EFFICACY OF UNANI FORMULATIONS IN CHRONIC ENDOCERVICITIS: A RANDOMIZED COMPARATIVE STUDY

Objective: To compare the efficacy of Unani formulation in chronic endocervicitis. Methods: A parallel, comparative randomized trial was conducted at Govt. Nizamia General Hospital, Hyderabad from 1998 to 2000 in 50 patients (25 in each group) with sign and symptoms of endocervicitis. The intervention was administered per oral and locally for 10 d from day 7 to day 16 of each menstrual cycle up to three consecutive months in both groups (A and B). Group A received 10 g powder of mako khusk, chobchini, and gul surkh with equal quantity of sugar orally, twice daily and locally douching with 100 ml of joshandae of barge neem (5g), and gule tesu (5g) was done per vaginum followed by insertion of humool (pessary) of loabe khatmi (5g), and safoof sadberg (3) mixed with roghan neem (10 ml). Group B received 7.5 g powder of ushba and kasni mixed with equal quantity of sugar orally, twice daily. Humool of loabe hulba (5g), and raswat (3g) with roghane gul was kept per vaginum. The outcome was inter-group comparison of effectiveness of Unani medicine by observing change in subjective and objective parameters of endocervicitis. Chi-square/Fisher Exact tests were carried out to observe the inter group comparison. Results: The demographic characteristics were statistically not significant (P>0.05) between the groups. No statistical difference was noted in the subjective and objective parameters of endocervicitis (P>0.05), showing that both groups were comparable. Conclusion: Group A and B were comparable in ameliorating sign and symptoms of endocervicitis because of anti-inflammatory, analgesic and anti-microbial effects. Further, randomized controlled trials are recommended

Antihyperglycemic and antinociceptive activity evaluation of ‘Khoyer’ prepared from boiling the wood of Acacia catechu in water

‘Khoyer’ is prepared by boiling the wood of Acacia catechu in water and then evaporating the resultant brew. The resultant hard material is powdered and chewed with betel leaves and lime with or without tobacco by a large number of the people of Bangladesh as an addictive psycho-stimulating and euphoria-inducing formulation. There are folk medicinal claims that khoyer helps in the relief of pain and is also useful to diabetic patients to maintain normal sugar levels. Thus far no scientific studies have evaluated the antihyperglycemic and antinociceptive effects of khoyer. The present study was carried out to evaluate the possible glucose tolerance efficacy of methanolic extracts of khoyer using glucose-induced hyperglycemic mice, and antinociceptive effects with acetic acid-induced gastric pain models in mice. In antihyperglycemic activity tests, the extract at different doses was administered one hour prior to glucose  administration and blood glucose level was measured after two hoursof glucose administration (p.o.) using glucose oxidase method. The statistical data indicated the significant oral hypoglycemic activity on glucose-loaded mice at all doses of the extracts tested. Maximum anti-hyperglycemic activity was shown at 400 mg extract per kg body weight, which was less than that of a standard drug, glibenclamide (10 mg/kg body weight). In antinociceptive activity tests, the extract also demonstrated a dose-dependent significant reduction in the number of writhing induced in mice through intraperitoneal administration of acetic acid. Maximum antinociceptive activity was observed at a dose of 400 mg extract per kg body weight, which was greater than that of a standard antinociceptive drug, aspirin, when administered at a dose of 400 mg per kg body weight. The results validate the folk medicinal use of the plant for reduction of blood sugar in diabetic patients, as well as the folk medicinal use for alleviation of pain.Key words: Acacia catechu, antihyperglycemic, antinociceptive, khoye

Симптоматические выражения с семантикой проявления радости в хинди и в русском языке

ВУЗЫВЫСШИЕ УЧЕБНЫЕ ЗАВЕДЕНИЯОБРАЗОВАНИЕ МЕДИЦИНСКОЕСТУДЕНТЫ МЕДИЦИНСКИХ УЧЕБНЫХ ЗАВЕДЕНИЙИНОСТРАННЫЕ СТУДЕНТЫРУССКИЙ ЯЗЫКСЕМАНТИКАСИМПТОМАТИЧЕСКИЕ ВЫРАЖЕНИЯХИНДИРАДОСТ

Substantial and sustained reduction in under-5 mortality, diarrhea, and pneumonia in Oshikhandass, Pakistan : Evidence from two longitudinal cohort studies 15 years apart

Funding Information: Study 1 was funded through the Applied Diarrheal Disease Research Program at Harvard Institute for International Development with a grant from USAID (Project 936–5952, Cooperative Agreement # DPE-5952-A-00-5073-00), and the Aga Khan Health Service, Northern Areas and Chitral, Pakistan. Study 2 was funded by the Pakistan US S&T Cooperative Agreement between the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC) (No.4–421/PAK-US/HEC/2010/955, grant to the Karakoram International University) and US National Academies of Science (Grant Number PGA-P211012 from NAS to the Fogarty International Center). The funding bodies had no role in the design of the study, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing of the manuscript. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Plant-mediated gene silencing restricts growth of the potato late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans

A host-induced gene-silencing strategy for controlling potato late blight is presented, a plant disease that conventionally requires regular application of fungicides at high rates.Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete that causes severe damage to potato, and is well known for its ability to evolve rapidly in order to overcome resistant potato varieties. An RNA silencing strategy was evaluated here to clarify if small interfering RNA homologous to selected genes in P. infestans could be targeted from the plant host to reduce the magnitude of the infection. As a proof-of-concept, a hairpin RNA (hp-RNA) construct using the GFP marker gene was designed and introduced in potato. At 72 hpi, a 55-fold reduction of the signal intensity of a corresponding GFP expressing P. infestans strain on leaf samples of transgenic plants, compared with wild-type potato, was detected. This suggests that an RNA interference construct in the potato host could be processed and target a transcript of the pathogen. Three genes important in the infection process of P. infestans, PiGPB1, PiCESA2, and PiPEC, together with PiGAPDH taking part in basic cell maintenance were subsequently tested using an analogous transgenic strategy. Out of these gene candidates, the hp-PiGPB1 targeting the G protein beta-subunit (PiGPB1) important for pathogenicity resulted in most restricted disease progress. Further, Illumina sequencing of inoculated transgenic potato leaves revealed sRNAs of 24/25 nt size homologous to the PiGPB1 gene in the transgenic plants indicating post-transcriptional silencing of the target gene. The work demonstrates that a host-induced gene-silencing approach is functional against P. infestans but is highly dependent on target gene for a successful outcome. This finding broadens the arsenal of control strategies to this important plant disease

Molecular characterization of hepatitis B virus in Bangladesh reveals a highly recombinant population

The natural history and treatment outcome of hepatitis B viruses (HBV) infection is largely dependent on genotype, subgenotype, and the presence or absence of virulence associated mutations. We have studied the prevalence of genotype and subgenotype as well as virulence and drug resistance associated mutations and prevalence of recombinant among HBV from Bangladesh. A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted among treatment naïve chronic HBV patients attending at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University, Dhaka, Bangladesh for HBV viral load assessment between June and August 2015.. Systematical selected 50% of HBV DNA positive patients (every second patient) were enrolled. Biochemical and serological markers for HBV infection and whole genome sequencing (WGS) was performed on virus positive sample. Genotype, subgenotype, virulence, nucleos(t)ide analogue (NA) resistance (NAr) mutations , and the prevalence of recombinant isolates were determined. Among 114 HBV DNA positive patients, 57 were enrolled in the study and 53 HBV WGS were generated for downstream analysis. Overall, 38% (22/57) and 62% (35/57) of patients had acute and chronic HBV infections, respectively. The prevalence of genotypes A, C, and D was 18.9% (10/53), 45.3% (24/53), and 35.8% (19/53), respectively. Among genotype A, C and D isolates subgenotype A1 (90%; 9/10), C1 (87.5%; 21/24) and D2 (78.9%; 15/19) predominates. The acute infection, virulence associated mutations, and viral load was higher in the genotype D isolates. Evidence of recombination was identified in 22.6% (12/53) of the HBV isolates including 20.0% (2/10), and 16.7% (4/24) and 31.6% (6/19) of genotype A, C and D isolates, respectively. The prevalence of recombination was higher in chronic HVB patients (32.2%; 10/31 versus 9.1%; 2/22); p<0.05. NAr mutations were identified in 47.2% (25/53) of the isolates including 33.9% novel mutations (18/53). HBV genotype C and D predominated in this population in Bangladesh; a comparatively high prevalence of recombinant HBV are circulating in this setting