Placental Morphology of Pregnant Iraqi Women with Rheumatic Heart Disease

Background: Placental morphology and cellular arrangement can be altered in maternal diseases. Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) is a chronic heart condition that can lead to death in pregnant women. The aim of this study is to determine the histological changes of the placenta in pregnant women suffering from RHD. Methods: Placentae were collected from 10 healthy pregnant women, and 31 pregnant women with heart conditions (26 with RHD and 5 with NRHD) who had been admitted to the Baghdad Teaching Hospital. Placental tissues were fixed in 10% formal-saline and were processed for light microscopy. Measurements including the placental weight and diameter of the chorionic villi capillaries were recorded. Results: The results indicate that there are many histological changes in pregnant women with RHD such as hyalinisation, fibrosis of the chorionic villi, proliferation of trophoblastic cells, and thickening of its membrane. Additionally, expectant mothers with RHD experience a reduction in capillary diameter and thickening of the capillary walls, and decreased size and weight of their placenta when compared with the control. Conclusions: Heart diseases, especially RHD, are associated with developmental damage of the placenta in pregnant women by injuring the endothelial cells of the placentas capillaries

Assessment of Natural Radionuclides in Powdered Milk Consumed in Iraq

The activity concentrations of 226Ra232Th, and 40K radionuclides were measured for 10 brands of powdered milk samples consumed in Iraq,which are imported from different countries.The main detected activity corresponding to 40K with average activity of 290.661 BqKg-1, while the average activities of 226Ra and232Th were below the detection level (B.D.L.).Results are compared with those of different countries worldwide.The total average annual effective doses due to intake of 40Kfrom the ingestion of the powdered milk for children (2-7, 7-12, 12-17)y and adults (≥ 17y) were estimated to be82.21, 50.90, 29.75 and 22.55 µSvy-1, respectively. These results indicate no significant radiation dose to the public. The resulting data may serve as base-line levels of activity concentration in powdered milk in the area of study. Keywords: Natural Radioactivity, Milk, Ingestion dose, Hazard quotient

Reconstruction of Nonunion Tibial Fractures in War-Wounded Iraqi Civilians, 2006-2008: Better Late Than Never

OBJECTIV

An Ensemble Model for Detection of Adverse Drug Reactions

The detection of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) plays a necessary role in comprehending the safety and benefit profiles of medicines. Although spontaneous reporting stays the standard approach for ADR documents, it suffers from significant under reporting rates and limitations in terms of treatment inspection. This study proposes an ensemble model that combines decision trees, support vector machines, random forests, and adaptive boosting (ADA-boost) to improve ADR detection. The experimental evaluation applied the benchmark data set and many preprocessing techniques such as tokenization, stop-word removal, stemming, and utilization of Point-wise Mutual Information. In addition, two term representations, namely, term frequency-inverse document frequency and term frequency, are utilized. The proposed ensemble model achieves an F-measure of 89% on the dataset. The proposed ensemble model shows its ability in detecting ADR to be a favored option in achieving both accuracy and clarity

Detection of Lupeol in Calendula Officinalis Grown in Iraq by GC-MS Analysis

Triterpenes are abundant group of natural compounds with important structural components of plant’s cell membranes. Free triterpenes stabilize phospholipid bilayers in plant cell membranes just as cholesterol does in animal cell membranes. Lupeol is a pentacyclic trite- rpene reported to have important physiological and therapeutic effects in human health issues, therefore its extraction from Calendula officinalis flowers and detection by GC-MS is of significant importance

Anti-proteinase 3 anti-neutrophil cytoplasm autoantibodies recapitulate systemic vasculitis in mice with a humanized immune system.

Evidence is lacking for direct pathogenicity of human anti-proteinase-3 (PR3) antibodies in development of systemic vasculitis and granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA, Wegener's granulomatosis). Progress in study of these antibodies in rodents has been hampered by lack of PR3 expression on murine neutrophils, and by different Fc-receptor affinities for IgG across species. Therefore, we tested whether human anti-PR3 antibodies can induce acute vasculitis in mice with a human immune system. Chimeric mice were generated by injecting human haematopoietic stem cells into irradiated NOD-scid-IL2Rγ⁻/⁻ mice. Matched chimera mice were treated with human IgG from patients with: anti-PR3 positive renal and lung vasculitis; patients with non-vasculitic renal disease; or healthy controls. Six-days later, 39% of anti-PR3 treated mice had haematuria, compared with none of controls. There was punctate bleeding on the surface of lungs of anti-PR3 treated animals, with histological evidence of vasculitis and haemorrhage. Anti-PR3 treated mice had mild pauci-immune proliferative glomerulonephritis, with infiltration of human and mouse leukocytes. In 3 mice (17%) more severe glomerular injury was present. There were no glomerular changes in controls. Human IgG from patients with anti-PR3 autoantibodies is therefore pathogenic. This model of anti-PR3 antibody-mediated vasculitis may be useful in dissecting mechanisms of microvascular injury

Global burden of human brucellosis : a systematic review of disease frequency

BACKGROUND: This report presents a systematic review of scientific literature published between 1990-2010 relating to the frequency of human brucellosis, commissioned by WHO. The objectives were to identify high quality disease incidence data to complement existing knowledge of the global disease burden and, ultimately, to contribute towards the calculation of a Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) estimate for brucellosis.METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Thirty three databases were searched, identifying 2,385 articles relating to human brucellosis. Based on strict screening criteria, 60 studies were selected for quality assessment, of which only 29 were of sufficient quality for data analysis. Data were only available from 15 countries in the regions of Northern Africa and Middle East, Western Europe, Central and South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central Asia. Half of the studies presented incidence data, six of which were longitudinal prospective studies, and half presented seroprevalence data which were converted to incidence rates. Brucellosis incidence varied widely between, and within, countries. Although study biases cannot be ruled out, demographic, occupational, and socioeconomic factors likely play a role. Aggregated data at national or regional levels do not capture these complexities of disease dynamics and, consequently, at-risk populations or areas may be overlooked. In many brucellosis-endemic countries, health systems are weak and passively-acquired official data underestimate the true disease burden.CONCLUSIONS: High quality research is essential for an accurate assessment of disease burden, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Asia-Pacific, Central and South America and Africa where data are lacking. Providing formal epidemiological and statistical training to researchers is essential for improving study quality. An integrated approach to disease surveillance involving both human health and veterinary services would allow a better understand of disease dynamics at the animal-human interface, as well as a more cost-effective utilisation of resources

Moderate and heavy metabolic stress interval training improve arterial stiffness and heart rate dynamics in humans

Traditional continuous aerobic exercise training attenuates age-related increases of arterial stiffness, however, training studies have not determined whether metabolic stress impacts these favourable effects. Twenty untrained healthy participants (n = 11 heavy metabolic stress interval training, n = 9 moderate metabolic stress interval training) completed 6 weeks of moderate or heavy intensity interval training matched for total work and exercise duration. Carotid artery stiffness, blood pressure contour analysis, and linear and non-linear heart rate variability were assessed before and following training. Overall, carotid arterial stiffness was reduced (p  0.05). This study demonstrates the effectiveness of interval training at improving arterial stiffness and autonomic function, however, the metabolic stress was not a mediator of this effect. In addition, these changes were also independent of improvements in aerobic capacity, which were only induced by training that involved a high metabolic stress