Recent trends in the pattern and long-term management strategy of patients diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome in India: an observational study

Background: The understanding of demographic patterns and the real-world management practices for patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) will facilitate optimizing the management strategies for ACS based on the patient’s clinical profile and the associated risk factors in Indian patients. Hence, this study determined the demographic details and the treatment patterns in Indian patients with ACS.Methods: The RECent trends in the pattern and lOng-term management stRategy of patients Diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome in India (RECORD ACS-2) study was a real-world, retrospective, cross-sectional, observational study conducted at various centres across India between 2021 and 2022. The study outcomes included the demographic profile and therapeutic management in patients with ACS.Results: A total of 9945 patients with a mean age of 59 years were included. The ACS was commonly observed in the age group of 41-70 years with highest incidence in the age group of 51-60 years. The ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) was most common (53.2%) presentation. Hypertension (37.2%) and dyslipidemia (29.3%) followed by diabetes (21.3%) were the most common comorbidities. Single vessel disease was the most common angiographic feature (58%). Percutaneous coronary intervention was the most preferred management strategy (57%). Ticagrelor was the most preferred loading (68.3%) as well as maintenance (71.2%) P2Y12 inhibitor in ACS patients. Most of the patients (81.8%) had received high intensity statin therapy for the secondary prevention of the disease.Conclusions: The prevalence of ACS was high between 51-60 years of age, more so in males, smokers, and physically less active patients. Associated comorbidities were hypertension, dyslipidemia and diabetes. Incidence of STEMI was high, and more than half of the patients underwent PCI. Ticagrelor was the most preferred P2Y12 inhibitor in ACS patients for loading as well as maintenance therapy

International carbon markets for carbon dioxide removal

International carbon markets are potentially a very powerful tool for mobilizing carbon dioxide removal in line with Paris Agreement ambitions to limit global warming to well below 2°C. This requires reaching global net-zero emissions between 2050 and 2070. Yet, carbon market regulators have not approached removals in a systematic manner. This review assesses the highly fragmented treatment of removals under compliance and voluntary carbon markets, including baseline, credit and cap-and-trade systems. The Kyoto mechanisms and the large voluntary carbon market standards have long focussed on biological removals without inherent storage permanence and only recently started to develop methodologies for removals with geological storage, mineralization or biochar. Driven by high prices for credits from emerging removal technologies and advance market commitment initiatives targeting high permanence removals, various newcomers in voluntary markets are currently establishing their own approaches for generating removal credits. However, they disregard key concepts safeguarding market quality such as additionality, which risks triggering scandals and tainting the entire market for removal credits. Given the diversity of credit prices spanning three orders of magnitude from 1 to 1000, as well as of volumes ranging from a few hundred to tens of millions of credits, the current “gold rush” atmosphere of removal markets needs to quickly be replaced by a coordinated approach, ensuring credibility, and enabling removals to play the required role in reaching global net zero

Incidence and Determinants of Low birth weight babies at rural tertiary care hospital in central Uttar Pradesh

Background: An infant’s birth weight is a reliable index of intrauterine growth and a sensitive predictor of newborn chances of survival, growth and long-term physical and psychosocial development. Low birth weight has been defined as birth weight <2.5 kg regardless of gestational age. The incidence of low birth weight (LBW) in India varies between 25–30% and of which 60–65% are because of intrauterine growth retardation. Aim & Objective: To determine the incidence and various determinants of low birth weight among babies delivered at rural tertiary care hospitals in central Uttar Pradesh. Methods and Material: The study was conducted at UPUMS, Saifai, Etawah, among pregnant women who delivered babies from 1st January 2018 to 31st December 2018. Details regarding age of the mother, gravida, parity, gestation period, presence of complications, the procedure for delivery and birth weight of the newborn were recorded and analyzed using SPSS software (version 23)   Results: A total of 7615 deliveries were conducted (53.2% were males, 46.8% were females). The mean birth weight of babies was 2.65 Kg with S.D ± 0.52. Preterm babies were 32% while 67% were term babies and 23% of babies were low birth weight. There was a statistically significant association between birth weight of babies and factors like age of mother, parity of mother, gestation period, and presence of complications during the antenatal period. Conclusions: Prompt identification of high-risk factors, prevention of premature delivery, increasing the use of health services during pregnancy and management of the risk factors would reduce the incidence of low birth weight

Interstellar: Using Halide's Scheduling Language to Analyze DNN Accelerators

We show that DNN accelerator micro-architectures and their program mappings represent specific choices of loop order and hardware parallelism for computing the seven nested loops of DNNs, which enables us to create a formal taxonomy of all existing dense DNN accelerators. Surprisingly, the loop transformations needed to create these hardware variants can be precisely and concisely represented by Halide's scheduling language. By modifying the Halide compiler to generate hardware, we create a system that can fairly compare these prior accelerators. As long as proper loop blocking schemes are used, and the hardware can support mapping replicated loops, many different hardware dataflows yield similar energy efficiency with good performance. This is because the loop blocking can ensure that most data references stay on-chip with good locality and the processing units have high resource utilization. How resources are allocated, especially in the memory system, has a large impact on energy and performance. By optimizing hardware resource allocation while keeping throughput constant, we achieve up to 4.2X energy improvement for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), 1.6X and 1.8X improvement for Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), respectively.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ASPLOS 202

Synthesis, Dielectric and Electrical Properties of Silver-Polymer Nanocomposites

Metallic nanoparticles and its composites have emerged as valuable asset in all phases of material science and engineering including electronic, optics and electromagnetic domains. Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) are one of the most vital and fascinating nanomaterials among several metallic nanoparticles due to its large surface ratio and outstanding properties with diverse field of potential applications. We demonstrated various synthesis techniques of nanocomposites, silver nanoparticles and composite based on these particles have shown great importance because of the remarkable properties (high electrical and thermal conductivity, good chemical stability and catalytic properties) of silver nanoparticles. This chapter provides various synthesis techniques for preparation of silver nanoparticles and their composites with dielectric and electrical properties in a lucid manner. The detail discussions of silver-polymer nanocomposites, emphasizing on each individual synthesis routes and properties have been carried out

International carbon markets for carbon dioxide removal

International carbon markets are potentially a very powerful tool for mobilizing carbon dioxide removal in line with Paris Agreement ambitions to limit global warming to well below 2°C. This requires reaching global net-zero emissions between 2050 and 2070. Yet, carbon market regulators have not approached removals in a systematic manner. This review assesses the highly fragmented treatment of removals under compliance and voluntary carbon markets, including baseline, credit and cap-and-trade systems. The Kyoto mechanisms and the large voluntary carbon market standards have long focussed on biological removals without inherent storage permanence and only recently started to develop methodologies for removals with geological storage, mineralization or biochar. Driven by high prices for credits from emerging removal technologies and advance market commitment initiatives targeting high permanence removals, various newcomers in voluntary markets are currently establishing their own approaches for generating removal credits. However, they disregard key concepts safeguarding market quality such as additionality, which risks triggering scandals and tainting the entire market for removal credits. Given the diversity of credit prices spanning three orders of magnitude from 1 to 1000, as well as of volumes ranging from a few hundred to tens of millions of credits, the current “gold rush” atmosphere of removal markets needs to quickly be replaced by a coordinated approach, ensuring credibility, and enabling removals to play the required role in reaching global net zero

Foliar feeding of boron influencing biochemical attributes and enzyme activity in dragon fruit (Selenicereus monacanthus)

Boron plays crucial role in metabolic processes during fruit ripening and in turn ensures better fruit quality. However limited studies have been conducted to assess the influence of boron on fruit quality of dragon fruit. In the present study, the efficacy of boron was investigated on red-fleshed dragon fruit (Selenicereus monacanthus). Four levels of boron (100 mgL-1, 200 mgL-1, 300 mgL-1 and 400 mgL-1) were applied on 7- and 14-day-old flower buds. The highest pollen germinability, seed weight, fruit weight (274.32 ± 36.72g), pulp content (70.80 ± 1.79%) and pulp firmness (2.74 ± 0.18 N) were recorded when B was applied@300 mg L-1 on 7-day old flower bud. The same treatment also manifested higher soluble solid contents (17.42 ± 0.62 °Brix), sugar content, total carbohydrate (15.92 ± 1.12%), protein (1.33±0.11%), ascorbic acid (112.66 ± 4.98 µg/g), betacyanin (32.86±2.52 µg/g), total phenol (95.26 ± 3.72 µg GAE/ 100g), total flavonoid (37.65 ±2.14 mg QE/100g) and anti-oxidative activity (27.71±2.14 mM Fe II/100g). Correlation studies elucidated significant positive influence of pollen germinability on fruit weight, pulp content and pulp firmness. The activities of α-amylase, invertase and sucrose synthase enzymes were significantly upregulated with the application of B 300 mg L-1 on 7-day old flower bud. On the other hand, the activities of cell wall degrading enzymes such as cellulase, polygalacturonase and pectin methyl esterase were reduced with increasing levels of boron. The principal component analysis (PCA) illustrated the maximal proximity of most of the quality attributes with B 300 mgL-1, applied at 7-day old flower bud stage, thus exemplifying it as the best treatment

Inhibition of IRGM establishes a robust antiviral immune state to restrict pathogenic viruses

The type I interferon (IFN) response is the major host arsenal against invading viruses. IRGM is a negative regulator of IFN responses under basal conditions. However, the role of human IRGM during viral infection has remained unclear. In this study, we show that IRGM expression is increased upon viral infection. IFN responses induced by viral PAMPs are negatively regulated by IRGM. Conversely, IRGM depletion results in a robust induction of key viral restriction factors including IFITMs, APOBECs, SAMHD1, tetherin, viperin, and HERC5/6. Additionally, antiviral processes such as MHC-I antigen presentation and stress granule signaling are enhanced in IRGM-deficient cells, indicating a robust cell-intrinsic antiviral immune state. Consistently, IRGM-depleted cells are resistant to the infection with seven viruses from five different families, including Togaviridae, Herpesviridae, Flaviviverdae, Rhabdoviridae, and Coronaviridae. Moreover, we show that Irgm1 knockout mice are highly resistant to chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection. Altogether, our work highlights IRGM as a broad therapeutic target to promote defense against a large number of human viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, CHIKV, and Zika virus