Anemia in Antiretroviral Naïve HIV/AIDS Patients: A Study from Eastern India

Background: Hematological manifestations are common throughout the course of HIV infection. Impact of anemia is the most significant among them. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the etiologies underlying anemia in HIV/AIDS. Methods This was a non randomized cross sectional observational study conducted in a tertiary care hospital of India over a period of 2 years. One hundred and fifty HIV patients were screened. Thorough clinical and laboratory evaluation was done in 50 randomly selected anemic cases. Results: Proper etiological diagnosis could be reached in 46 patients. Among them correlation between Hb% and CD4 count was statistically insignificant (p = 0.074, r = 0.47) whereas it was significant with absolute lymphocyte and CD4 count (p = 0.006, r = 0.41). There was better correlation of bone marrow iron status with percent saturation of transferrin (p = 0.003, r = 0.54) than with serum ferritin (p = 0.055, r = 0.09). Bone marrow iron status did not have any relationship with CD4 count. Anemia of chronic disease was the commonest etiology (37%) followed by HIV related myelodysplastic syndrome (31%), iron deficiency anemia (13%), bone marrow suppression due to direct involvement by some infective process (7%). Aplastic anemia, multiple myeloma, Hodgkin’s disease, pure red cell aplasia, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis and vitamin B12 deficiency were detected in one case (2%) each. Conclusions: Etiologies of anemia in HIV/AIDS are multifactorial with anemia of chronic disease being the commonest. For screening of iron deficiency in this group, percent saturation is a better tool than serum ferritin. Absolute lymphocyte count can sometimes be used as a surrogate marker of immunological status in antiretroviral naïve HIV patients, particularly in resource poor areas

Generating functions for canonical systems of fermions

The method proposed by Pratt to derive recursion relations for systems of degenerate fermions [Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 4255 (2000), arXiv:nucl-th/9905055] relies on diagrammatic techniques. This efficient formalism assumes no explicit two-body interactions, makes possible the inclusion of conservation laws and requires low computational time. In this brief report, we show that such recursion relations can be obtained from generating functions, without any restriction as concerns the number of conservation laws (e.g. total energy or angular momentum).Comment: submitted to Physical Review

The performance environment in football

The first phase of this research project focused on developing an understanding of the performance environment in football, that is, the array of factors impacting individual and team performance in competitive situations. Study one was a qualitative investigation of the performance environment of the England youth football teams. National coaches, sport scientists, and players were interviewed regarding the factors that influenced performance at international tournaments. The main positives included: player understanding, strong team cohesion, managed free-time activities, and a detailed knowledge of opposition. The main negatives included: over coaching, player boredom, limited player free-time, player anxiety, and physical fatigue. Overall, results revealed 158 raw data themes, from which eight dimensions were abstracted to describe the performance environment. [Continues.

Improved limits on photon velocity oscillations

The mixing of the photon with a hypothetical sterile paraphotonic state would have consequences on the cosmological propagation of photons. The absence of distortions in the optical spectrum of distant Type Ia supernov\ae allows to extend by two orders of magnitude the previous limit on the Lorentz-violating parameter $\delta$ associated to the photon-paraphoton transition, extracted from the abscence of distortions in the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. The new limit is consistent with the interpretation of the dimming of distant Type Ia supernov\ae as a consequence of a nonzero cosmological constant. Observations of gamma-rays from active galactic nuclei allow to further extend the limit on $\delta$ by ten orders of magnitude.Comment: 10 pages, 4 Postscript figures, use epsfig, amssym

Higher-order conservative interpolation between control-volume meshes: Application to advection and multiphase flow problems with dynamic mesh adaptivity

© 2016 .A general, higher-order, conservative and bounded interpolation for the dynamic and adaptive meshing of control-volume fields dual to continuous and discontinuous finite element representations is presented. Existing techniques such as node-wise interpolation are not conservative and do not readily generalise to discontinuous fields, whilst conservative methods such as Grandy interpolation are often too diffusive. The new method uses control-volume Galerkin projection to interpolate between control-volume fields. Bounded solutions are ensured by using a post-interpolation diffusive correction. Example applications of the method to interface capturing during advection and also to the modelling of multiphase porous media flow are presented to demonstrate the generality and robustness of the approach

Turbulent Flows and Pollution Dispersion around Tall Buildings Using Adaptive Large Eddy Simulation (LES)

The motivation for this work stems from the increased number of high-rise buildings/skyscrapers all over the world, and in London, UK, and hence the necessity to see their effect on the local environment. We concentrate on the mean velocities, Reynolds stresses, turbulent kinetic energies (TKEs) and tracer concentrations. We look at their variations with height at two main locations within the building area, and downstream the buildings. The pollution source is placed at the top of the central building, representing an emission from a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plant. We see how a tall building may have a positive effect at the lower levels, but a negative one at the higher levels in terms of pollution levels. Mean velocities at the higher levels (over 60 m in real life) are reduced at both locations (within the building area and downstream it), whilst Reynolds stresses and TKEs increase. However, despite the observed enhanced turbulence at the higher levels, mean concentrations increase, indicating that the mean flow has a greater influence on the dispersion. At the lower levels (Z < 60 m), the presence of a tall building enhanced dispersion (hence lower concentrations) for many of the configurations

A Poisson hierarchical modelling approach to detecting copy number variation in sequence coverage data.

BACKGROUND: The advent of next generation sequencing technology has accelerated efforts to map and catalogue copy number variation (CNV) in genomes of important micro-organisms for public health. A typical analysis of the sequence data involves mapping reads onto a reference genome, calculating the respective coverage, and detecting regions with too-low or too-high coverage (deletions and amplifications, respectively). Current CNV detection methods rely on statistical assumptions (e.g., a Poisson model) that may not hold in general, or require fine-tuning the underlying algorithms to detect known hits. We propose a new CNV detection methodology based on two Poisson hierarchical models, the Poisson-Gamma and Poisson-Lognormal, with the advantage of being sufficiently flexible to describe different data patterns, whilst robust against deviations from the often assumed Poisson model. RESULTS: Using sequence coverage data of 7 Plasmodium falciparum malaria genomes (3D7 reference strain, HB3, DD2, 7G8, GB4, OX005, and OX006), we showed that empirical coverage distributions are intrinsically asymmetric and overdispersed in relation to the Poisson model. We also demonstrated a low baseline false positive rate for the proposed methodology using 3D7 resequencing data and simulation. When applied to the non-reference isolate data, our approach detected known CNV hits, including an amplification of the PfMDR1 locus in DD2 and a large deletion in the CLAG3.2 gene in GB4, and putative novel CNV regions. When compared to the recently available FREEC and cn.MOPS approaches, our findings were more concordant with putative hits from the highest quality array data for the 7G8 and GB4 isolates. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, the proposed methodology brings an increase in flexibility, robustness, accuracy and statistical rigour to CNV detection using sequence coverage data

Prevention of Endotoxaemia in Obstructive Jaundice — a Comparative Study of Bile Salts

Systemic endotoxaemia is associated with postoperative renal dysfunction in obstructive jaundice, and can be prevented by the pre-operative administration of certain bile salts. In order to find the most effective bile salt for use in this condition, a comparison of the anti-endotoxic activities of different bile salts was performed. Bile salts were incubated in vitro with endotoxin and the resultant endotoxin level was measured with a quantitative limulus assay. The in vivo effects of different oral bile salts on the intestinal absorption of radiolabelled endotoxin from rats with obstructive jaundice were compared. The in vitro and in vivo anti-endotoxic activities of bile salts related to their known detergent activities. Deoxycholic acid and its conjugates were the most effective and should be the bile salts of choice for further clinical evaluation in obstructive jaundice in man

Chicken Embryonic-Stem Cells Are Permissive to Poxvirus Recombinant Vaccine Vectors.

The discovery of mammalian pluripotent embryonic stem cells (ESC) has revolutionised cell research and regenerative medicine. More recently discovered chicken ESC (cESC), though less intensively studied, are increasingly popular as vaccine substrates due to a dearth of avian cell lines. Information on the comparative performance of cESC with common vaccine viruses is limited. Using RNA-sequencing, we compared cESC transcriptional programmes elicited by stimulation with chicken type I interferon or infection with vaccine viruses routinely propagated in primary chicken embryo fibroblasts (CEF). We used poxviruses (fowlpox virus (FWPV) FP9, canarypox virus (CNPV), and modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA)) and a birnavirus (infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) PBG98). Interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs) were induced in cESC to levels comparable to those in CEF and immortalised chicken fibroblast DF-1 cells. cESC are permissive (with distinct host transcriptional responses) to MVA, FP9, and CNPV but, surprisingly, not to PBG98. MVA, CNPV, and FP9 suppressed innate immune responses, while PBG98 induced a subset of ISGs. Dysregulation of signalling pathways (i.e., NFκB, TRAF) was observed, which might affect immune responses and viral replication. In conclusion, we show that cESC are an attractive alternative substrate to study and propagate poxvirus recombinant vaccine vectors