Physiology and Anatomy of Hair in Drug Abusing Cases

To interpret the results of hair analysis tests accurately and to understand the appropriate role of hair analysis in drug abuse testing and solve instances of poisoning, drug and substance abuse, a basic knowledge of the biology of hair is essential. In case of poising by heavy metals, the hair retains traces of poison for a considerable period. Chemical examination of hair in such cases will reveal the presence of poison in the living as well as exhumed whose biology is only partially understood. Hair grows from small organs (follicles-a skin organ which produce hair) located within the complex microenvironment of the skin which has multiple layers of tissue, three glands whose secretions bathe hair, and multiple vascular systems which are capable of transferring drugs to hair at many levels along the path of the hair shaft. The advantages and disadvantages of using pubic, scalp and beard hair as specimens for hair analysis are also considered. A more precise understanding of the mechanisms involved in the incorporation of drugs into hair is critical for forensic scientist in order to interpret the results of hair analysis properly

Prostate cancer: emerging pharmacotherapeutic modalities

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in the world due to factors like old age, family history, ethnicity, diet and some elements exposure, with lot of controversies regarding prevention of prostate cancer. Though the exact pathogenesis is not clear, epidemiological evidence supports a relationship between prostate cancer and hormone levels. In this review article we are focusing on the advances in different pharmacotherapeutic modalities i.e. Chemoprevention, Prostate-Specific Antigen, Hormone Therapy, Anti-Inflammatory Drugs, SERM, Vaccines, Cryotherapy, Watchful Waiting, Radiotherapy and Androgen Deprivation Therapy etc. and new possibilities with strategies to provide maximal benefits while effectively balancing risks for the prostate cancer treatment

Trends in rates and methods of suicide in India

AbstractSuicide has been around for as long as human society, ranking among the top 13 causes of death in all ages worldwide and continues to challenge our collective wisdom. The present study is a retrospective study evaluating suicide cases in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh and one of the largest cities in India, between Jan 2008 and Oct 2012. There were 5204 cases with 2946 male (56.61%) and 2258 female (43.38%) victims, between ages 20 and 60years; suicide rates ranged from 21.55 to 24.23 per 100,000 population. The method of suicide was different between male and female victims, as male victims tried to use more violent methods than females. The present study showed that suicide rates have increased since 1994, indicating a grave problem that needs to be solved

The Genetic and environmental risk Factors of Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer is one of the most common neurodegenerative disease generally found in the form of dementia in old age population. Advanced age is still considered as most influencing risk factors for this disease. WHO reported that dementia is the seventh leading cause of death in 2018 and affecting about fifty million people worldwide. Aging led to impair protein metabolism in the Alzheimer’s disease. A number of molecular events has been implicated behind this disease. As AD is a chronic neurodegenerative disease and etiology is still unclear, familial AD accounts only 5% of the disease. Then it is important to know about some other hidden risk factors that may play crucial role in the onset of the disease. Thus, this paper focused on the role of genetics, different environmental, oxidative stress factors and its association with the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease

Checklist of family Poaceae in Lahaul and Spiti district (Cold Desert), Himachal Pradesh, India

The present study provides an overview of the diversity and distribution of grass species in Lahaul- Spiti district (cold desert) situated in the Trans-Himalayan region i.e. Himachal Pradesh, India. From the study area 141 taxa (138 species and 3 subspecies) belonging to 14 tribes were recorded. The largest tribe was Festuceae followed by Agrostideae having 48 and 20 species, respectively. Two species Poa koelzii and P. Lahaulensis are endemic to Lahaul- Spiti. Puccinellia kashmiriana is rare as per IUCN status. The present study on the grass floral wealth of Lahaul-Spiti provides an important baseline data on grasses for further quantitative and qualitative investigations like their nutritive values, crop improvement programmes and shall also help in the identification of priority conservation areas in the region

Fe–TiO2_2 composite beads driven hybrid process of photocatalysis and photo-Fenton for the degradation of isoproturon

The concept of hybrid process of photo-Fenton and photocatalysis, particularly in the fixed mode, has been presented in this study for the degradation of the pesticide isoproturon with reduction at the time of treatment. For fixed-bed studies, spherical beads were prepared by combining definite proportions of clay, foundry sand, and fly ash, which were utilized as iron sources for titanium dioxide (TiO2) immobilization. The optimization of various parameters was performed by utilizing the Box–Behnken design model under response surface methodology. The process of degradation followed first-order kinetics under an optimized condition for the integrated degradation of isoproturon with a 700 mg${\cdot }$L-1 dose of H2O2, 42 spherical beads, and 190 mL of solution for a duration of 176 min at pH 3.7. Approximately 80.96% degradation of isoproturon was observed after inducing the optimized conditions. The integrated treatment was also carried out in a solar batch reactor under optimized conditions to expand its application to industries for treating bio-recalcitrant compounds. The mineralization of isoproturon was confirmed through the generation of nitrate, nitrite, and ammonical nitrogen with a definite chemical oxygen demand reduction. The recyclability of the catalyst was confirmed by recycling the spherical beads characterized by scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive X-Ray analysis. For confirming the dual effect, that is, the presence of TiO2 along with Fe on the bead’s surface, various analyses including UV–diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy–energy-dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy were carried out. A tentative pathway for isoproturon removal was also predicted based on intermediate analysis through gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy

Fe–TiO2_2 composite beads driven hybrid process of photocatalysis and photo-Fenton for the degradation of isoproturon

The concept of hybrid process of photo-Fenton and photocatalysis, particularly in the fixed mode, has been presented in this study for the degradation of the pesticide isoproturon with reduction at the time of treatment. For fixed-bed studies, spherical beads were prepared by combining definite proportions of clay, foundry sand, and fly ash, which were utilized as iron sources for titanium dioxide (TiO2) immobilization. The optimization of various parameters was performed by utilizing the Box–Behnken design model under response surface methodology. The process of degradation followed first-order kinetics under an optimized condition for the integrated degradation of isoproturon with a 700 mg${\cdot }$L-1 dose of H2O2, 42 spherical beads, and 190 mL of solution for a duration of 176 min at pH 3.7. Approximately 80.96% degradation of isoproturon was observed after inducing the optimized conditions. The integrated treatment was also carried out in a solar batch reactor under optimized conditions to expand its application to industries for treating bio-recalcitrant compounds. The mineralization of isoproturon was confirmed through the generation of nitrate, nitrite, and ammonical nitrogen with a definite chemical oxygen demand reduction. The recyclability of the catalyst was confirmed by recycling the spherical beads characterized by scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive X-Ray analysis. For confirming the dual effect, that is, the presence of TiO2 along with Fe on the bead’s surface, various analyses including UV–diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy–energy-dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy were carried out. A tentative pathway for isoproturon removal was also predicted based on intermediate analysis through gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy

Analysis and classification of electroencephalography signals

EEG signal processing is one of the hottest areas of research in digital signal processing applications and biomedical research. Analysis of EEG signals provides a crucial tool for diagnosis of neurobiological diseases. The problem of EEG signal classification into healthy and pathological cases is primarily a pattern recognition problem using extracted features. Many methods of feature extraction have been applied to extract the relevant characteristics from a given EEG data. The EEG data was collected from a publicly available source. Three types of cases were classified viz. signals recorded from healthy volunteers having their eyes open, epilepsy patients in the epileptogenic zone during a seizure-free interval, and epilepsy patients during epileptic seizures. The feature extraction was done by computing the discrete wavelet transform and spectral analysis using AR model. The wavelet transform coefficients compress the number of data points into few features. Various statistics were used to further reduce the dimensionality. The AR coefficients obtained from burg auto-regressive method provide important features of the EEG signals. Classification of the EEG data using committee neural network provides robust and improved performance over individual members of the committee. F-ratio based dimension reduction technique was used to reduce the number of features without affecting the accuracy much

Estimation of postmortem interval using the data of insulin level in the cadaver׳s blood

An assessment of levels of Insulin in cadaveric fluids, to estimate the postmortem interval (PMI) was carried out.To profile postmortem changes of Insulin, it was extracted at different intervals i.e. (0, 3, 6, 12, 24 h), from the heart of 22 human cadavers. The cases included were the subjects of accidental deaths without any prior history of disease and their exact time of death was known. Immunoanalyzer Cobas e-411 instrument was used to detect the relationship between the amount of Insulin and PMI.Level of Insulin was measured in cardiac blood. Statically, significant correlations between levels of Insulin and PMI were studied and correlation coefficients were calculated. SPSS (version 12.0) was used for statistical analysis.Insulin levels in cadaver blood are correlated significantly with PMI with a p value of <0.001. When insulin level increases by 1 unit the duration decreases by 0.93 units. The least square regression line is: [Duration(Y)=22.71−0.93 Insulin level (X)] Keywords: Blood, Insulin, Post-mortem interval, Cadaver

Audit of burn deaths among older adults in North India – An autopsy-based study

Objective: Burn injury among older adults above 60 years of age will result in notable morbidity and mortality despite the many advances in treatment. The motive of this study was to record and assess the causes and magnitude of the fatal burns in older adults. Methods: This study was carried out on older adults who were autopsied at Forensic Medicine & Toxicology Department of King George’s Medical University, India. From a total of 26,880 medico legal deaths reported over a period of 6 years 2008–2013, 2695 (10.02%) deaths were due to burns. Among which 77 were older adults who forms the material of this study. The results were presented in Mean ± SD and percentages and analyzed with SPSS 16.0. Results: In all burn deaths among older adults, 41.6% of the victims were male and 58.4% were female with male: female ratio 1:1.4. Most common manner of deaths among elderly was accident (42.9%) followed by homicide (35.1%) and suicide (22%). Women in all three groups were more to the risk of burn deaths. Causative agents for the accidental deaths were fire in all cases while in suicidal and homicidal deaths the causative agents were sprinkling /pouring of kerosene. 54.7% of the suicidal victim’s had burns >70% TBSA (total body surface area). Conclusion: Results of this study shows that incidence of burn mortality was significantly higher among females. Most common manner of deaths among elderly is accident. Women in all three groups are more to the risk of burn deaths. Majority of burn victims were between the ages of 60–69 years. The percentage of TBSA was found to be significantly higher among suicidal subjects. Results of this study provide the necessary information to implement programs for health education relating to prevention of burns