Expression profiles of TRPV1, TRPV4, TLR4 and ERK1/2 in the dorsal root ganglionic neurons of a cancer-induced neuropathy rat model

Background: The spread of tumors through neural routes is common in several types of cancer in which patients suffer from a moderate-to-severe neuropathy, neural damage and a distorted quality of life. Here we aim to examine the expression profiles of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) and of transient receptor potential vanilloid 4 (TRPV4), toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK1/2), and to assess the possible therapeutic strategies through blockade of transient receptor potential (TRP) channels. Methods: Cancer was induced within the sciatic nerves of male Copenhagen rats, and tissues from dorsal root ganglia (DRG) were collected and used for measurements of immunofluorescence and Western blotting. The TRPV1 antagonist capsazepine, the selective TRPV4 antagonist HC-067047 and the calcium ions inhibitor ruthenium red were used to treat thermal and/or mechanical hyperalgesia. Results: Transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 showed a lower expression in DRGs on days 7 and 14. The expression of TRPV4, TLR4 and ERK1/2 showed an increase on day 3 then a decrease on days 7 and 14. TRPV1 and TLR4 as well as TRPV4 and ERK1/2 co-existed on the same neuronal cells. The neuropathic pain was reversed in dose-dependent manners by using the TRP antagonists and the calcium ions inhibitor. Conclusion: The decreased expression of TRPV1 and TRPV4 is associated with high activation. The increased expression of TLR4 and ERK1/2 reveals earlier immune response and tumor progression, respectively, and their ultimate decrease is an indicator of nerve damage. We studied the possible role of TRPV1 and TRPV4 in transducing cancer-induced hyperalgesia. The possible treatment strategies of cancer-induced thermal and/or mechanical hyperalgesia using capsazepine, HC-067047 and ruthenium red are examined.Comment: PMID: 29637027, PMCID: PMC588970

How Does Pressure to be Perfect Impact Pre-Collegiate Gymnasts?

This synthesis highlights the available research of how pressure to be perfect impacts pre-collegiate gymnasts. With recent accusations of sexual assault from USA Gymnastics doctor, Larry Nassar and the idealism of looking aesthetically pleasing for success, this research was imperative. The literature review examined evidence-based research in areas of body image and disordered eating issues, and pressure on young gymnasts. Specifically, this literature review used peer-reviews and scholarly articles to explore what kinds of pressure pre-collegiate gymnast encounter, from whom the pressure comes from, and the gymnast deals with the pressure. Results showed that coaches, parents, teammates, and the gymnast themselves instigate pressure associated with achieving a perfect body image, perfection in sport, and continued practice even through injury without complaining. In turn, gymnasts deal with these pressures through prompting eating disorders and the act of silence when guidance is needed most

Rectenna Systems for RF Energy Harvesting and Wireless Power Transfer

With the rapid development of the wireless systems and demands of low-power integrated electronic circuits, various research trends have tended to study the feasibility of powering these circuits by harvesting free energy from ambient electromagnetic space or by using dedicated RF source. Wireless power transmission (WPT) technology was first pursued by Tesla over a century ago. However, it faced several challenges for deployment in real applications. Recently, energy harvesting and WPT technologies have received much attention as a clean and renewable power source. Rectenna (rectifying antenna) system can be used for remotely charging batteries in several sensor networks at internet of things (IoT) applications as commonly used in smart buildings, implanted medical devices and automotive applications. Rectenna, which is used to convert from RF energy to usable DC electrical energy, is mainly a combination between a receiving antenna and a rectifier circuit. This chapter will present several designs for single and multiband rectennas with different characteristics for energy harvesting applications. Single and multiband antennas as well as rectifier circuits with matching networks are introduced for complete successful rectenna circuit models. At the end of the chapter, a dual-band rectenna example is introduced with a detailed description for each section of the rectenna

A Novel Model of Cancer-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy and the Role of TRPA1 in Pain Transduction

Background. Models of cancer-induced neuropathy are designed by injecting cancer cells near the peripheral nerves. The interference of tissue-resident immune cells does not allow a direct contact with nerve fibres which affects the tumor microenvironment and the invasion process. Methods. Anaplastic tumor-1 (AT-1) cells were inoculated within the sciatic nerves (SNs) of male Copenhagen rats. Lumbar dorsal root ganglia (DRGs) and the SNs were collected on days 3, 7, 14, and 21. SN tissues were examined for morphological changes and DRG tissues for immunofluorescence, electrophoretic tendency, and mRNA quantification. Hypersensitivities to cold, mechanical, and thermal stimuli were determined. HC-030031, a selective TRPA1 antagonist, was used to treat cold allodynia. Results. Nociception thresholds were identified on day 6. Immunofluorescent micrographs showed overexpression of TRPA1 on days 7 and 14 and of CGRP on day 14 until day 21. Both TRPA1 and CGRP were coexpressed on the same cells. Immunoblots exhibited an increase in TRPA1 expression on day 14. TRPA1 mRNA underwent an increase on day 7 (normalized to 18S). Injection of HC-030031 transiently reversed the cold allodynia. Conclusion. A novel and a promising model of cancer-induced neuropathy was established, and the role of TRPA1 and CGRP in pain transduction was examined.Comment: 12 page

The hiring problem and its algorithmic applications

The hiring problem is a simple model for on-line decision-making under uncertainty, recently introduced in the literature. Despite some related work dates back to 2000, the name and the first extensive studies were written in 2007 and 2008. The problem has been introduced explicitly first by Broder et al. in 2008 as a natural extension to the well-known secretary problem. Soon afterwards, Archibald and Martínez in 2009 introduced a discrete (combinatorial) model of the hiring problem, where the candidates seen so far could be ranked from best to worst without the need to know their absolute quality scores. This thesis introduces an extensive study for the hiring problem under the formulation given by Archibald and Martínez, explores the connections with other on-line selection processes in the literature, and develops one interesting application of our results to the field of data streaming algorithms. In the hiring problem we are interested in the design and analysis of hiring strategies. We study in detail two hiring strategies, namely hiring above the median and hiring above the m-th best. Hiring above the median hires the first interviewed candidate then any coming candidate is hired if and only if his relative rank is better than the median rank of the already hired staff, and others are discarded. Hiring above the m-th best hires the first m candidates in the sequence, then any coming candidate is hired if and only if his relative rank is larger than the m-th best among all hired candidates, and others are discarded. For both strategies, we were able to obtain exact and asymptotic distributional results for various quantities of interest (which we call hiring parameters). Our fundamental parameter is the number of hired candidates, together with other parameters like waiting time, index of last hired candidate and distance between the last two hirings give us a clear picture of the hiring rate or the dynamics of the hiring process for the particular strategy under study. There is another group of parameters like score of last hired candidate, score of best discarded candidate and number of replacements that give us an indicator of the quality of the hired staff. For the strategy hiring above the median, we study more quantities like number of hired candidates conditioned on the first one and probability that the candidate with score q is getting hired. We study the selection rule 1/2-percentile rule introduced by Krieger et al., in 2007, and the seating plan (1/2,1) of the Chinese restaurant process (CRP) introduced by Pitman, which are very similar to hiring above the median. The connections between hiring above the m-th best and the notion of m-records, and also the seating plan (0,m) of the CRP are investigated here. We report preliminary results for the number of hired candidates for a generalization of hiring above the median; called hiring above the alpha-quantile (of the hired staff). The explicit results for the number of hired candidates enable us to design an estimator, called RECORDINALITY, for the number of distinct elements in a large sequence of data which may contain repetitions; this problem is known in the literature as cardinality estimation problem. We show that another hiring parameter, the score of best discarded candidate, can also be used to design a new cardinality estimator, which we call DISCARDINALITY. Most of the results presented here have been published or submitted for publication. The thesis leaves some open questions, as well as many promising ideas for future work. One interesting question is how to compare two different strategies; that requires a suitable definition of the notion of optimality, which is still missing in the context of the hiring problem. We are also interested in investigating other variants of the problem like probabilistic hiring strategies, that is when the hiring criteria is not deterministic, unlike all the studied strategies

Perceptual Reports in (Dialects of) Arabic

This paper offers what is to our knowledge the ?rst description and analy-sis of the encoding of perceptual reports in Arabic: we focus here on ModernStandard Arabic (MSA) and Maltese (MT) building on the analytic frame-work offered by Asudeh and Toivonen (2012) (henceforth AT). We show thata range of different syntactic constructions are used to encode perceptual re-ports with seem-class redicates while the core semantic observation devel-oped in AT, concerning the distinction between types of PSOURCE, is foundto hold robustly in these languages. In the light of the data we outline, an im-portant question for future work turns out to be that of distinguishing casesof (genuine) copy-raising from constructions with thematic subjects (for theverbs in question). While Maltese is ideologically and sociolinguistically aseparate language, it shares many key aspects of its syntax with the Westernvernaculars of Arabic, and is fruitfully considered as a dialect of Arabic forthe purposes of cross-dialectal compariso

Verbal Complementation in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic : An LFG account

This study provides description and analysis of some verbal complementation patterns in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), namely the Auxiliary /kaan/, Causative /xalla/, phasal verbs and modals. Each verb is represented by a set of sentences extracted from a 5 million word corpus of ECA online texts that was built for the purpose of the current study using the Sketch Engine tool. These verbal complements are described and analysed within the principles of LFG syntactic theory, and represented in a grammar fragment implemented using the XLE tool. The analysis shows that both tense and aspect can be expressed verbs in ECA, where in simple tense forms the verb carries tense only, while in compound tense, the main predicate marks tense and occupies I while the following lexical verb marks grammatical aspect and occupies V. The bi- prefix marks present tense on verbs in I and imperfect aspect on verbs in V, as well as a HAB/PROG feature. The bare Imperfective verb form is treated as a non-finite verb in ECA, where it can not occupy I and is marked by VFORM=BARE. All of the verbal constructions analysed are bi-clausal structures, however, they show differences regarding the kind of control relation. Functional control was attested in constructions where the main predicate is the auxiliary /kaan/, the causative verb /xalla/, phasal verbs, as well as non-inflecting modals. Anaphoric control was attested only with inflecting modals, with the modal /yi2dar/ ‘able’ showing a case of obligatory anaphoric control. This is, to my knowledge, the first study which attempts to develop a grammar for ECA using the XLE platform. It provides an insight over the issues correlated with developing this grammar, which could be a step towards including ECA into the ParGram project in order to develop broad coverage grammars for a bigger number of languages

Potential effect of fortified pan bread with Aloe vera juice on alloxan-induced diabetic rats

Background: This study was designed to investigate (1) the potential use of Aloe vera juice (AVJ) for fortification of pan bread with evaluates the sensory characteristics and the nutritive value. (2) The  possible beneficial role of 5% and 10% AVJ-fortified bread against diabetic rats.Materials and Methods: Bread fortified with 5%, 10% and 20% AVJ investigated with panel test and the highest two scores (5%, 10%) were recorded and included for biological study. Forty male Albino rats weighted 200 + 10 g were divided into 4 groups (n=10) (-) control, (+) diabetic control, 5% and 10% AVJ-fortified bread.Results: Diabetic rats resulted in significant (p<0.05) increase in liver and kidney mass, blood glucose, serum hepatic biomarkers, malondialdehyde (MDA) and serum lipid profiles except serum high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C)while serum insulin, albumin, and total antioxidant capacity (TAC) that had significant (p<0.05) reduction compared to control group. AVJ-fortified bread causes sufficient amelioration against the effects of diabetes with improving all tested biochemical parameters which were more pronounced in 10% AVJfortified group.Conclusions: Based on the results, it appeared that consumption of AVJ-fortified bread has reduced blood glucose, lipid profiles and hepatic biomarkers with eliminated oxidative stress by virtue of its antioxidant  properties.Key words: Aloe vera Juice, Fortification, Pan Bread, Lipid Profiles, Diabetes