjects. The proposed methodology is split into two parts: (1) single-patient electrophoresis image segmentation by means of the lane extraction technique, and (2) binary classification (normal or abnormal) of the electrophoresis images using state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and using the concept of transfer learning. Image processing techniques including filtering and morphological operations are applied for object detection and lane extraction to automatically separate the lanes and classify them using CNN models. Seven different CNN models (ResNet18, ResNet50, ResNet101, InceptionV3, DenseNet201, SqueezeNet and MobileNetV2) were investigated in this study. InceptionV3 outperformed the other CNNs in detecting thalassaemia using Hb electrophoresis images. The accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and specificity in the detection of thalassaemia obtained with the InceptionV3 model were 95.8%, 95.84%, 95.8%, 95.8% and 95.8%, respectively. MobileNetV2 demonstrated an accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and specificity of 95.72%, 95.73%, 95.72%, 95.7% and 95.72% respectively. Its performance was comparable with the best performing model, InceptionV3. Since it is a very shallow network, MobileNetV2 also provides the least latency in processing a single-patient image and it can be suitably used for mobile applications. The proposed approach, which has shown very high classification accuracy, will assist in the rapid and robust detection of thalassaemia using Hb electrophoresis images. 2022 by the authors.A part of the research was funded by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan through its funded project of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, Intelligent Information Processing Lab, National Center of Artificial Intelligence.Scopu

Rhoifolin protects cisplatin mediated pulmonary toxicity via attenuation of oxidative stress, inflammatory response, apoptosis and histopathological damages

Cisplatin (CP) is a ubiquitous antineoplastic medicine that has been recognized to have sever toxic effects on different organs including lungs. Rhoifolin (RHO) is a therapeutic compound with significant pharmacological activities. The present study was designed to evaluate the protective effect of RHO against CP induced pulmonary toxicity. Twenty-four rats were randomly divided into 4 groups: control group, CP treated group (20 mgkg−1), CP + RHO treated group (20 mgkg−1 + 10 mgkg−1) and RHO supplemented group (10 mgkg−1). Following 30 days of administration, our results showed that CP treatment decreased the activity of antioxidant enzymes such as glutathione (GSH), glutathione reductase (GSR), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), glutathione S-transferase (GST), superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) while elevated the level of malondialdehyde (MDA) along with reactive oxygen species (ROS). Furthermore, levels of inflammatory cytokines involving interleukin-6 (IL-6), nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB), interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX-2) activity were escalated. Besides, treatment with CP enhanced the activities of apoptotic proteins i.e., Bax, caspase-9 along with caspase-3 while reducing the activity of Bcl-2. Additionally, the histopathological examination revealed significant pulmonary tissue impairments in the CP exposed group. However, RHO treatment considerably (P < 0.05) recovered the abovementioned CP-induced toxic effects. Therefore, the current research demonstrated that RHO may be used as a promising pharmacological compound to cure CP-instigated pulmonary damages due to its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antiapoptotic and histo-protective properties

Benchmarking performance of document level classification and topic modeling

Text classification of low resource language is always a trivial and challenging problem. This paper discusses the process of Urdu news classification and Urdu documents similarity. Urdu is one of the most famous spoken languages in Asia. The implementation of computational methodologies for text classification has increased over time. However, Urdu language has not much experimented with research, it does not have readily available datasets, which turn out to be the primary reason behind limited research and applying the latest methodologies to the Urdu. To overcome these obstacles, a medium-sized dataset having six categories is collected from authentic Pakistani news sources. Urdu is a rich but complex language. Text processing can be challenging for Urdu due to its complex features as compared to other languages. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (TFIDF) based term weighting scheme for extracting features, chi-2 for selecting essential features, and Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for dimensionality reduction have been used. TFIDF matrix and cosine similarity measure have been used to identify similar documents in a collection and find the semantic meaning of words in a document FastText model has been applied. The training-test split evaluation methodology is used for this experimentation, which includes 70% for training data and 30% for testing data. State-of-the-art machine learning and deep dense neural network approaches for Urdu news classification have been used. Finally, we trained Multinomial Naïve Bayes, XGBoost, Bagging, and Deep dense neural network. Bagging and deep dense neural network outperformed the other algorithms. The experimental results show that deep dense achieves 92.0% mean f1 score, and Bagging 95.0% f1 score

Separation of Levofloxacin from Industry Effluents Using Novel Magnetic Nanocomposite and Membranes Hybrid Processes

Magnetic carbon nanocomposite (MCN) was synthesized from waste biomass precursor, pineapple. The prepared adsorbent was characterized using different instrumental techniques and was used to remove levofloxacin (LEV) from effluents. The maximum sorption of LEV was observed at pH 7. Pseudo-2nd-order (PSO) kinetic was found to be the best model that fits well the adsorption kinetics data. For Langmuir adsorption isotherm, the R2 value was higher as compared with other isotherms. The Van’t Hoff equation was used for thermodynamic parameters determinations. ΔS° (standard entropy) was positive and ΔG° (standard Gibb’s free energy) was negative: -0.37, -1.81, and -3.73 kJmol−1 corresponding to 25, 40, and 60°C. The negative values of ΔG° at different temperatures stipulate that the adsorption of LEV was spontaneous in nature and adsorbent has a considerable affinity for LEV molecules. The MCN was then utilized in hybrid way by connecting with ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF), and reverse osmosis (RO) membranes in series and as a result enhanced permeate fluxes were observed. The percent retention of LEV molecules was lower with UF membrane and with NF it was 96%, while it was 100% with RO. For MCN/UF and MCN/NF systems, improvement in % retention was recorded

Protective effects of cupressuflavone against doxorubicin-induced hepatic damage in rats

Doxorubicin (DOX) is a potent chemotherapeutic agent that is used in various sorts of malignancies. However, its uses are restricted owing to its deleterious effects on different organs including the liver. Cupressuflavone (CUP) is a plant-based flavonoid which is well known for its biological as well pharmacological potential. Our investigation aimed to evaluate the ameliorative potential of CUP against DOX provoked liver toxicity in rats. Twenty-four albino rats (Rattus norvegicus) were distributed into four distinct groups such as control, DOX (3 mg/kg), co- administrated DOX (3 mg/kg) + CUP (40 mg/kg) and CUP (40 mg/kg) only. DOX exposure reduced catalase (CAT), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), superoxide dismutase (SOD), Glutathione reductase (GSR), glutathione-S-transferase (GST) activities and glutathione (GSH) content while escalating the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and malondialdehyde (MDA). Besides, the levels of ALT, AST and ALP were increased in response to DOX exposure. Furthermore, administration of DOX upregulated the levels of Interleukin-6 (IL-6), Nuclear factor kappa-B (NF-κB), Interleukin-1β (IL-1β), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and the activity of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2). The treatment of DOX reduced the levels of Bcl-2 while escalating the levels of Caspase-3, Caspase-9 and Bax. Similarly, DOX intoxication instigated various histopathological disruptions in hepatic tissues of rats. However, supplementation of CUP notably (p < 0.05) restored abovementioned hepatic dysregulations owing to its anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory as well as anti-apoptotic potential. Our results manifested that CUP could be used as hepatoprotective agent againt DOX induced liver damage in rats