Frequency of metabolic syndrome in stroke: a study in a tertiary health care centre in north Kerala

Background: Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability in developing countries beginning to affect young adults. Key components of the metabolic syndrome are important risk factors for stroke. This study intended to study the prevalence of metabolic syndrome in patients with stroke. Screening adolescents and young adults for components of metabolic syndrome will prove useful in clinical management, and its elements ultimately become important therapeutic targets for the reduction of stroke burden in the general population.Methods: Data was collected from 150 patients who were admitted with cerebrovascular accident (CVA) in the Department of Medicine. Frequency tests were conducted for various risk factors. Chi-square and Fisher exact test were used to test the significance of proportion of study parameters in the classes. The observations in this study were analysed using SPSS software.Results: Metabolic syndrome was present in 46% of the study population. Among the components of the metabolic syndrome, Hypertension was the most prevalent risk factor (68%). 67.14% of the population had 2 components of metabolic syndrome which predisposes them to a greater risk of developing metabolic syndrome over a period of few months to years.Conclusions: With the obesity epidemic, the impact of the metabolic syndrome is likely to increase. Thus, diagnosing and adequately managing metabolic syndrome is an important step in the preventing cerebrovascular disease. This study emphasises the need to target the population with one or more components of the metabolic syndrome as they are at high risk of developing stroke in the future

Maximum Power Point Tracking Algorithm for Advanced Photovoltaic Systems

Photovoltaic (PV) systems are the major nonconventional sources for power generation for present power strategy. The power of PV system has rapid increase because of its unpolluted, less noise and limited maintenance. But whole PV system has two main disadvantages drawbacks, that is, the power generation of it is quite low and the output power is nonlinear, which is influenced by climatic conditions, namely environmental temperature and the solar irradiation. The natural limiting factor is that PV potential in respect of temperature and irradiation has nonlinear output behavior. An automated power tracking method, for example, maximum power point tracking (MPPT), is necessarily applied to improve the power generation of PV systems. The MPPT methods undergo serious challenges when the PV system is under partial shade condition because PV shows several peaks in power. Hence, the exploration method might easily be misguided and might trapped to the local maxima. Therefore, a reasonable exploratory method must be constructed, which has to determine the global maxima for PV of shaded partially. The traditional approaches namely constant voltage tracking (CVT), perturb and observe (P&O), hill climbing (HC), Incremental Conductance (INC), and fractional open circuit voltage (FOCV) methods, indeed some of their improved types, are quite incompetent in tracking the global MPP (GMPP). Traditional techniques and soft computing-based bio-inspired and nature-inspired algorithms applied to MPPT were reviewed to explore the possibility for research while optimizing the PV system with global maximum output power under partially shading conditions. This paper is aimed to review, compare, and analyze almost all the techniques that implemented so far. Further this paper provides adequate details about algorithms that focuses to derive improved MPPT under non-uniform irradiation. Each algorithm got merits and demerits of its own with respect to the converging speed, computing time, complexity of coding, hardware suitability, stability and so on

Bandwidth Recycling using Variable Bit Rate

IEEE 802.16 standard was designed to support the bandwidth demanding applications with quality of service (QoS). Bandwidth is reserved for each application to ensure the QoS. For variable bit rate (VBR) applications, however, it is difficult for the subscriber station (SS) to predict the amount of incoming data. To ensure the QoS guaranteed services, the SS may reserve more bandwidth than its demand. As a result, the reserved bandwidth may not be fully utilized all the time. In this paper, we propose a scheme, named Bandwidth Recycling, to recycle the unused bandwidth without changing the existing bandwidth reservation. The idea of the proposed scheme is to allow other SSs to utilize the unused bandwidth when it is available. Thus, the system throughput can be improved while maintaining the same QoS guaranteed services. Mathematical analysis and simulation are used to evaluate the proposed scheme. Simulation and analysis results confirm that the proposed scheme can recycle 35% of unused bandwidth on average. By analyzing factors affecting the recycling performance, three scheduling algorithms are proposed to improve the overall throughput. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm improves the overall throughput by 40% in a steady network. Keywords: WiMAX, IEEE 802.16, Bandwidth Recyclin

Ultra-high Performance Liquid Chromatography in Steroid Analysis

The latest version of liquid chromatography is ultra-high performance (or pressure) chromatography (UHPLC). In the technique, short and narrow-bore columns with particle sizes below 3 µm are used. The extremely high pressure used results in very short analysis times, excellent separation, and good resolution. This makes UHPLC a good choice for steroidal analysis. Steroids are a highly interesting area of study; they can be recognized as biomarkers for several diseases and are a relevant topic in doping testing. In this thesis articles on the topic ‘steroid analysis with UHPLC’, published prior to April 2017, are reviewed. UHPLC is always combined with mass spectrometry (MS) for steroid analysis. The MS utilized is usually of multi-dimension: quadrupole time of flight (QTOF) or triple quadrupole (QqQ). The instrumentation is suitable for both untargeted and targeted analysis. In untargeted studies, the study of changes in the human metabolome has been especially interesting. The articles on targeted studies are usually focused on doping control and quantification of identified biomarkers. The analysis with UHPLC-MS/MS usually provide reliable results with fast analysis time, without complicated sample preparation. Typically, the sample preparation processes can include only protein precipitation, liquid-liquid extraction or solid-phase extraction. UHPLC is also a valuable tool in simple and routine analysis. The separation efficiency is increased by the small plate height and the analysis time can thus be reduced. In this thesis work the technique was utilized for the analysis of food additives. For validation of an UHPLC method the repeatability, trueness, bias, measurement uncertainty and other factors need to be assessed. The experimental part of the thesis is dedicated to describe the development and validation of a method for analysis of five food additives and caffeine. The developed method was partly validated, with the aim to fulfil the needs of the Finnish Customs Laboratory. The optimized method comprised of an injection volume of 2 µL and a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The buffer was a phosphate buffer at pH of 4.0 and the gradient elution program was from 6 % to 30 % of acetonitrile in 1.6 minutes, then 1.6-1.7 minutes with 6% acetonitrile. The total run time was only 1.7 minutes. The limit of detection values was between 0.02 µg/mL and 1.73 µg/mL. The limit of quantitation values was between 0.054 µg/mL to 5.78 µg/mL, which should be sufficient for the Customs needs in the sense of checking if a product is over a certain limit. Expanded measurement uncertainties were around 20 %

Changes in biological productivity associated with Ningaloo Niño / Niña events in the southern subtropical Indian Ocean in recent decades

Using observations and long term simulations of an ocean-biogeochemical coupled model, we investigate the biological response in the southern subtropical Indian Ocean (SIO) associated with Ningaloo Niño and Niña events. Ningaloo events have large impact on sea surface temperature (SST) with positive SST anomalies (SSTA) seen off the west coast of Australia in southern SIO during Ningaloo Niño and negative anomalies during Niña events. Our results indicate that during the developing period of Ningaloo Niño, low chlorophyll anomaly appears near the southwest Australian coast concurrently with high SSTA and vice-versa during Niña, which alter the seasonal cycle of biological productivity. The difference in the spatiotemporal response of chlorophyll is due to the southward advection of Leeuwin current during these events. Increased frequency of Ningaloo Niño events associated with cold phase of Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) resulted in anomalous decrease in productivity during Austral summer in the SIO in the recent decades

Transcription Factors Mediate the Enzymatic Disassembly of Promoter-Bound 7SK snRNP to Locally Recruit P-TEFb for Transcription Elongation

SummaryThe transition from transcription initiation into elongation is controlled by transcription factors, which recruit positive transcription elongation factor b (P-TEFb) to promoters to phosphorylate RNA polymerase II. A fraction of P-TEFb is recruited as part of the inhibitory 7SK small nuclear ribonucleoprotein particle (snRNP), which inactivates the kinase and prevents elongation. However, it is unclear how P-TEFb is captured from the promoter-bound 7SK snRNP to activate elongation. Here, we describe a mechanism by which transcription factors mediate the enzymatic release of P-TEFb from the 7SK snRNP at promoters to trigger activation in a gene-specific manner. We demonstrate that Tat recruits PPM1G/PP2Cγ to locally disassemble P-TEFb from the 7SK snRNP at the HIV promoter via dephosphorylation of the kinase T loop. Similar to Tat, nuclear factor (NF)-κB recruits PPM1G in a stimulus-dependent manner to activate elongation at inflammatory-responsive genes. Recruitment of PPM1G to promoter-assembled 7SK snRNP provides a paradigm for rapid gene activation through transcriptional pause release

A neonate with perianal cellulitis due to leukocyte adhesion deficiency - A case report

Leukocyte adhesion deficiency (LAD) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by absence or dysfunctional CD18 on the surface of leukocytes due to a mutation in ITGB2 gene. The hallmarks of LAD are defects in leukocyte adhesion and marked leukocytosis. It is characterized by recurrent bacterial infections of the skin and mucosal membrane. Here, we report clinical and flow cytometric immunophenotyping of a baby diagnosed with LAD Type 1