Serum Levels of Selenium, Zinc, Copper and Magnesium in Asthmatic Patients: a Case Control Study.

Background: Free radicals have harmful effects on cells and tissues and are thought to be responsible for the pathogenesis of many diseases including bronchial asthma. Selenium (Se), Zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), and magnesium (Mg) are trace elements required for the antioxidant enzymes and hence the optimal functions of the immune system. Changes in the levels of these elements may lead to a reduction in antioxidant activities in asthma. Objective: This study was conducted to determine serum levels of the trace elements Se, Zn, Cu, and Mg in asthmatic patients in order to evaluate the associations of these nutrients with asthma in adults Subjects and Methods: Serum Se, Zn, Cu, and Mg concentrations were measured in 100 asthmatic adult patients and 170 healthy control subjects matched for age and sex. The patients were recruited from asthma casualties, referred clinics and wards of Elshaab and Omdurman Teaching Hospital, Khartoum Sudan. Socio- demographic data and clinical history of all subjects were collected in questionnaires. Results: Serum Se and Cu levels were found to be significantly decreased in asthmatic patients compared to controls. Mean serum Se and Cu for patients were 65.8 5.5Ig/l (mean SD) and 0.711 0.37g/l respectively while that for controls were 78.2 7.5 Ig/l and 0.939 0.322g/l respectively (P value was < 0.001). On the other hand the mean serum Zn level was significantly higher in patients compared to controls (1.2 0.51g/l and 0.94 0.254g/l respectively) (P value wa

Non-metastatic cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma treated with photodynamic therapy using intravenous mTHPC

INTRODUCTION Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a method of treating various pathologies. In this retrospective study with prospective intent, a total of 22 patients with T1/T2 N0 cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) were treated with intravenous mTHPC (meta-tetrahydroxyphenylchlorin) and surface illumination PDT. Comparisons with the clinical features, rate of recurrence and overall outcome were made. MATERIALS AND METHODS Surface illumination PDT was offered under local anaesthesia. 0.05 mg/kg mTHPC was administered intravenously into the midcubital vein 48 h prior to tissue illumination. A single-channel 652 nm diode laser was used for illumination and light was delivered at 20 J/cm2 per site. Lesion response evaluation was carried out according to Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors (RECIST). RESULTS Clinical assessment revealed that 16 patients had lesions of <2 cm in size (T1), while the rest were T2. No nodal involvement was identified in any of the patients. None of the patients had a locally recurrent lesion. During the 3-year follow-up, 20/22 patients had complete response (CR) and this was after one round of treatment. Two patients suffered from recurrent disease within 3 years of the follow-up, and they underwent surgical resection. CONCLUSION PDT achieved high efficacy in the treatment of T1N0 cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma with greatly reduced morbidity and disfigurement. The technique is simple, can commonly be carried out in outpatient clinics, and is highly acceptable to patients

Epithelial tissue thickness improves optical coherence tomography's ability in detecting oral cancer

BACKGROUND OCT is a non-invasive imaging technique that enables the measurement of epithelial thickness and architectural changes, which can help in the diagnosis of pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions. The purpose of the study was to assess whether epithelial tissue thickness improves optical coherence tomography’s ability in detecting oral cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS Surgically resected oral margins from 60 patients diagnosed with oral squamous cell carcinoma were subjected to OCT. Three OCT measurements (immediate, 1 h and 24 h post-resection) were conducted per resected tissue specimen to look at the effect of saline and formalin on the specimen and its effect on the reproducibility of the OCT. OCT was, then, used to measure the epithelial tissue thickness in cancer-free and cancer-involved margins in eight oral anatomical locations. This data was, then, combined with architectural changes data to calculate the sensitivity and specificity. RESULTS An overall of 189 cancer-free margins and 51 cancer-involved margins had their epithelial thickness measured using OCT and compared to histopathology. With regards to the validity of the OCT and histopathological measurements, epithelial thickness showed good correlation between different readings at all oral sites. With regards to the reproducibility of the OCT measurements, the mean epithelial thickness for all measurements at first (immediate) and second (1 h post-resection – saline preserved) measurements was not significantly different. Underestimation of the epithelial depth in cancer-free margins was 20 μm, while in the cancer-involved margins was 10 μm. Combining data from architectural changes and epithelial thickness, a sensitivity of 92% and a specificity of 94% was achieved. CONCLUSION Oral epithelium measurements using OCT were valid compared to those made with gold standard pathology. Measurements made using OCT was also reproducible with minor underestimation. Epithelial thickness, combined with architectural changes, led to high accuracy in differentiating between cancer-free and cancer-involved margins

Quora Insincere Questions Classification Using Attention Based Model

The online platform has evolved into an unparalleled storehouse of infor-mation. People use various social question-and-answer websites such as Quora, Form-spring, Stack-Overflow, Twitter, and Beepl to ask questions, clarify doubts, and share ideas and expertise with others. An increase in in-appropriate and insincere comments by users without a genuine motive is a major issue with such Q & A websites. Individuals tend to share harmful and toxic content intended to make a statement rather than look for helpful answers. In the world of natural language processing (NLP), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has been a game-changer. It has dominated performance benchmarks and thereby pushed the limits of researchers' ability to experiment and produce similar models. This resulted in improvements in language models by introducing lighter models while maintaining efficiency and performance. This study utilized pre-trained state-of-the-art language models for understanding whether posted questions are sincere or insincere with limited computation. To overcome the high computation problem of NLP, the BERT, XLNet, StructBERT, and DeBERTa models were trained on three samples of data. The metrics proved that even with limited resources, recent transformer-based models outscore previous studies with remarkable results. Amongst the four, DeBERTa stands out with the highest balanced accuracy, macro, and weighted f1-score of 80%, 0.83 and 0.96, respectively

Drug Discovery for Schistosomiasis: Hit and Lead Compounds Identified in a Library of Known Drugs by Medium-Throughput Phenotypic Screening

The flatworm disease schistosomiasis infects over 200 million people with just one drug (praziquantel) available—a concern should drug resistance develop. Present drug discovery approaches for schistosomiasis are slow and not conducive to automation in a high-throughput format. Therefore, we designed a three-component screen workflow that positions the larval (schistosomulum) stage of S. mansoni at its apex followed by screens of adults in culture and, finally, efficacy tests in infected mice. Schistosomula are small enough and available in sufficient numbers to interface with automated liquid handling systems and prosecute thousands of compounds in short time frames. We inaugurated the workflow with a 2,160 compound library that includes known drugs in order to cost effectively ‘re-position’ drugs as new therapies for schistosomiasis and/or identify compounds that could be modified to that end. We identify a variety of ‘hit’ compounds (antibiotics, psychoactives, antiparasitics, etc.) that produce behavioral responses (phenotypes) in schistosomula and adults. Tests in infected mice of the most promising hits identified a number of ‘leads,’ one of which compares reasonably well with praziquantel in killing worms, decreasing egg production by the parasite, and ameliorating disease pathology. Efforts continue to more fully automate the workflow. All screen data are posted online as a drug discovery resource

Airway smooth muscle relaxation results from a reduction in the frequency of Ca(2+ )oscillations induced by a cAMP-mediated inhibition of the IP(3 )receptor

BACKGROUND: It has been shown that the contractile state of airway smooth muscle cells (SMCs) in response to agonists is determined by the frequency of Ca(2+ )oscillations occurring within the SMCs. Therefore, we hypothesized that the relaxation of airway SMCs induced by agents that increase cAMP results from the down-regulation or slowing of the frequency of the Ca(2+ )oscillations. METHODS: The effects of isoproterenol (ISO), forskolin (FSK) and 8-bromo-cAMP on the relaxation and Ca(2+ )signaling of airway SMCs contracted with methacholine (MCh) was investigated in murine lung slices with phase-contrast and laser scanning microscopy. RESULTS: All three cAMP-elevating agents simultaneously induced a reduction in the frequency of Ca(2+ )oscillations within the SMCs and the relaxation of contracted airways. The decrease in the Ca(2+ )oscillation frequency correlated with the extent of airway relaxation and was concentration-dependent. The mechanism by which cAMP reduced the frequency of the Ca(2+ )oscillations was investigated. Elevated cAMP did not affect the re-filling rate of the internal Ca(2+ )stores after emptying by repetitive exposure to 20 mM caffeine. Neither did elevated cAMP limit the Ca(2+ )available to stimulate contraction because an elevation of intracellular Ca(2+ )concentration induced by exposure to a Ca(2+ )ionophore (ionomycin) or by photolysis of caged-Ca(2+ )did not reverse the effect of cAMP. Similar results were obtained with iberiotoxin, a blocker of Ca(2+)-activated K(+ )channels, which would be expected to increase Ca(2+ )influx and contraction. By contrast, the photolysis of caged-IP(3 )in the presence of agonist, to further elevate the intracellular IP(3 )concentration, reversed the slowing of the frequency of the Ca(2+ )oscillations and relaxation of the airway induced by FSK. This result implied that the sensitivity of the IP(3)R to IP(3 )was reduced by FSK and this was supported by the reduced ability of IP(3 )to release Ca(2+ )in SMCs in the presence of FSK. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that the relaxant effect of cAMP-elevating agents on airway SMCs is achieved by decreasing the Ca(2+ )oscillation frequency by reducing internal Ca(2+ )release through IP(3 )receptors

Carbon nanotubes allow capture of krypton, barium and lead for multichannel biological X-ray fluorescence imaging

The desire to study biology in situ has been aided by many imaging techniques. Among these, X-ray fluorescence (XRF) mapping permits observation of elemental distributions in a multichannel manner. However, XRF imaging is underused, in part, because of the difficulty in interpreting maps without an underlying cellular ‘blueprint’; this could be supplied using contrast agents. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can be filled with a wide range of inorganic materials, and thus can be used as ‘contrast agents’ if biologically absent elements are encapsulated. Here we show that sealed single-walled CNTs filled with lead, barium and even krypton can be produced, and externally decorated with peptides to provide affinity for sub-cellular targets. The agents are able to highlight specific organelles in multiplexed XRF mapping, and are, in principle, a general and versatile tool for this, and other modes of biological imaging