Assessment of Iron Overload in Homozygous and Heterozygous Beta Thalassemic Children below 5 Years of Age

Background: Thalassemia is a genetic disease having 3-7% carrier rate in Indians. It is transfusion dependent anemia having high risk of iron overloading. A clinical symptom of iron overload becomes detectable in second decade causing progressive liver, heart and endocrine glands damage. There is a need to assess iron overload in thalassemics below 5 years of age to protect them from complications at later age of life. Aims and objectives: Present study was undertaken to estimate serum iron status and evaluate serum transferrin saturation in both homozygous & heterozygous form of thalassemia as an index of iron overload among children of one to five years of age. Materials and Methods: Clinically diagnosed thirty cases of β thalassemia major & thirty cases of β thalassemia minor having severe anemia, hepatospleenomegaly and between 1 year to 5 years of age were included in study group and same age matched healthy controls were included in the study. RBC indices and HbA, HbA2 and HbF were estimated along with serum iron & serum Total Iron Binding Capacity (TIBC) and serum transferrin levels. Results: Significant difference was observed in hemoglobin levels between control and both beta thalassemia groups. Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV) and Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin (MCH) values were reduced. Hemoglobin electrophoresis showed the elevated levels of HbF and HbA2 in both beta thalassemia groups. Among serum iron parameters, serum iron, TIBC and transferrin saturation were elevated whereas serum transferrin levels were low in thalassemia major in children below 5 years of age. Conclusion: Although clinical symptoms of iron overload have been absent in thalassemic children below five years of age, biochemical iron overloading has started at much lower age which is of great concern

Godan: A Study of Social Realism

With the publication of Godan, Premchand surmounted the summit of success. Godan spurs great amount introspection, which is crucial in order to come to terms with such disturbing themes as travails of the soul of the poor Indian farmers and abject poverty. The inclusion of these problems imparts a universal appeal to his novels. Godan is not a tale of misery but it is also a realistic representation of rural India. The novelist indicts Sanskritised Brahminical religion. The main thrust of Godan is to arouse the humanitarian attitude in man so that society learns to move on the path of socialism and a happy world. The novel presents a synthesis of art and society, man and his age. The novelist has expressed his views on religion, caste, social set-up and community in realistic manner

Blood-brain barrier-associated pericytes internalize and clear aggregated amyloid-β42 by LRP1-dependent apolipoprotein E isoform-specific mechanism

Table S1. Demographic and clinical features of human subjects used in this study. Figure S1. Aβ deposition in microvessels in AD patients and APPSw/0 mice. Figure S2. Biochemical analysis of Aβ42 aggregates. Figure S3. Cy3-Aβ42 cellular uptake in wild type mouse brain slices within 30 min. Figure S4. Pericyte coverages in Lrp1lox/lox and Lrp1lox/lox; Cspg4-Cre mice. Figure S5.. LRP1 and apoE suppression with siRNA. (DOCX 1454 kb

XWikiGen: Cross-lingual Summarization for Encyclopedic Text Generation in Low Resource Languages

Lack of encyclopedic text contributors, especially on Wikipedia, makes automated text generation for low resource (LR) languages a critical problem. Existing work on Wikipedia text generation has focused on English only where English reference articles are summarized to generate English Wikipedia pages. But, for low-resource languages, the scarcity of reference articles makes monolingual summarization ineffective in solving this problem. Hence, in this work, we propose XWikiGen, which is the task of cross-lingual multi-document summarization of text from multiple reference articles, written in various languages, to generate Wikipedia-style text. Accordingly, we contribute a benchmark dataset, XWikiRef, spanning ~69K Wikipedia articles covering five domains and eight languages. We harness this dataset to train a two-stage system where the input is a set of citations and a section title and the output is a section-specific LR summary. The proposed system is based on a novel idea of neural unsupervised extractive summarization to coarsely identify salient information followed by a neural abstractive model to generate the section-specific text. Extensive experiments show that multi-domain training is better than the multi-lingual setup on average

XF2T: Cross-lingual Fact-to-Text Generation for Low-Resource Languages

Multiple business scenarios require an automated generation of descriptive human-readable text from structured input data. Hence, fact-to-text generation systems have been developed for various downstream tasks like generating soccer reports, weather and financial reports, medical reports, person biographies, etc. Unfortunately, previous work on fact-to-text (F2T) generation has focused primarily on English mainly due to the high availability of relevant datasets. Only recently, the problem of cross-lingual fact-to-text (XF2T) was proposed for generation across multiple languages alongwith a dataset, XALIGN for eight languages. However, there has been no rigorous work on the actual XF2T generation problem. We extend XALIGN dataset with annotated data for four more languages: Punjabi, Malayalam, Assamese and Oriya. We conduct an extensive study using popular Transformer-based text generation models on our extended multi-lingual dataset, which we call XALIGNV2. Further, we investigate the performance of different text generation strategies: multiple variations of pretraining, fact-aware embeddings and structure-aware input encoding. Our extensive experiments show that a multi-lingual mT5 model which uses fact-aware embeddings with structure-aware input encoding leads to best results on average across the twelve languages. We make our code, dataset and model publicly available, and hope that this will help advance further research in this critical area

Effect of Ethephon Stimulation on Downward Tapping in Latex Production Metabolism on Upward Tapping in PB 217 Clone of Hevea Brasiliensis

In Hevea brasiliensis, Ethephon is used as an exogenous stimulant of latex production. In downward tapping, it has been shown that its misuse has negative consequences on the metabolism of the latex cells of the tree. However, little is known about the impact of this downward tapping practice on latex-producing metabolism in upward tapping. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of stimulation in downward tapping on the latex-producing metabolism in clones PB 217, when the trees are subsequently tapped up. Study was carried out by monitoring the evolution of biochemical parameters of latex and rubber production. From this study, it was found during the last two years of downward tapping that in PB 217 clone, the optimal metabolism of latex production was obtained with 13 Ethephon stimulations per year. When subsequent tapping is done upward, the stimulation frequencies of the trees greater than 4 times per year in downward tapping have a negative impact on the latex-producing metabolism in PB 217 clone of Hevea brasiliensis. However, in cumulative production over the 10 years of downward tapping added to the 2 years of upward tapping, it is the frequency of 13 stimulations per year in downward tapping which is the highest

Wireless Biometric Attendance Management System

Design of an automated system by using real time NRF - biometric system for simple and time saving attendance on a regular basis using the finger prints of the students at any college or department level along with the students incoming and outgoing log maintenance. Initially students fingerprints are scanned by the scanner and then a unique number is allotted as their individual enrollment. While taking the attendance, when students impress their fingerprints against the scanner, the system will compare the new fingerprint patterns and the connection between various points in the fingerprint and then match with the enrolment database. A match is recorded as an indication of processing, matching and mark of attendance respectively. Through this automated system,time, paperwork and manpower is reduced to the great extent

Orexin receptors exert a neuroprotective effect in Alzheimer's disease (AD) via heterodimerization with GPR103

Orexins are neuropeptides that regulate the sleep-wake cycle and feeding behaviour. QRFP is a newly discovered neuropeptide which exerts similar orexigenic activity, thus playing an important role in energy homeostasis and regulation of appetite. The exact expression and signalling characteristics and physiological actions of QRFP and its receptor GPR103 are poorly understood. Alzheimerâ €™ s disease (AD) patients experience increased nocturnal activity, excessive daytime sleepiness, and weight loss. We hypothesised therefore that orexins and QRFP might be implicated in the pathophysiology of AD. We report that the down-regulation of hippocampal orexin receptors (OXRs) and GPR103 particularly in the cornu ammonis (CA) subfield from AD patients suffering from early onset familial AD (EOFAD) and late onset familial AD (LOAD). Using an in vitro model we demonstrate that this downregulation is due to to Aβ-plaque formation and tau hyper-phosphorylation. Transcriptomics revealed a neuroprotective role for both orexins and QRFP. Finally we provide conclusive evidence using BRET and FRET that OXRs and GPR103 form functional hetero-dimers to exert their effects involving activation of ERK 1/2. Pharmacological intervention directed at the orexigenic system may prove to be an attractive avenue towards the discovery of novel therapeutics for diseases such as AD and improving neuroprotective signalling pathways

Endothelial LRP1 protects against neurodegeneration by blocking cyclophilin A

The low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP1) is an endocytic and cell signaling transmembrane protein. Endothelial LRP1 clears proteinaceous toxins at the blood-brain barrier (BBB), regulates angiogenesis, and is increasingly reduced in Alzheimer\u27s disease associated with BBB breakdown and neurodegeneration. Whether loss of endothelial LRP1 plays a direct causative role in BBB breakdown and neurodegenerative changes remains elusive. Here, we show that LRP1 inactivation from the mouse endothelium results in progressive BBB breakdown, followed by neuron loss and cognitive deficits, which is reversible by endothelial-specific LRP1 gene therapy. LRP1 endothelial knockout led to a self-autonomous activation of the cyclophilin A-matrix metalloproteinase-9 pathway in the endothelium, causing loss of tight junctions underlying structural BBB impairment. Cyclophilin A inhibition in mice with endothelial-specific LRP1 knockout restored BBB integrity and reversed and prevented neuronal loss and behavioral deficits. Thus, endothelial LRP1 protects against neurodegeneration by inhibiting cyclophilin A, which has implications for the pathophysiology and treatment of neurodegeneration linked to vascular dysfunction