Comparing the Efficacy of Mulligan Mobilization Technique and Pilates Programme on Outcome Measures of Subjects with Chronic Neck Pain

BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION: Neck pain is a frequent and disabling complaint in general population. One of the most common causes of neck pain is mechanical dysfunction of cervical spine. Although diverse methods have been proposed for increasing cervical range of motion, joint mobilization has been confirmed as effective in several studies. The current study will compare the effect of two different treatment protocols i.e., Mulligan mobilization and Pilates programme along with conventional physiotherapy treatment patients with chronic neck pain. This study tries to find out new effective method for reducing the problem of pain. OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY: To compare the efficacy of Mulligan mobilization technique and Pilates programme on outcome measures of subjects with chronic neck pain. METHOD: 32 subjects were selected according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria were randomly divided into two groups: Mulligan mobilization, Pilates programme along with conventional physiotherapy. Treatment was given 3 sessions a week for three weeks. Pain, functional disability and ROM were assessed by Numerical Pain Radiating Scale (NPRS), Neck Disability Index (NDI) and Universal Goniometer. paired "t" test and independent "t" test were used. RESULTS: After three week protocol it was found that all the two groups showed significant improvement in NPRS, ROM and NDI score within the group. The present finding shows that Group A (Mulligan) shows significant improvements in the flexion and right cervical rotation of range of motion than group B (Pilates). CONCLUSION: The present study shows that Mulligan mobilization and Pilates programme along with conventional physiotherapy aids in treating the pain, range of motion and functional disability of patients with chronic neck pain

A Study of Cerebrospinal Fluid Chloride Levels in Meningitis

BACKGROUND: Meningitis is a one of the important cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Still mortality is high especiallyin a developing country like ours. Hence prompt, early definite initiation of treatment could save lot of lives. OBJECTIVES: To substantiate already available investigations in aiding presumptive diagnosis of meningitis. The present study aims at determining whether CSF chloride could aid in differentiating meningitis etiologically. METHODS: 100 patients diagnosed with meningitis segregatedetiologically into bacterial/tuberculous/viral/ fungal meningitis based on symptoms, clinical examination, investigations like complete CSF analysis and imaging. CSF chloride levels are estimated in all the study subjects. RESULTS: In our study, the mean value of CSF chloride in bacterial meningitis was found to be 117.19 mg/dl and tuberculous meningitis was found to be 114mg/dl, both reduced in comparison to viral meningitis. Statistical analysis was performed on these two variables using chi square test , a significant ‘p’ value of <0.001 was obtained. CONCLUSION: CSF chloride levels can substantiate the diagnosis of meningitis and can be indicative, supporting the etiological diagnosis. CSF chloride is cheap readily available non-invasive investigation which could aid thephysician in clearly differentiating the bacterial and other causes of meningitis

Design and Implementation an RFID Customer Shopping Behaviour Mining System

Shopping behavior data is of great an importance in understanding the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising campaigns. Online clothing stores are capable of the capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click streams and customer shopping carts. Retailers within physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to comprehensively identify shopping behaviors. In this study, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which garments they pay attention to, and which garments they usually pair up. The intuition is that phase readings of tags attached to items will demonstrate distinct yet stable patterns in a time-series when customers look at, pick out, or turn over desired items. We design Shop Miner, a framework that harnesses these unique spatial-temporal correlations of time-series phase readings to detect comprehensive shopping behaviors. We have implemented a prototype of Shop Miner with a COTS RFID reader and four antennas, and tested its effectiveness in two typical indoor environments. Empirical studies from two-week shopping-like data show that Shop Miner is able to identify customer shopping behaviors with high accuracy and low overhead, and is robust to interference

Novel Proposed Work for Empirical Word Searching in Cloud Environment

People's lives have become much more convenient as a result of the development of cloud storage. The third-party server has received a lot of data from many people and businesses for storage. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that the user's data is protected from prying eyes. In the cloud environment, searchable encryption technology is used to protect user information when retrieving data. The versatility of the scheme is, however, constrained by the fact that the majority of them only offer single-keyword searches and do not permit file changes.A novel empirical multi-keyword search in the cloud environment technique is offered as a solution to these issues. Additionally, it prevents the involvement of a third party in the transaction between data holder and user and guarantees integrity. Our system achieves authenticity at the data storage stage by numbering the files, verifying that the user receives a complete ciphertext. Our technique outperforms previous analogous schemes in terms of security and performance and is resistant to inside keyword guessing attacks.The server cannot detect if the same set of keywords is being looked for by several queries because our system generates randomized search queries. Both the number of keywords in a search query and the number of keywords in an encrypted document can be hidden. Our searchable encryption method is effective and protected from the adaptive chosen keywords threat at the same time

Rice biofortification: breeding and genomic approaches for genetic enhancement of grain zinc and iron contents

Rice is a highly consumed staple cereal cultivated predominantly in Asian countries, which share 90% of global rice production. Rice is a primary calorie provider for more than 3.5 billion people across the world. Preference and consumption of polished rice have increased manifold, which resulted in the loss of inherent nutrition. The prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies (Zn and Fe) are major human health challenges in the 21st century. Biofortification of staples is a sustainable approach to alleviating malnutrition. Globally, significant progress has been made in rice for enhancing grain Zn, Fe, and protein. To date, 37 biofortified Fe, Zn, Protein and Provitamin A rich rice varieties are available for commercial cultivation (16 from India and 21 from the rest of the world; Fe &gt; 10 mg/kg, Zn &gt; 24 mg/kg, protein &gt; 10% in polished rice as India target while Zn &gt; 28 mg/kg in polished rice as international target). However, understanding the micronutrient genetics, mechanisms of uptake, translocation, and bioavailability are the prime areas that need to be strengthened. The successful development of these lines through integrated-genomic technologies can accelerate deployment and scaling in future breeding programs to address the key challenges of malnutrition and hidden hunger

Sex differences in the adult human brain:Evidence from 5216 UK Biobank participants

Sex differences in the human brain are of interest for many reasons: for example, there are sex differences in the observed prevalence of psychiatric disorders and in some psychological traits that brain differences might help to explain. We report the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain (2750 female, 2466 male participants; mean age 61.7 years, range 44–77 years). Males had higher raw volumes, raw surface areas, and white matter fractional anisotropy; females had higher raw cortical thickness and higher white matter tract complexity. There was considerable distributional overlap between the sexes. Subregional differences were not fully attributable to differences in total volume, total surface area, mean cortical thickness, or height. There was generally greater male variance across the raw structural measures. Functional connectome organization showed stronger connectivity for males in unimodal sensorimotor cortices, and stronger connectivity for females in the default mode network. This large-scale study provides a foundation for attempts to understand the causes and consequences of sex differences in adult brain structure and function

Disturbances in Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis and Immunological Activity Differentiating between Unipolar and Bipolar Depressive Episodes

Differentiating bipolar depression (BD) from unipolar depression (UD) is difficult in clinical practice and, consequently, accurate recognition of BD can take as long as nine years. Research has therefore focused on the discriminatory capacities of biomarkers, such as markers of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis or immunological activity. However, no previous study included assessments of both systems, which is problematic as they may influence each other. Therefore, this study aimed to explore whether cortisol indicators and inflammatory markers were a) independently associated with and/or b) showed effect modification in relation to a lifetime (hypo)manic episode in a large sample of depressed patients.Data were derived from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety and comprised 764 patients with a DSM-IV depressive disorder at baseline, of which 124 (16.2%) had a lifetime (hypo)manic episode at the 2-year assessment, or a more recent episode at the 4-year or 6-year assessment. Baseline cortisol awakening response, evening cortisol and diurnal cortisol slope were considered as cortisol indicators, while baseline C-reactive Protein (CRP), Interleukin-6 (IL-6), and Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha (TNF-α) were included as inflammatory markers.In depressed men and women, none of the cortisol indicators and inflammatory markers were (independently) associated with a (hypo)manic episode. However, effect modification was found of diurnal cortisol slope and CRP in relation to a (hypo)manic episode. Further analyses showed that depressed men with high levels of diurnal cortisol slope and CRP had an increased odds (OR=10.99, p=.001) of having a (hypo)manic episode. No significant differences were found in women.Our findings suggest that the combination of high diurnal cortisol slope and high CRP may differentiate between UD and BD. This stresses the importance of considering HPA-axis and immunological activity simultaneously, but more research is needed to unravel their interrelatedness