Mullerian duct anomalies presenting with primary amenorrhoea

Background: Primary amenorrhoea is defined as the absence of menstruation by 14 years of age when there is no visible development of secondary sexual characteristics or by 16 years of age in the presence of normal secondary sexual characteristics. Primary Amenorrhoea occurs if there is a blockage of the outflow tract, or the outflow tract is missing, or there is no functioning uterus. The causes include: Transverse blockages, Mullerian Anomalies, and absence of functioning endometrium. The true incidence of obstructive Müllerian anomalies is unknown, but is believed to be between 0.1% and 3.8%.The second most common cause of primary amenorrhoea is mullerian anomaly. The aim of this study is to find the most common cause of primary amenorrhoea among mullerian anomalies and its renal association, the presenting symptom and the modalities to investigate it.Methods: After obtaining approval from the ethical committee, a retrospective study was undertaken of all cases of primary amenorrhoea presented at Dhiraj General Hospital, affiliated to SBKS Medical college and research centre, Waghodiya during a 5 year period (June 2011-June 2015). In inclusion criteria, all non-pregnant women of Reproductive age group attending Gynaecology O.P.D. at Dhiraj General Hospital with complains of primary amenorrhoea with normal secondary sex characters were included in the study (June 2011-June 2015). In exclusion criteria, after the detailed investigations, all non-pregnant women with complain of primary amenorrhoea due to   any other cause than mullerian anomaly were excluded.Results: In this study, most of the patients belonged to Class I, i.e. these patients had absent uterus, cervix and fallopian tubes along with upper part of vagina(61.5%) consisting of MRKH type 1. Nearly, 31% belonged to class II type; these patients had transverse vaginal septum with or without uterine anomaly. One patient belonged to class III type, (7.6%) i.e. imperforate hymen with hematocolpos and hematometra.Conclusions: We conclude that Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH) with normal female secondary sexual development is the commonest cause of primary amenorrhea in our study.

A case of functional non communicating rudimentary horn of unicornuate uterus presenting as persistent lump abdomen

Unicornuate uterus with a functional non communicating rudimentary horn is a rare congenital mullerian duct anomaly. It presents with various complaints like dysmenorrhoea, hematometra, endometriosis, lump in abdomen, infertility and even ectopic pregnancy. Here we present such a case which had undergone exploratory laparotomy in the past for lump in abdomen and now presented to us with persistence of lump even after surgery

Fixed points results on a partially ordered multiplicative metric spaces

In the present paper, we show the existence of a fixed point for a monotone mapping in partially ordered complete multiplicative metric space using a partial order induced by an appropriate function φ. Moreover, common fixed points for two and three weakly comparable mappings are also proved in the same space

Recovery from Lesion-Associated Learning Deficits by Fetal Amygdala Transplants

Bilateral lesions of the amygdaloid complex result in elimination or attenuation of the conditioned freezing that is normally seen in the conditioned emotional response (CER) paradigm and the active avoidance (AA) task. We observed the effect of amygdalar tissue transplantation on the ability of lesioned (central nucleus of amygdala, CeA) rats to learn CER and AA. In two groups of adult Wistar rats, sham operation or bilateral lesions of the CeA were produced electrolytically (2mA for 8 sec). In a third group, fetal amygdalar tissue was transplanted at the CeA-lesioned site 2 d postoperatively. All rats were trained on CER and AA from the 6th postoperative day. In comparison with the shamoperated group, bilaterally CeA-lesioned rats showed a significant (p<0.001) increase in all CER scores, indicating an acquisition deficit. After fetal amygdalar tissue transplantation, the CER scores significantly decreased (p<0.05) when compared with the lesioned group. A significant (p<0.01) decrease in the percentage of avoidance in the AA task occurring after CeA lesion returned to control values after amygdalar tissue transplantation. In conclusion, in CeA-lesioned rats a complete behavioral deficit in learning CER and AA was restored by transplanting fetal amygdalar tissue at the lesioned site

Role of fine needle aspiration cytology in diagnosing leprosy: in a tertiary care hospital

Background: Leprosy, a chronic inflammatory granulomatous disease chiefly involving skin and peripheral nerves and occasionally other organ systems, caused by Mycobacterium leprae. It has tormented the human civilization through time immemorial. Leprosy remains a significant public health problem worldwide, especially in developing countries like India. The diagnosis of leprosy is not always easy because of long incubation period, over dependence of clinical expertise and a lack of rapid and simple diagnostic tool, patients remain undiagnosed for longer time. Fine needle aspiration (FNAC) technique is an inexpensive, rapid and accurate procedure for diagnosis of leprosy. We conducted a prospective study evaluating the ability of fine needle aspiration cytology in diagnosing and classifying leprosy lesions on Ridley-Jopling scale (R-J scale). The aim of this prospective study was to assess the usefulness of fine needle aspiration cytology in early diagnosis of leprosy, to identify specific cytological characteristics of diagnosis and to correlate the cytological smear findings with histopathology and to evaluate merits of relatively non-invasive procedure of FNAC over more invasive procedure - biopsy.Methods: The study is a hospital based prospective study carried out in the Department of Pathology and Department of Skin, Venereal Diseases, Leprosy, N.S.C.B. Medical College & Hospital, Jabalpur (M.P.) September 2010 to September 2013. Patients with new skin lesions were selected for the study. FNAC was performed and aspirates were evaluated for cytology using Hematoxylin and Eosin staining (H&E staining), Ziehl-Neelsen staining (ZN staining) and punch biopsy was collected.Results: Out of 50 cases, clinical and cytological correlation was seen in 88% tuberculoid leprosy, 93.7% of borderline tuberculoid, 33% of borderline lepromatous leprosy and 66% of lepromatous leprosy. While clinical with histopathological correlation revealed 100% specificity in tuberculoid leprosy, 100% in borderline tuberculoid, 66.6% in borderline lepromatous, 83.3% in lepromatous leprosy and 80% in indeterminate leprosy and 100% in histoid leprosy in our study. The overall cytodiagnostic accuracy has been 92% in present study.  Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that the combination of FNAC and ZN staining for Acid Fast Bacilli (AFB) can provide a rapid diagnosis in majority of leprosy suspected cases. FNAC is a safe, simple, rapid, less-invasive, OPD procedure for early diagnosis and classification of leprosy cases.

Downregulation of calcineurin activity in cervical carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Calcineurin (CaN) is an important serine-threonine phosphatase (PP2B), which plays a crucial role in calcium-calmodulin mediated signal transduction events. Calcineurin has been implicated in pathogenesis of various diseases cardiac hypertrophy, diabetic neuropathy and Alzheimer's, however its role in neoplasia remains unclear. RESULTS: In view of this we evaluated the calcineurin activity in serum and biopsy samples collected from women diagnosed with invasive squamous cell carcinoma of cervix. A significant reduction was observed in the calcineurin activity in cancer cervix patients compared to the control group. However the calcineurin activity remained unaltered in the cervical scrapes obtained from patients diagnosed with low-grade squamous intra epithelial lesions (LSIL). Interestingly the downregulation of calcineurin activity in squamous cell carcinomas was not accompanied by any significant change in DNA-binding affinity of the transcriptional factor NFAT (Nuclear Factor of Activated T-cells). All the squamous cell carcinoma samples used in the present study were positive for high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) types. CONCLUSION: The present study demonstrates the downregulation of calcineurin activity in squamous cell carcinoma of cervix with high risk HPV infection. We conclude that perturbations in calcineurin-mediated pathway may be involved in development of cervical neoplasia

RFFE – Random Forest Fuzzy Entropy for the classification of Diabetes Mellitus

Diabetes is a category of metabolic disease commonly known as a chronic illness. It causes the body to generate less insulin and raises blood sugar levels, leading to various issues and disrupting the functioning of organs, including the retinal, kidney and nerves. To prevent this, people with chronic illnesses require lifetime access to treatment. As a result, early diabetes detection is essential and might save many lives. Diagnosis of people at high risk of developing diabetes is utilized for preventing the disease in various aspects. This article presents a chronic illness prediction prototype based on a person's risk feature data to provide an early prediction for diabetes with Fuzzy Entropy random vectors that regulate the development of each tree in the Random Forest. The proposed prototype consists of data imputation, data sampling, feature selection, and various techniques to predict the disease, such as Fuzzy Entropy, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Classification and Regression Tree (CART), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Naïve Bayes (NB). This study uses the existing Pima Indian Diabetes (PID) dataset for diabetic disease prediction. The predictions' true/false positive/negative rate is investigated using the confusion matrix and the receiver operating characteristic area under the curve (ROCAUC). Findings on a PID dataset are compared with machine learning algorithms revealing that the proposed Random Forest Fuzzy Entropy (RFFE) is a valuable approach for diabetes prediction, with an accuracy of 98 percent

Silencing COI1 in Rice Increases Susceptibility to Chewing Insects and Impairs Inducible Defense

The jasmonic acid (JA) pathway plays a key role in plant defense responses against herbivorous insects. CORONATINE INSENSITIVE1 (COI1) is an F-box protein essential for all jasmonate responses. However, the precise defense function of COI1 in monocotyledonous plants, especially in rice (Oryza sativa L.) is largely unknown. We silenced OsCOI1 in rice plants via RNA interference (RNAi) to determine the role of OsCOI1 in rice defense against rice leaf folder (LF) Cnaphalocrocis medinalis, a chewing insect, and brown planthopper (BPH) Nilaparvata lugens, a phloem-feeding insect. In wild-type rice plants (WT), the transcripts of OsCOI1 were strongly and continuously up-regulated by LF infestation and methyl jasmonate (MeJA) treatment, but not by BPH infestation. The abundance of trypsin protease inhibitor (TrypPI), and the enzymatic activities of polyphenol oxidase (PPO) and peroxidase (POD) were enhanced in response to both LF and BPH infestation, but the activity of lipoxygenase (LOX) was only induced by LF. The RNAi lines with repressed expression of OsCOI1 showed reduced resistance against LF, but no change against BPH. Silencing OsCOI1 did not alter LF-induced LOX activity and JA content, but it led to a reduction in the TrypPI content, POD and PPO activity by 62.3%, 48.5% and 27.2%, respectively. In addition, MeJA-induced TrypPI and POD activity were reduced by 57.2% and 48.2% in OsCOI1 RNAi plants. These results suggest that OsCOI1 is an indispensable signaling component, controlling JA-regulated defense against chewing insect (LF) in rice plants, and COI1 is also required for induction of TrypPI, POD and PPO in rice defense response to LF infestation

Biochemical and structural characterization of mycobacterial aspartyl-tRNA synthetase AspS, a promising TB drug target.

The human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the causative agent of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), a disease with high worldwide mortality rates. Current treatment programs are under significant threat from multi-drug and extensively-drug resistant strains of M. tuberculosis, and it is essential to identify new inhibitors and their targets. We generated spontaneous resistant mutants in Mycobacterium bovis BCG in the presence of 10× the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of compound 1, a previously identified potent inhibitor of mycobacterial growth in culture. Whole genome sequencing of two resistant mutants revealed in one case a single nucleotide polymorphism in the gene aspS at 535GAC>535AAC (D179N), while in the second mutant a single nucleotide polymorphism was identified upstream of the aspS promoter region. We probed whole cell target engagement by overexpressing either M. bovis BCG aspS or Mycobacterium smegmatis aspS, which resulted in a ten-fold and greater than ten-fold increase, respectively, of the MIC against compound 1. To analyse the impact of inhibitor 1 on M. tuberculosis AspS (Mt-AspS) activity we over-expressed, purified and characterised the kinetics of this enzyme using a robust tRNA-independent assay adapted to a high-throughput screening format. Finally, to aid hit-to-lead optimization, the crystal structure of apo M. smegmatis AspS was determined to a resolution of 2.4 Å