Effect of amlodipine on blood glucose level in euglycemic and streptozotocin induced diabetic Albino rats and its pharmacodynamic interaction with glibenclamide

Background: Diabetes is one of the largest global health emergencies of the 21st century and its co-existence with hypertension is frequent. These conditions often require polypharmacy with possible risk of drug interaction. This study is conducted to investigate the effect of amlodipine on blood glucose level in euglycemic and diabetic rats and its pharmacodynamic interaction with glibenclamide.Methods: Rats were divided into six groups of 6 rats in each group. Group 1 and 3 were non-diabetic given 1% Gum acacia and amlodipine respectively. Group 2, 4, 5 and 6 were made diabetic by using nicotinamide and streptozotocin injection intra peritoneally and given 1% Gum acacia, glibenclamide, amlodipine and amlodipine + glibenclamide respectively for the period of 28 days. Fasting Blood Glucose (FBG) levels were measured before induction of diabetes, 72 hrs after the induction, on day 0, 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th day.Results: Amlodipine produced no significant effect on FBG level in non-diabetic rats but in diabetic rats statistically significant hyperglycemia were observed on day 21st and 28th of study with the ‘p’ value (<0.05). Glibenclamide treated rats shows better controlled FBG level throughout study than concomitant administration of glibenclamide with amlodipine. Significant rise in blood FBG level with ‘P’ value (<0.05) were observed in amlodipine + glibenclamide treated group on 21st and 28th day of study.Conclusions: This study suggest amlodipine produce no effect on the FBG level of normal rats but causes significant hyperglycemia in diabetic rats. Hypoglycemic effect of glibenclamide gets blunted when co-administered with amlodipine

Fluconazole induced multifocal bullous eruptions: a case report

The term bullous drug eruption refers to adverse drug reactions that result in fluid filled blisters. Blistering can be due to various medications. A 22 year old primigravida developed bullous lesions on upper limbs, lower legs and face after taking six doses of lumether forte (artemether 80 mg + lumefantrine 480 mg themis medicare ltd) and difenac plus (diclofenac 50 mg + paracetamol 500 mg intermed), and single dose of flucan (fluconazole 150 mg Bombay tablet Mfg co) and mebex (mebendazole 100 mg Cipla Limited). She had a previous history of localized bullous eruption 2 years back after taking a single dose of forcan (fluconazole 150 mg Cipla Limited) for vaginal candidiasis. There are reported cases of bullous eruptions due to diclofenac, mebendazole and paracetamol. However in our case past history of localized bullous eruptions after taking fluconazole, made it superior to other offenders to be suspected as the “probable” culprit. Naranjo causality score was (…+5…)

Study of prescription pattern in a tertiary care hospital in Chhattisgarh, India: an observational study

Background: Prescription audit is one of the methods to assess the drug utilization pattern and rational use of drugs. In our country the value of drugs prescribed is in crores but a significant proportion of drugs is prescribed irrationally. This is probably due to defect in prescription pattern, lack of knowledge in health care personnel, pressure from drug manufacturing companies and many more. To promote rational use of drugs, standard policies must be set and this can be achieved only after auditing current prescription practices.Methods: A prospective study was carried out in Medical college hospital, Raigarh in the month of January 2018. Around 1000 prescriptions were collected randomly from pharmacy and the prescriptions were analysed on various parameters like patient’s demography, parts of a prescription, information related to doctor and drugs.Results: In this study, we found that percentage of generic drugs were 58.02% and 70.43% drugs were from essential drug list. Only 13.19% FDCs were used. 34 prescriptions were illegible and capital letters were used only in 26 prescriptions. We also found deficiency in parts of a prescription like inscription part (13.3%), subscription part (26.9%) and in doctor’s identity (33.2%). The majority of drugs were antimicrobials (23.81%) followed by anti-inflammatory and analgesics (21.1%).Conclusions: This study shows that the use of generic drugs and essential drugs is on the lower side as compared to standard guidelines. The prescription pattern was defective in many prescriptions. This study shows incompleteness of prescriptions and proper steps are needed to guide the physicians to promote rational use of drugs

A comparative study of thiamine with metformin on fasting blood glucose of diabetic albino rats

Background: Thiamine is a member of the vitamin B family. Thiamine is necessary for normal insulin synthesis and secretion. In diabetes thiamine and its derivative benfotiamine showed promising results in prevention of microvascular complications. Some experimental and clinical studies have shown the antihyperglycaemic effect of thiamine. This study compared the antihyperglycaemic effect of thiamine with metformin in streptozotocin-nicotinamide induced diabetic albino rats.Methods: 24 albino rats were taken and divided into four groups of six rats in each group. The groups were normal control, diabetic control, diabetic rats treated with thiamine, diabetic rats treated with metformin. Diabetes was induced in three groups by intraperitoneal injection of Streptozotocin in the dose of 60 mg/kg. To have an ideal type 2 diabetes model nicotinamide was administered 120 mg/ kg intraperitoneally fifteen minutes before streptozotocin administration. After successful induction of diabetes thiamine and metformin were given to the respective group for a period of 6 weeks. Fasting blood glucose was estimated on day 0, 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 of treatment.Results: In this study both thiamine and metformin showed significant antihyperglycaemic effect (p<0.05). Further studies are needed to evaluate and compare the antihyperglycaemic effect of thiamine with other established anti diabetic drugs.Conclusions: From this study we concluded that individually both thiamine and metformin were effective in controlling hyperglycaemia but metformin was better in achieving normal mean FBS. Further studies are required to validate the antihyperglycaemic effect of thiamine. Study taking different doses of thiamine or with increasing the duration of study period can elaborate the role of thiamine in achieving proper glycemic control

A prospective observational study of prescription pattern in a tertiary care teaching hospital of Jharkhand

Background: Prescription error and irrational prescribing are the avoidable problems imposed on health care delivery system from prescriber side which must be addressed. Periodic prescription audit helps to curtail the error and irrational prescribing.Methods: A prospective observational study was conducted on patients visiting various Outpatient Department of RIMS, Ranchi, Jharkhand on all working days at 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM from 1 August 2018 to 31 July 2019. Various aspects of collected prescriptions were analyzed by using World Health Organization (WHO) prescribing indicators.Results: In this study, out of 700 prescriptions collected, 76 were excluded. Out of total 624 patients analyzed, 382 (61.28%) were male and 242 (38.72%) were female. 48 (7.69%) patients belonged to ≤18, 464 (74.36%) to 19-64 and 112 (17.95%) to ≥65 years of age group. Tablet (71%) was the most common dosage form. None of prescriptions were having registration number of the doctor. 242 (38.78%) prescriptions did not have a diagnosis duly written. The total no. of drugs prescribed in 624 prescriptions was 2176. Only 32 (5.13%) prescriptions were found to have medicines prescribed in block letters. Antibiotics (29%) were the most common class of drugs prescribed. Average number of drugs per prescription was 3.47. Only 48 (2.20%) drugs were prescribed by their generic name while total of injectables prescribed were 102 (4.68%). Total number of drugs from NLEM was 848 (38.97%). 196 (9.00%) drugs were fixed-dose combination.Conclusions: In our study, we found deficiencies in various parts of prescriptions. Prescribing pattern was not in accordance with WHO recommendation for prescribing practice

Monoclonal Antibodies Recognizing the Non-Tandem Repeat Regions of the Human Mucin MUC4 in Pancreatic Cancer

The MUC4 mucin is a high molecular weight, membrane-bound, and highly glycosylated protein. It is a multi-domain protein that is putatively cleaved into a large mucin-like subunit (MUC4α) and a C-terminal growth-factor like subunit (MUC4β). MUC4 plays critical roles in physiological and pathological conditions and is aberrantly overexpressed in several cancers, including those of the pancreas, cervix, breast and lung. It is also a potential biomarker for the diagnosis, prognosis and progression of several malignancies. Further, MUC4 plays diverse functional roles in cancer initiation and progression as evident from its involvement in oncogenic transformation, proliferation, inhibition of apoptosis, motility and invasion, and resistance to chemotherapy in human cancer cells. We have previously generated a monoclonal antibody 8G7, which is directed against the TR region of MUC4, and has been extensively used to study the expression of MUC4 in several malignancies. Here, we describe the generation of anti-MUC4 antibodies directed against the non-TR regions of MUC4. Recombinant glutathione-S-transferase (GST)-fused MUC4α fragments, both upstream (MUC4α-N-Ter) and downstream (MUC4α-C-Ter) of the TR domain, were used as immunogens to immunize BALB/c mice. Following cell fusion, hybridomas were screened using the aforementioned recombinant proteins ad lysates from human pancreatic cell lines. Three anti MUC4α-N-Ter and one anti-MUC4α-C-Ter antibodies were characterized by several inmmunoassays including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), immunoblotting, immunofluorescene, flow cytometry and immunoprecipitation using MUC4 expressing human pancreatic cancer cell lines. The antibodies also reacted with the MUC4 in human pancreatic tumor sections in immunohistochemical analysis. The new domain-specific anti-MUC4 antibodies will serve as important reagents to study the structure-function relationship of MUC4 domains and for the development of MUC4-based diagnostics and therapeutics

Reservoir Characterization of the Snorre field: A pseudo wells based inversion approach

Master's thesis in Petroleum Geosciences EngineeringComplex reservoirs make hydrocarbon exploration challenging, and therefore improvement of methods for discovering and producing hydrocarbons is desired. Consequently, various seismic inversion algorithms have been developed to provide better characterization of the reservoir. One Dimensional Stochastic Inversion (ODiSI) is one such method that has been applied in the study which inverts seismic data by matching to large number of pseudo wells. Inversion studies have been applied to a producing sandstone field, with the objective to improve the reservoir characterization and acquire accurate estimations of facies and reservoir properties together with the associated uncertainities. The study area is the Snorre field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea. The reservoir has complex geology due to presence of several large fault blocks and is grouped into various zones containing sandstones of the Statfjord and Lunde Formations. The reservoir is highly heterogeneous with varying reservoir quality (i.e. net to gross, porosity). The inversion study includes building pseudo wells which essentially encompasses an acceptable sampling of the area of interest. Lithofacies columns are populated using geologically realistic bed-thickness distributions. Each pseudowell is built with a full suite of well log curves generated from a rock physics model. The rock physics model/trend depends on porosity depth trends, moduli relationships and velocity trends from calibration well. In addition, seismic data are color inverted to be accepted as input for the inversion process. Synthetics based on Extended Elastic Impedance are used in the matching process. Finally, inversion is carried out resulting estimates of facies probabilities and reservoir properties. Only one well containing S-sonic functions as the calibration well. Based on rock physics analysis, it is observed that the reservoir and non-reservoir facies is distinguishable in impedance domain. Different combinations of color inverted chi angle stacks such as near-mid and mid-far were used as an input. The blind well predictions were considerably accurate. However, predictions in mid-far combination came out to be more consistent in comparison to that of near-mid. In addition, the study illustrates the quality of algorithm which generates laterally stable results

Pattern transition from dense branching morphology to fractal for copper and β′ brass electrodeposition in thin gap geometry

Copper and β′ brass are electrodeposited in thin gap geometry and a clear transition from dense branching to fractal like pattern is observed with the variation of electric potential and concentration. The transition electric potential is 6V – 5V for copper and 25V for β′ brass. The explanation of the pattern transition is done first using the Laplacian growth as in the Di-electric Breakdown Model (DBM) and then on the basis of ion dynamics in terms of viscosity, ionic mobility, drift and thermal velocity. The fractal growth is more likely at higher electric potential as the electric field dominates and more likely to be dense branched at lower electric field when thermal motion dominates. This work inspires for further studies on modification of our model for the two ions electrodeposition and their compositional variation with different deposition parameters

Study of prescription pattern in a tertiary care hospital in Chhattisgarh, India: an observational study

Background: Prescription audit is one of the methods to assess the drug utilization pattern and rational use of drugs. In our country the value of drugs prescribed is in crores but a significant proportion of drugs is prescribed irrationally. This is probably due to defect in prescription pattern, lack of knowledge in health care personnel, pressure from drug manufacturing companies and many more. To promote rational use of drugs, standard policies must be set and this can be achieved only after auditing current prescription practices.Methods: A prospective study was carried out in Medical college hospital, Raigarh in the month of January 2018. Around 1000 prescriptions were collected randomly from pharmacy and the prescriptions were analysed on various parameters like patient’s demography, parts of a prescription, information related to doctor and drugs.Results: In this study, we found that percentage of generic drugs were 58.02% and 70.43% drugs were from essential drug list. Only 13.19% FDCs were used. 34 prescriptions were illegible and capital letters were used only in 26 prescriptions. We also found deficiency in parts of a prescription like inscription part (13.3%), subscription part (26.9%) and in doctor’s identity (33.2%). The majority of drugs were antimicrobials (23.81%) followed by anti-inflammatory and analgesics (21.1%).Conclusions: This study shows that the use of generic drugs and essential drugs is on the lower side as compared to standard guidelines. The prescription pattern was defective in many prescriptions. This study shows incompleteness of prescriptions and proper steps are needed to guide the physicians to promote rational use of drugs

Study on Snake Venom Protein-Antibody Interaction by Surface Plasmon Resonance Spectroscopy

Abstract The development of a portable and inexpensive surface plasmon resonance (SPR) measurement device with the integrated biosensor for the detection of snake venom protein is presented in this paper. For the construction of the sensing element, amine coupling chemistry is used to bio-functionalize silver coated glass slide with antibodies like immunoglobulin (IgG). The immobilization of the antibody is confirmed by spectroscopic measurements like ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis) and Fourier-transforms infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The device is calibrated with the standard solution of sodium chloride and ethanol before testing venom protein samples. To investigate the bio-molecular interactions, crude venom of Indian cobra (concentration range: 0.1 mg/ml‒1.0 mg/ml) in the phosphate buffer solution (PBS) are exposed to the biosensor. The experimentally measured data indicate the shift in the plasmon resonance angle from its initial value (52°) to 54° for 0.1 mg/ml and 60° for 1.0 mg/ml protein solution