Relationship between the duration of diabetes and severity of neuropathy in patients of peripheral neuropathic diabetic foot ulcers

Background: Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) has devastating impact on the social, personal as well as economic life of a diabetic patient. In US, prevalence of peripheral neuropathy in adult diabetics is approximately 28%. The aim of this study is to establish relationship between the duration of diabetes and severity of neuropathy in patients with peripheral neuropathic DFU. Methods: This is a prospective observational study, including 30 patients, who underwent history, examination and Toronto clinical scoring system (TCSS) was used for diagnosing severity of diabetic peripheral neuropathy (mild, moderate, severe) from a period of October 2015 to June 2017. Results: In this study, we observed that the mean age of the diabetic foot patients was 53.50±12.03 years ranging from 30 to 75 years. Male-to-female ratio was 1.5:1. The mean duration of diabetes was 6.38±4.57 years. The patients with mild neuropathy had a mean duration of diabetes of 4.77±2.61 years, while, those with moderate and severe neuropathy had mean duration of 7.17±1.48years and 8.48±4.59 years, respectively. Conclusions: The study concluded that there is a significant association between duration of diabetes and severity of neuropathy, i.e., patients with longer duration of diabetes had severe peripheral neuropathy

Hmrbase: a database of hormones and their receptors

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hormones are signaling molecules that play vital roles in various life processes, like growth and differentiation, physiology, and reproduction. These molecules are mostly secreted by endocrine glands, and transported to target organs through the bloodstream. Deficient, or excessive, levels of hormones are associated with several diseases such as cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes etc. Thus, it is important to collect and compile information about hormones and their receptors.</p> <p>Description</p> <p>This manuscript describes a database called Hmrbase which has been developed for managing information about hormones and their receptors. It is a highly curated database for which information has been collected from the literature and the public databases. The current version of Hmrbase contains comprehensive information about ~2000 hormones, e.g., about their function, source organism, receptors, mature sequences, structures etc. Hmrbase also contains information about ~3000 hormone receptors, in terms of amino acid sequences, subcellular localizations, ligands, and post-translational modifications etc. One of the major features of this database is that it provides data about ~4100 hormone-receptor pairs. A number of online tools have been integrated into the database, to provide the facilities like keyword search, structure-based search, mapping of a given peptide(s) on the hormone/receptor sequence, sequence similarity search. This database also provides a number of external links to other resources/databases in order to help in the retrieving of further related information.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Owing to the high impact of endocrine research in the biomedical sciences, the Hmrbase could become a leading data portal for researchers. The salient features of Hmrbase are hormone-receptor pair-related information, mapping of peptide stretches on the protein sequences of hormones and receptors, Pfam domain annotations, categorical browsing options, online data submission, DrugPedia linkage etc. Hmrbase is available online for public from <url>http://crdd.osdd.net/raghava/hmrbase/</url>.</p

The spectrum of mild cognitive impairment in dyslipidemic non-elderly type 1 diabetics

Background: Diabetics often have reduced performance in numerous domains of cognitive function, a process termed as Diabetic encephalopathy. The exact pathophysiology of cognitive dysfunction in diabetes is not completely understood, but it is likely that hyperglycaemia, vascular disease, hypoglycemia, and insulin resistance play significant roles. Although cognitive dysfunction is quite common in elderly, however, its occurrence in non-elderly diabetics is not much investigated. Aim of the study was to identify the correlation among various components of lipid profile with mild cognitive impairment in non-elderly type 1 diabetics.Methods: 98 type 1 diabetics were enrolled justifying relevant inclusion &exclusion criteria. Anthropometric indices, biochemical and clinical parameters were measured. MoCA test was employed for the assessment of cognitive dysfunction. Receiver operating characteristic, partial correlation, and logistic regression analyzes were employed for evaluation.Results: 71.42% of enrolled diabetics had some degree of cognitive dysfunction. Duration of the disease had a significant impact on cognitive functioning (p=0.032).Gender, residential area as well as the age of onset of diabetes appeared to have an insignificant impact on cognitive functioning (p>0.05). Diabetics with poor glycemic control were more prone to develop MCI (p<0.001).On comparison of various component of MoCA test; it was seen that most significant parameter that was affected was attention (p<0.001), followed by delayed recall /memory, naming and abstraction (p<0.05).Conclusions: The results of our study suggest that dyslipidemia chiefly raised total cholesterol, triglycerides and LDL is quite common in non-elderly type 1 diabetics and are associated with poorer cognitive function. Cognitive dysfunction should be listed as one of the many complications of diabetes, along with retinopathy, neuropathy, nephropathy, and cardiovascular disease in the future

Effect of Syzygium cumini (jamun) seed powder on dyslipidemia: a double blind randomized control trial

Background: Diabetes is a metabolic syndrome characterized by disturbance in carbohydrate, fat and protein metabolism. Dyslipidemia, commonly associated in diabetes, is major risk factor for macrovascular complications leading to CAD, major contributor to mortality associated with diabetes. Managing DM without side effects is challenge that attracts researchers toward plant based new products. Many studies have found anti-diabetic and anti-hyperlipidemic properties of seeds of Syzygium cumini, attributed to saponins, glycosides and flavonoids. So it should be further explored for its benefits.  The aim was to study the effect of jamun seed powder on dyslipidemia in type 2 DM. Methods: Patients with type 2 DM were randomly divided in two groups- group A was supplemented with 10 gms/day jamun seed powder and group B was given placebo powder. Patients and investigators were blinded about treatment allocated. Lipid profile was noted at baseline and 30th, 60th and 90th day. All the data was collected and analyzed at the end of study.Results: Improvement in dyslipidemia was seen after 60 days of supplementation with S. cumini seed powder. Statistically significant decrease in cholesterol levels by 10.55% and 15.79% in mean triglyceride levels by 8.28% and 13.66%, LDL-c levels by 10.29% and 14.50% was noticed at 60th and 90th day, respectively, reduction in VLDL-c levels by 9.38%, 12.90% and 20.69% was noted at 30th, 60th and 90th day. HDL-c increased significantly by 11.11% and 13.89% in males and 10.81% and 16.21% in females after 60 and 90 days of supplementation with S. cumini seed powder.Conclusions: A significant overall effect of S. cumini supplementation was found in improvement of lipid profile in type 2 diabetes subjects. However, above results are seen in small number subjects, further multicenter studies with larger sample size, supplementation dose and time should be planned and its effects in detail should be explored.

EBBINNOT: A Hardware Efficient Hybrid Event-Frame Tracker for Stationary Dynamic Vision Sensors

As an alternative sensing paradigm, dynamic vision sensors (DVS) have been recently explored to tackle scenarios where conventional sensors result in high data rate and processing time. This paper presents a hybrid event-frame approach for detecting and tracking objects recorded by a stationary neuromorphic sensor, thereby exploiting the sparse DVS output in a low-power setting for traffic monitoring. Specifically, we propose a hardware efficient processing pipeline that optimizes memory and computational needs that enable long-term battery powered usage for IoT applications. To exploit the background removal property of a static DVS, we propose an event-based binary image creation that signals presence or absence of events in a frame duration. This reduces memory requirement and enables usage of simple algorithms like median filtering and connected component labeling for denoise and region proposal respectively. To overcome the fragmentation issue, a YOLO inspired neural network based detector and classifier to merge fragmented region proposals has been proposed. Finally, a new overlap based tracker was implemented, exploiting overlap between detections and tracks is proposed with heuristics to overcome occlusion. The proposed pipeline is evaluated with more than 5 hours of traffic recording spanning three different locations on two different neuromorphic sensors (DVS and CeleX) and demonstrate similar performance. Compared to existing event-based feature trackers, our method provides similar accuracy while needing approx 6 times less computes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a stationary DVS based traffic monitoring solution is extensively compared to simultaneously recorded RGB frame-based methods while showing tremendous promise by outperforming state-of-the-art deep learning solutions.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure

A crowdsourced analysis to identify ab initio molecular signatures predictive of susceptibility to viral infection

The response to respiratory viruses varies substantially between individuals, and there are currently no known molecular predictors from the early stages of infection. Here we conduct a community-based analysis to determine whether pre- or early post-exposure molecular factors could predict physiologic responses to viral exposure. Using peripheral blood gene expression profiles collected from healthy subjects prior to exposure to one of four respiratory viruses (H1N1, H3N2, Rhinovirus, and RSV), as well as up to 24 h following exposure, we find that it is possible to construct models predictive of symptomatic response using profiles even prior to viral exposure. Analysis of predictive gene features reveal little overlap among models; however, in aggregate, these genes are enriched for common pathways. Heme metabolism, the most significantly enriched pathway, is associated with a higher risk of developing symptoms following viral exposure. This study demonstrates that pre-exposure molecular predictors can be identified and improves our understanding of the mechanisms of response to respiratory viruses

A mini review on solubility enhancement technique – Solid dispersion

Many new drug substances have low aqueous solubility which can cause poor bioavailability after oral administration. Solid dispersions are one of the most promising strategies to improve the oral bioavailability of poorly water soluble drugs. By reducing drug particle size to the absolute minimum, and hence improving drug wettability, bioavailability may be significantly improved. Generally, SDs can be defined as a dispersion of active ingredients in molecular, amorphous and/or microcrystalline forms into an inert carrier. The application of solid dispersions is a useful method to increase the dissolution rate of drugs. This article is indented to combine literature on solid dispersion technology for solubility enhancement with special emphasis on mechanism responsible for the same by solid dispersion, various preparation methods and evaluation parameters

Formulation and evaluation of controlled porosity osmotic pump-based tablet of tramadol hydrochloride

Introduction: Extended-release formulation of tramadol hydrochloride based on osmotic technology was developed and evaluated. The effect of different formulation variables, namely level of swellable polymer in the core and membrane weight gain, was studied. Drug release was found to be affected by the level of swellable polymer in the core formulation. Tramadol release was inversely proportional to the level of swellable polymer and membrane weight. Drug release from the developed formulations was independent of pH and agitation intensity. Results: The manufacturing procedure was found to be reproducible, and formulations were stable after 3 months of accelerated stability studies

Efficacy of neuronavigation guided biopsy in deep seated brain lesions

Localisation of brain lesions and prevention of damage to vital structures are important goals in the operation of brain pathologies, which can be aimed after the development of many techniques (e.g. angiography, MRI, sonography, frame base stereotaxy). In spite of current developments in radiological imaging techniques, accurate histological diagnosis is required to determine the appropriate treatment methods for intracranial lesions. The study was conducted in the Department of Neurosurgery, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences, over a period of 18 months. Descriptive statistics (frequencies and percentages) were used to interpret the collected data. After editing, data was entered into SPSS free versions for statistical studies. The results from various sites of the biopsy were compared based on sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values. In this study, 4 patients were found to be below 20 years, 7 patients in the 20 – 40 years age group, 10 patients in the age group of 40 to 60 years and 4 patients were above sixty years. 22 (88%) patients were found to have positive yield when the biopsy was taken from the core area while 3 (12%) patients were not having any positive results from the biopsy. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of various sites of the biopsy were calculated Sensitivity of the periphery came out to be 68.2 % while specificity was 67.7%. The positive predictive value of the periphery was found to be 93.8 % while the negative predictive value was 22.2%. The sensitivity of the contrast-enhanced area came out to be 72.7 %, with specificity being 67.7%. The positive predictive value of periphery in such cases was found to be 94.1 % and the negative predictive value was 25%. The most common system-related complication was the inability to show choline peak properly, which was present in 7 patients. Hence, it can be concluded safely that the use of neuronavigation is beginning to have a vital role in a variety of intracranial procedures with precise localisation of both intracranial as well as spinal lesions and prevention of damage to vital structures intraoperatively thereby significantly reducing procedure-related morbidity and mortality