Occurrence of Drug Resistant Candida Species in the Sputum of TB Clinic Attendees in and Around Chidambaram, Tamilnadu, India

ABSTRACT: Three years constant study was performed in order to screen the drug resistant Candida presence in the sputum of TB clinic attendees in and around Chidambaram, Tamilnadu, India. Totally 3100 sputum specimens were screened by using the routine mycological procedures. We could able to obtain 20.5% of Candida strains from 3100 TB clinic attendees and Candida albicans, Candida tropicalis, Candida dubliniensis and Candida krusei was identified. Overall based on our study report we could able to report 48%, 25% and 22% antifungal resistance by Candida strains towards the antifungal drugs Nystatin, Azole drugs and Amphotericin B. From this we can conclude and suggest that the occurrence of drug resistant Candida strains in the sputum/ respiratory tract of the patients with respiratory tract infections is not uncommon. Therefore the periodical survey of the drug resistant Candida strains is essential not only to for the development of new antifungal drugs and in the appropriate antifungal drug selection for the earliest treatment for the patient care, but also equally important for the prevention of these drug resistant Candida transmitted from the patients to the public. Key words: Candida, Drug resistance ---Department of Medical Microbiology, Rajah Muthiah Medical College & Hospital, Annamalai University, Chidambaram, Tamilnadu, India---Please Cite This Article As:K.K. Prasobh and V. Udhaya. 2010. Occurrence of Drug Resistant Candida Species in the Sputum of TB Clinic Attendees in and Around Chidambaram, Tamilnadu, India. J. Exp. Sci. 1(4):43-47.Â

Cardiovascular Dementia - A Different Perspective

The number of dementia patients has been growing in recent years and dementia represents a significant threat to aging people all over the world. Recent research has shown that the number of people affected by Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia is growing at an epidemic pace. The rapidly increasing financial and personal costs will affect the world's economies, health care systems, and many families. Researchers are now exploring a possible connection among AD, vascular dementia (VD), diabetes mellitus (type 2, T2DM) and cardiovascular diseases (CD). This correlation may be due to a strong association of cardiovascular risk factors with AD and VD, suggesting that these diseases share some biologic pathways. Since heart failure is associated with an increased risk of AD and VD, keeping the heart healthy may prove to keep the brain healthy as well. The risk for dementia is especially high when diabetes mellitus is comorbid with severe systolic hypertension or heart disease. In addition, the degree of coronary artery disease (CAD) is independently associated with cardinal neuropathological lesions of AD. Thus, the contribution of T2DM and CD to AD and VD implies that cardiovascular therapies may prove useful in preventing AD and dementia

A STUDY ON USAGE OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) FORMAT TO ENHANCING THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN RAMANATHAPURAM EDUCATIONAL DISTRICT

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely available, openly allowed text, media, and other digital resources that are useful for instruction. The Open Educational Resources (OER) formats are used for this study with the help of the internet. The investigator as a facilitator for this study. The learning is through open educational resources in three months. The quarterly marks were used for pretest and half-yearly marks were used for the post-test score. The experimental method and single group design were employed in the study. 40 students were taken for this study. The simple random sampling has used the study. The findings were there is no significant difference between the groups. The academic performance is may increase through Open Educational Resource (OER) format learning.

Laboratory Profile of Adult Hemoglobinopathies Picked Up During Routine Health Check in a Tertiary Care Hospital from South India

Background and aim: Hemoglobin (Hb) variants can clinically range from being completely asymptomatic to frequent requirement of transfusions. Some individuals may become aware of a variant only when a complete blood count (CBC), hemoglobin analysis or genetic testing is done for a different reason. These individuals are typically heterozygous for an autosomal recessive variant. A study was conducted to find out the different types of hemoglobinopathies in adults presenting to a tertiary care hospital for routine health check and its geographic distribution. Objective: 1) To find out the severity of anemia associated with different hemoglobinopathies. 2) To find the relevance of glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) in the presence of various hemoglobinopathies. Methods: A retrospective cross-sectional observational study was done in 111 consecutive patients who were found to have hemoglobinopathies during routine health checks in a tertiary care hospital in South India from 2013 to 2021. Results: One hundred eleven patients were found to have abnormality in Hb electrophoresis and there was a male predominance (69 patients, 62.2%). Majority of patients with beta-thalassemia (28 patients, 63.6%) were from West Bengal. Both HbE trait (17 patients, 65.4%) and homozygous HbE (23 patients, 62.2%) were from Assam. There was statistically significant distribution (p value 0.0001). HbA1c detected Hb variant in those with HbE disease. Conclusion: Hemoglobinopathies constitute a huge hereditary burden and a serious healthcare concern in India. Hence, it is the need of the hour to pick up such asymptomatic cases and provide appropriate premarital and prenatal counseling. Also, it is essential to devise strategies other than routine HbA1c testing to guide blood sugar control

Resistotyping of Candida albicans isolated from sputum samples of patients attending TB clinics in and around Chidambaram

            Resistotyping was first developed for strain delineation, pathogenesis, or epidemiological studies. This depends on the ability of the strains to grow on agar plates containing various dilutions of toxic chemicals. There are many resistotyping methods and modified techniques were used by the authors to carry out the typing of clinical isolates of Candida. We performed resistotyping of 350 Candida albicans (isolated from the sputum of TB clinic attendees) with modified technique and could able to obtained four (04) different resistotypes among –B--F- resistotypes was found to be the predominant Candida albicans resistotypes we recorded. From our one year study period from June 2007 to May 2008, we concluded that the Candida albicans resistotypes –B--F- was the most commonly found resistotype in the specified areas of Cudallore district of Tamilnadu, India

Exploration of contrastive learning strategies toward more robust stance detection systems

Stance Detection, in general, is the task of identifying the author’s position on controversial topics. In Natural Language Processing, Stance Detection extracts the author’s attitude from the text written toward an issue to determine whether the author supports the issue or is against the issue. The studies analyzing public opinion on social media, especially in relation to political and social concerns, heavily rely on Stance Detection. The linguistics of social media texts and articles are often unstructured. Hence, the Stance Detection systems needed to be robust when identifying the position or stance of an author on a topic. This thesis seeks to contribute to the ongoing research on Stance Detection. This research proposes a Contrastive Learning approach to achieve the goal of learning sentence representations leading to more robust Stance Detection systems. Further, this thesis explores the possibility of extending the proposed methodology to detect stances from unlabeled or unannotated data. The stance of an author towards a topic can be implicit (through reasoning) or explicit; The proposed method learns the sentence representations in a contrastive fashion to learn the sentence-level meaning. The Contrastive Learning of sentence representations results in bringing similar examples in the Sentence Representation space belonging to the same stance close to each other, whereas the dissimilar examples are far apart. The proposed method also accommodates the token-level meaning by combining the Masked Language Modeling objective (similar to BERT pretraining) with the Contrastive Learning objective. [...

Formulation and Characterization of Gelatin Loaded Rosuvastatin Nanoparticles by Two Step Desolvation Method.

Recently, several technical advancements have resulted in the development of new techniques for drug delivery. These techniques are capable of controlling the rate of drug delivery, sustaining the duration of therapeutic activity and or targeting the delivery of drug to a tissue. These are referred to as novel drug delivery systems. And they have revolutionized the method of medication, provides a number of therapeutic benefits. The in-vitro released of Rosuvastatin was evaluated in phosphate buffer saline (pH6.8) up to 16hrs. The formulation F1 was released the drug 93.38% up to16 hours. and chosen the best among the formulations were prepared. Zeta potential was determined for the formulation F1 and it was found to be +ve value of 1.57mv.The in-vitro drug released data was applied to various kinetic models like zero order kinetics, Higuchi plot, first order kinetics, and Peppas plot by predict the drug release kinetics mechanism. The formulation F1 was best fitted the zero order kinetics. In short term stability studies the formulation F1 was showed that there was no remarkable changes in the % drug loading efficiency. Based on the % drug loading efficiency, zeta potential, in-vitro drug release profile, in-vitro drug release kinetics and stability studies the formulation F1 was found to be best one among the formulations (F1 to F8) were prepared. These nanoparticles can be promising agents for rational drug delivery in lipidemic condition

Clinical study on Carcinoma Esophagus in Government Rajaji Hospital, Madurai

NEED FOR STUDY: Benign tumors of the esophagus are rare and are usually more bother- some than harmful. The most common type of benign tumor is a leiomyoma which occurs in people between 30 and 60 years of age. Other tumors consist of fibrovascular polyps and Schwannomas. Benign tumors of esophagus is very rare comprising of 0.5 to 0.8% of esophageal tumors. Carcinoma of esophagus is the ninth most common cancer in the world. Numerous studies have demonstrated that in developing countries cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption are the most important predisposing factor for esophagus carcinoma. Barrett’s esophagus is a consequence of chronic gastro esophageal reflex disorder which is the most important risk factor for adenocarcinoma of esophagus. Several esophageal motility disorders have been implicated in the development of esophageal carcinoma. Carcinogenic effects of tobacco and alcohol is far more pronounced for squamous cell carcinoma than for adenocarcinoma. Recent epidemiological studies have found that obesity (measured as body mass index) is another strong risk factor for esophageal carcinoma squamous cell carcinoma seen in association with smoking and alcohol. In India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka the high incidence of esophageal carcinoma has been linked with chewing of tobacco with or without betal nut, betal nut, betal leaf and salked lime. In certain regions the world exceedingly high rates esophageal carcinoma have been attributed to other environmental and dietary / nutritional factors. These include ingestion of hot foods and beverages, nitrate containing preserved food, deficiencies in essential nutrients (carotene, riboflavin, vitamin C and E) and minerals (zinc and selenium) as well as infrequent consumption of fruits and vegetables. • Esophageal carcinoma has an insidious onset with poor prognosis. • As more advanced facilities for investigation are now available it is possible for early diagnosis and management of esophageal carcinoma. OBJECTIVE: This study evaluated incidence, age/sex distribution, various etiological factors, clinic-pathological characteristics & outcome of surgery inmalignant tumours of esophagus. METHODS: A prospective study was conducted for malignant esophageal tumours IN Department of General Surgery, Government Rajaji Hospital, Madurai. RESULTS: A total of 30 patients were operated with age group (40-87yrs) with 20 males and 10 females (ratio 2:1) squamous cell ca (70%), Adenocarcinoma (30%) carcinoma of Lower third esophagus is more common. (>70%) of patients belonged to blood group A (46.6%) or O (26.6%). Tobacco Smoking/chewing, alcohol consumption, chronic irritation and pre-existing esophageal conditions are strong risk factors. CONCLUSION: Tobacco, smoking/chewing and alcohol consumption and preexisting esophageal conditions are strong risk factors. Disease shows predominance to male, more common in 5th & 6th decade of life. Squamous cell carcinoma is more common than adenocarcinoma Different surgical approach has no effect on duration of hospital stay, mortality or survival