Subacute toxicity study of an aqueous extract of dried leaves of Gymnosporia spinosa on albino rats

Background: Leaves of Gymnosporia spinosa have been used by people for treatment of jaundice. Traditional herbal drugs are popular all over the world and it is presumed that herbal medicines have lesser or no side effects. This generalized belief and no information available regarding toxicity study of G. spinosa with search from limited available information prompted us to carry out work on subacute toxicity study of aqueous extract of dried leaves of G. spinosa.Methods: Subacute toxicity study was carried out using aqueous extract of G. spinosa leaves. 30 rats of either sex were randomly divided in to 4 groups. First group received distilled water (control). Second, third and fourth groups received single daily dose of drug orally as 40, 120 and 240 mg/100 g of body weight respectively for 3 weeks. Animals were observed for various parameters. After 21 days blood was collected for blood counts and biochemical parameters. Liver, lungs and kidney were subjected to histo-pathological studies.Results: Throughout study there was no mortality in any group. Degenerative changes in the liver. Other organ does not show any changes. Analysis of biochemical data showed serum glutamic pyruvic transaminase and s. alkaline phosphatase levels were decreased. Serum bilirubine, blood urea and serum creatinine level were increased significantly.Conclusions: The data showed that there was hepato-renal toxicity at higher dose level which is about 100x human therapeutic dose.

Transcriptional response to mild therapeutic hypothermia in noise-induced cochlear injury

IntroductionPrevention or treatment for acoustic injury has been met with many translational challenges, resulting in the absence of FDA-approved interventions. Localized hypothermia following noise exposure mitigates acute cochlear injury and may serve as a potential avenue for therapeutic approaches. However, the mechanisms by which hypothermia results in therapeutic improvements are poorly understood.MethodsThis study performs the transcriptomic analysis of cochleae from juvenile rats that experienced noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) followed by hypothermia or control normothermia treatment.ResultsDifferential gene expression results from RNA sequencing at 24 h post-exposure to noise suggest that NIHL alone results in increased inflammatory and immune defense responses, involving complement activation and cytokine-mediated signaling. Hypothermia treatment post-noise, in turn, may mitigate the acute inflammatory response.DiscussionThis study provides a framework for future research to optimize hypothermic intervention for ameliorating hearing loss and suggests additional pathways that could be targeted for NIHL therapeutic intervention

Central nervous system infections in the intensive care unit

Neurological infections constitute an uncommon, but important aetiological cause requiring admission to an intensive care unit (ICU). In addition, health-care associated neurological infections may develop in critically ill patients admitted to an ICU for other indications. Central nervous system infections can develop as complications in ICU patients including post-operative neurosurgical patients. While bacterial infections are the most common cause, mycobacterial and fungal infections are also frequently encountered. Delay in institution of specific treatment is considered to be the single most important poor prognostic factor. Empirical antibiotic therapy must be initiated while awaiting specific culture and sensitivity results. Choice of empirical antimicrobial therapy should take into consideration the most likely pathogens involved, locally prevalent drug-resistance patterns, underlying predisposing, co-morbid conditions, and other factors, such as age, immune status. Further, the antibiotic should adequately penetrate the blood-brain and blood- cerebrospinal fluid barriers. The presence of a focal collection of pus warrants immediate surgical drainage. Following strict aseptic precautions during surgery, hand-hygiene and care of catheters, devices constitute important preventive measures. A high index of clinical suspicion and aggressive efforts at identification of aetiological cause and early institution of specific treatment in patients with neurological infections can be life saving

A reliable and reproducible protocol for sound-evoked vestibular myogenic potentials in rattus norvegicus

IntroductionCervical vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs) provide an objective measure of the integrity of the sacculo-collic pathway leading to their widespread use as a clinical tool in the diagnostic vestibular test battery. Though the application of cVEMPs in preclinical models to assess vestibular function, as performed in relevant clinical populations, remains limited. The present study aimed to establish a rodent model of cVEMP with standardized methods and protocols, examine the neural basis of the responses, and characterize and validate important features for interpretation and assessment of vestibular function.MethodsWe compared air-conducted sound (ACS)-evoked VEMPs from the sternocleidomastoid muscles in naïve Brown Norway rats. A custom setup facilitated repeatable and reliable measurements which were carried out at multiple intensities with ACS between 1 and 16 kHz and over 7 days. The myogenic potentials were identified by the presence of a positive (P1)-negative (N1) waveform at 3–5 ms from the stimulus onset. Threshold, amplitude, and latency were compared with intensity- and frequency-matched responses within and between animals.ResultscVEMP responses were repeatedly evoked with stimulus intensities between 50–100 dB SPL with excellent test-retest reliability and across multiple measurements over 7 days for all frequencies tested. Suprathreshold, cVEMP responses at 90 dB SPL for 6–10 kHz stimuli demonstrated significantly larger amplitudes (p < 0.01) and shorter latencies (p < 0.001) compared to cVEMP responses for 1–4 kHz stimuli. Latency of cVEMP showed sex-dependent variability, but no significant differences in threshold or amplitude between males and females was observed.DiscussionThe results provide a replicable and reliable setup, test protocol, and comprehensive characterization of cVEMP responses in a preclinical model which can be used in future studies to elucidate pathophysiological characteristics of vestibular dysfunctions or test efficacy of therapeutics

Automatic Sequential to Parallel Code Conversion

The way software programs are being written has been redefined since the introduction of multicore processors. Software developers have started writing parallel programs that are robust and scalable. This would ensure use of processor power being made available in the form of multiple cores. Though this trend is increasing, there are legacy applications that have been developed over the past few decades. Most of these applications are inherently sequential making no use of multithreading or parallel programming. If such applications are ported to execute on the multicore hardware as they are then optimal usage of all cores is not guaranteed. Such applications would ideally utilize only one core and the other cores would remain idle, unless the operating system supports some parallelism while scheduling. Hence there is a need to convert such legacy sequential codes to their parallel versions so that multicore hardware is exploited to the fullest. In this paper we present a tool that we have developed to automatically convert a sequential C code to parallel code. This Sequential to Parallel (S2P) tool is still in the development phase. We also discuss other parallelization tools available today, compare such tools with S2P tool and present our performance analysis results on different kind of multicore hardware

Community resource centres to improve the health of women and children in Mumbai slums: study protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial

Background: The trial addresses the general question of whether community resource centers run by a non-government organization improve the health of women and children in slums. The resource centers will be run by the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action, and the trial will evaluate their effects on a series of public health indicators. Each resource center will be located in a vulnerable Mumbai slum area and will serve as a base for salaried community workers, supervised by officers and coordinators, to organize the collection and dissemination of health information, provision of services, home visits to identify and counsel families at risk, referral of individuals and families to appropriate services and support for their access, meetings of community members and providers, and events and campaigns on health issues. Methods/design: A cluster randomized controlled trial in which 20 urban slum areas with resource centers are compared with 20 control areas. Each cluster will contain approximately 600 households and randomized allocation will be in three blocked phases, of 12, 12 and 16 clusters. Any resident of an intervention cluster will be able to participate in the intervention, but the resource centers will target women and children, particularly women of reproductive age and children under 5. The outcomes will be assessed through a household census after 2 years of resource center operations. The primary outcomes are unmet need for family planning in women aged 15 to 49 years, proportion of children under 5 years of age not fully immunized for their ages, and proportion of children under 5 years of age with weight for height less than 2 standard deviations below the median for age and sex. Secondary outcomes describe adolescent pregnancies, home deliveries, receipt of conditional cash transfers for institutional delivery, other childhood anthropometric indices, use of public sector health and nutrition services, indices of infant and young child feeding, and consultation for violence against women and children

Bayesian evidence as a tool for comparing datasets

We introduce a new conservative test for quantifying the consistency of two or more datasets. The test is based on the Bayesian answer to the question, ``How much more probable is it that all my data were generated from the same model system than if each dataset were generated from an independent set of model parameters?''. We make explicit the connection between evidence ratios and the differences in peak chi-squared values, the latter of which are more widely used and more cheaply calculated. Calculating evidence ratios for three cosmological datasets (recent CMB data (WMAP, ACBAR, CBI, VSA), SDSS and the most recent SNe Type 1A data) we find that concordance is favoured and the tightening of constraints on cosmological parameters is indeed justified.Comment: 4 pages, accepted by Phys. Rev.

Characterization of the Millimeter-Wave Polarization of Centaurus A with QUaD

Centaurus (Cen) A represents one of the best candidates for an isolated, compact, highly polarized source that is bright at typical cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment frequencies. We present measurements of the 4 degree by 2 degree region centered on Cen A with QUaD, a CMB polarimeter whose absolute polarization angle is known to 0.5 degrees. Simulations are performed to assess the effect of misestimation of the instrumental parameters on the final measurement and systematic errors due to the field's background structure and temporal variability from Cen A's nuclear region are determined. The total (Q, U) of the inner lobe region is (1.00 +/- 0.07 (stat.) +/- 0.04 (sys.), -1.72 +/- 0.06 +/- 0.05) Jy at 100 GHz and (0.80 +/- 0.06 +/- 0.06, -1.40 +/- 0.07 +/- 0.08) Jy at 150 GHz, leading to polarization angles and total errors of -30.0 +/- 1.1 degrees and -29.1 +/- 1.7 degrees. These measurements will allow the use of Cen A as a polarized calibration source for future millimeter experiments.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, v2 matches version published in Ap

First season QUaD CMB temperature and polarization power spectra

QUaD is a bolometric CMB polarimeter sited at the South Pole, operating at frequencies of 100 and 150 GHz. In this paper we report preliminary results from the first season of operation (austral winter 2005). All six CMB power spectra are presented derived as cross spectra between the 100 and 150 GHz maps using 67 days of observation in a low foreground region of approximately 60 deg^2. These data are a small fraction of the data acquired to date. The measured spectra are consistent with the ΛCDM cosmological model. We perform jackknife tests that indicate that the observed signal has negligible contamination from instrumental systematics. In addition, by using a frequency jackknife we find no evidence for foreground contamination