Role of Iron Deficiency in Chronic Diffuse Hair Loss

There are conflicting reports of association between iron deficiency and hair loss in the literature. So we conducted this study to evaluate the role of iron deficiency in chronic diffuse hair loss in women of reproductive age group. Serum ferritin, a marker of iron deficiency, was recorded in 150 consecutive patients of chronic diffuse hair loss (FPHL n=69, CTE n=81) and in healthy controls (n=100). The mean serum ferritin (SF) recorded was 9.87, 10.80, 10.30 and 11.20 ng/mL for FPHL, CTE, total patients (FPHL and CTE) andcontrol group respectively, and it did not show any significant difference between these groups. Number of patients who recorded a serum ferritin label of less than 10 ng/mL (normal range 10–126ng/mL) were 48 (69.51%), 51 (62%), 99 (66%) and 63 (63%) for FPHL, CTE, total patients and controls respectively, and this also did not reveal any significant difference between the groups. We did not find any association between low serum ferritin (iron deficiency) and chronic diffuse hair loss in women of reproductive age group

Changing Profile of Leprosy in a Tertiary Care Hospital

WHO (World Health Organization) has fixed the target of zero grade 2 (G2D) deformity among pediatric leprosy patients and reduction of new leprosy cases with G2D to less than one case per million population, to be achieved by 2020. It has also mentioned the performing indicators to evaluate the progress of leprosy control program. We undertook this study to find out what changes the leprosy clinic at our hospital had witnessed in terms of the WHO performance indicators and whether we had progressed toward reaching the goal fixed by WHO. The important indicators such as number of new cases, percentage of MB cases, child cases, and G2D cases were examined from the year 2012-13 to 2016-17. Although a significant reduction in G2D cases, MB cases and child cases were noted, which is quite encouraging, yet the numbers of annual new cases detected remained almost static during the study period, indicating persistence of active transmission of infection and the need for augmented active surveillance (leprosy case detection campaign), contact tracing, community awareness, stigma reduction and training

A case of isolated eyelid cysticercosis masquerading as a dermoid cyst: histopathology to the rescue

Cysticercosis is a parasitic infection caused by larval form of Taenia Solium. The commonest site of cysticercosis is central nervous system followed by muscles, subcutaneous tissue and eyes. But only a handful of cases of eyelid cysticercosis have been reported in the literature. We report a case of isolated eyelid cysticercosis in a three year old female child who presented with swelling on the right upper eyelid which was clinically diagnosed as dermoid cyst because of its exclusive site of presentation. Histopathology of excised eyelid swelling revealed the diagnosis of cysticercosis

Unsupervised annotated city traffic map generation

Public bus services in many cities in countries like India are controlled by private owners, hence, building up a database for all the bus routes is non-trivial. In this paper, we leverage smart-phone based sensing to crowdsource and populate the information repository for bus routes in a city. We have developed an intelligent data logging module for smartphones and a server side processing mechanism to extract roads and bus routes information. From a 3 month long study involving more than 30 volunteers in 3 different cities in India, we found that the developed system, CrowdMap, can annotate bus routes wit

Simple Analytical Particle and Kinetic Energy Densities for a Dilute Fermionic Gas in a d-Dimensional Harmonic Trap

We derive simple analytical expressions for the particle density $\rho(r)$ and the kinetic energy density $\tau(r)$ for a system of noninteracting fermions in a $d-$dimensional isotropic harmonic oscillator potential. We test the Thomas-Fermi (TF, or local-density) approximation for the functional relation $\tau[\rho]$ using the exact $\rho(r)$ and show that it locally reproduces the exact kinetic energy density $\tau(r)$, {\it including the shell oscillations,} surprisingly well everywhere except near the classical turning point. For the special case of two dimensions (2D), we obtain the unexpected analytical result that the integral of $\tau_{TF}[\rho(r)]$ yields the {\it exact} total kinetic energy.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; corrected versio

Electromagnetic transition from the 4+^+ to 2+^+ resonance in 8^8Be measured via the radiative capture in 4^4He+4^4He

An earlier measurement on the 4$^+$ to 2$^+$ radiative transition in $^8$Be provided the first electromagnetic signature of its dumbbell-like shape. However, the large uncertainty in the measured cross section does not allow a stringent test of nuclear structure models. The present paper reports a more elaborate and precise measurement for this transition, via the radiative capture in the $^4$He+$^4$He reaction, improving the accuracy by about a factor of three. The {\it ab initio} calculations of the radiative transition strength with improved three-nucleon forces are also presented. The experimental results are compared with the predictions of the alpha cluster model and {\it ab initio} calculations.Comment: 5 pages and 7 figures, Submitted to Physical Review Letter

A Quantum Mechanical Model of Spherical Supermembranes

We present a quantum mechanical model of spherical supermembranes. Using superfields to represent the cartesian coordinates of the membrane, we are able to exactly determine its supersymmetric vacua. We find there are two classical vacua, one corresponding to an extended membrane and one corresponding to a point-like membrane. For the ${\mathcal N} = 2$ case, instanton effects then lift these vacua to massive states. For the ${\mathcal N} = 4$ case, there is no instanton tunneling, and the vacua remain massless. Similarities to spherical supermembranes as giant gravitons and in Matrix theory on pp-waves is discussed.Comment: 9 page