Establishing cheiloscopy as a tool for identification: an assessment on 500 subjects in central India

Objective: Human identification is a universal process of certification of death and for personal, social and legal reasons. Aim of this study is to check whether there are any peculiar / common lip patterns among males and females and to establish lip prints as a tool for identification. Background: The present study was conducted among 500 subjects, aged 1-70 years. Method: The lip-imprints were taken by researcher no. 1 on a simple bond paper after applying lip stick evenly. Analysis of different patterns was done by researcher no.2 to avoid bias. Results: 229 male out of 250 and 226 female out of 250 were positively identified. Type I, I’, II patterns were most commonly seen among female, while type III and IV lip patterns were most predominantly seen among males and type II lip pattern was present in both sexes. Conclusion: Lip prints are unique and do not change during the life of a person. So it can be taken as one of the person identification tool

Effectivity of in-house developed sandwich ELISA for antigen detection in resource constraint settings

Introduction: Around 26% of World’s Tuberculosis (TB) cases are in India. In resource constrained settings, it is difficult to use diagnostic tests like nucleic acid amplification technique and mycobacterial culture due to their complexity and expensiveness.Developing an assay using polyclonal antibody may help to solve this problem. On the basis of that we worked to detect tubercular antigen developing Sandwich ELISA from the serum of tuberculosis patients. Materials & Methods: For the study 50 cases, 50 disease controls, 30 healthy control subjects were taken. Commercially available reagents were used for the development of Sandwich ELISA. The data was statistically analyzed with the help of software SPSS version 16.0. Results: Our effectively developed test had 82% area under the ROC curve. 81% (n=35) patients of PTB cases with non-HIV infection detected by our Sandwich ELISA and 57% cases with the co-infection of HIV-TB. Developed test had 70.91% positive predictive value and 75.56% negative predictive value. Conclusion: We successfully developed Sandwich ELISA for tubercular antigen detection. To increase the sensitivity and specificity of the Sandwich ELISA, as per the WHO guidelines, further work is needed

Study of Impact of Lifestyle Modification on Diabetes and Prediabetes in an Urban Population

Diabetes mellitus has emerged as a prevalent noncommunicable disease worldwide. It ranks among the top causes of mortality in high-income countries and has reached epidemic proportions in newly developing nations.1 Continuous medical care and monitoring is required in Diabetes mellitus along with multi-factorial risk reduction strategies along associated with glycemic control. Due to population aging, growth, urbanization, a lack of physical exercise, and a high incidence of obesity, there are more persons with DM. Lifestyle factors include eating patterns, exercise routines, alcohol consumption, and smoking. An improvement in these parameters would lead to better adherence to hypoglycemic medications. An epidemiological study on diabetes and prediabetes in an urban area with reference to lifestyle modification. An interventional community-based study was conducted in an urban setup. Personal interviews using a semi-structured, pretested questionnaire were the main technique of data gathering. Detailed information has been taken on the demographic and socio-economic characteristics at both the individual and household levels. All responders provided their willingly given consent. Every second household was visited by systematic random sampling procedure to select 400 respondents. Finally, analysis was carried out on 346 respondents. All respondents were questioned using structured a pretested, questionnaire after taking informed consent. Significant difference was observed with positive family history of diabetes, obesity, physical activities in male, high calorie intake, stress, chewable tobacco and blood pressure level with diabetes and pre-diabetes. Compared to responders with normal level of blood glucose, pre diabetics and diabetics individual showed more positive family histories. Compared to responders with normal blood glucose levels, pre-diabetics and diabetics were more likely to be overweight. With regard to personal habits of the respondents, smoking was associated with more than 1-fold increase risk of obtaining serum glucose level >110 mg/dl as compared to non-smokers.The current research was an attempt to examine the effect of intervention with reference to life style modification. From the study, it is evident that overall awareness about diabetes has been found low and no awareness has been found about pre-diabetes. The present study also demonstrated that education is the fundamental tool to make the population aware of their health issues. Awareness about pre-diabetes and diabetes, which can make them beneficial for community and nation and so, they can play an innovative role for prevention of diabetes