Anatomical Parameters Associated with Osteoarthritis of the Knee Joint

Background & aim: Throughout the world, half of the people over 70 years of age suffer from knee osteoarthritis and detection of the factors associated with this disease is important. The present study was conducted to examine the association of knee joint anatomic parameters with osteoarthritis occurrence. Methods: In the present observational-comparative study, ninety-four patients with joint osteoarthritis as case group and 106 healthy individuals as control group were enrolled from Orthopedic Clinic of Shahrekord Hospital into the study for comparison. Anatomical parameters such as tibial plateau tilt, Cam effect, and tibial plateau coverage by femoral condyles were calculated by using radiographic findings and compared between two groups. The data were analyzed by SPSS software 16 using chi-square and Pearson correlation Results: Tibial plateau tilt values in patients with osteoarthritis of knee (11.9±3.4°) was significantly higher than the control group (10.2±1.9 °) (p<0.001). Cam effect in patients with osteoarthritis (1.8 ± 0.1) was higher than control group (1.7± 0.1) (p< 0.001). Index of tibial plateau articular surface occupied by condyles of femur in patients with osteoarthritis were 2/3±9/51% and 1/2±1/50% in the control group respectively (p<001/0).Tibial plateau coverage was identified in patients with osteoarthritis equal to 51.9 ± 3.2% and in the control group 50.1±2.1%. These parameters were not associated with each other, as well as age and gender (p>0.05). Conclusion: Anatomic parameters under study could be used to predict osteoarthritis occurrence in healthy individuals

Production of tau tau jj final states at the LHC and the TauSpinner algorithm: the spin-2 case

The TauSpinner algorithm is a tool that allows to modify the physics model of the Monte Carlo generated samples due to the changed assumptions of event production dynamics, but without the need of re-generating events. With the help of weights $\tau$-lepton production or decay processes can be modified accordingly to a new physics model. In a recent paper a new version TauSpinner ver.2.0.0 has been presented which includes a provision for introducing non-standard states and couplings and study their effects in the vector-boson-fusion processes by exploiting the spin correlations of $\tau$-lepton pair decay products in processes where final states include also two hard jets. In the present paper we document how this can be achieved taking as an example the non-standard spin-2 state that couples to Standard Model particles and tree-level matrix elements with complete helicity information included for the parton-parton scattering amplitudes into a $\tau$-lepton pair and two outgoing partons. This implementation is prepared as the external (user provided) routine for the TauSpinner algorithm. It exploits amplitudes generated by MadGraph5 and adopted to the TauSpinner algorithm format. Consistency tests of the implemented matrix elements, reweighting algorithm and numerical results for observables sensitive to $\tau$ polarization are presented.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures; version published in EPJ

Densest Subgraph in Dynamic Graph Streams

In this paper, we consider the problem of approximating the densest subgraph in the dynamic graph stream model. In this model of computation, the input graph is defined by an arbitrary sequence of edge insertions and deletions and the goal is to analyze properties of the resulting graph given memory that is sub-linear in the size of the stream. We present a single-pass algorithm that returns a $(1+\epsilon)$ approximation of the maximum density with high probability; the algorithm uses O(\epsilon^{-2} n \polylog n) space, processes each stream update in \polylog (n) time, and uses \poly(n) post-processing time where $n$ is the number of nodes. The space used by our algorithm matches the lower bound of Bahmani et al.~(PVLDB 2012) up to a poly-logarithmic factor for constant $\epsilon$. The best existing results for this problem were established recently by Bhattacharya et al.~(STOC 2015). They presented a $(2+\epsilon)$ approximation algorithm using similar space and another algorithm that both processed each update and maintained a $(4+\epsilon)$ approximation of the current maximum density in \polylog (n) time per-update.Comment: To appear in MFCS 201

Medicinal plants and secondary metabolites for leech control

No

Ethnobotanical study of medicinal plants used by Kurd tribe in Dehloran and Abdanan districts, Ilam province, Iran

This paper provides significant ethnobotanical information on pharmaceutical plant uses, where some degree of acculturation exists, so that there is urgency in recording such data. The aim of this work is to catalogue, document, and make known the uses of plants for folk medicine in Dehloran and Abdanan districts, Ilam Province, Iran. An analysis was made of the species used, parts of the plant employed, preparation methods, administration means, and the ailments treated in relation to pathological groups. A folk botanical survey was carried out fromFebruary 2007 to October 2009. The information was collected from 81 persons (60% men and 40% women) in 20 villages. The informants reported data on 122 species, belonging to 49 botanical families, were claimed as medicinal. This work is focused on human medicinal plant uses, which represent 95% of the pharmaceutical uses. The most commonly represented families were Asteraceae (37.5%), Lamiaceae (20.8%), Rosaceae (18.7%), Fabaceae (16.7%) and Apiaceae (14.6%). Some of the uses were found to be new when compared with published literature on ethnomedicine of Iran. The folk knowledge about medicinal plant use is still alive in the studied region, and a number of scarcely reported plant uses has been detected, some of them with promising phytotherapeutical applications. The results of the study reveal that some of species play an important role in primary healthcare system of these tribal communities

Short communication: Seasonal changes of blood serum ions in Beluga (Huso huso) cultured in brackish water

Living sturgeons (Acipenseridae) are representatives of the ancient group Chondrostei, which had a common origin with Palaeonisci, known from the Devonian period. In spite of their freshwater origin, in their history, they occupied different salinities and at present, they can live in both fresh and seawater mediums. Study of osmotic and ionic regulation in acipenserids, that connect to marine conditions in different extents (freshwater, diadromous brackish water, diadromous seawater), make it possible to establish the dependence of functional level of osmotic and ionic homeostatic mechanisms from medium salinity in some acipenserids. It was ascertained that in higher salinities, the functional level of these mechanisms increases. So investigation of osmo-ion regulation is one of the most important problems in the culture of sturgeon in new mediums

Pseudomoniasis phytotherapy: A review on most important Iranian medicinal plants effective on Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Background and Objectives: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative, aerobic bacterium found in water and soil. It is a normal flora in skin and gastrointestinal tract of human beings. P. aeruginosa as an opportunistic pathogen involved in nosocomial infections having multiple pathogenic factors and shows high rate of resistance to different antibiotics. The aim of this study was to identify the most important native medicinal plants of Iran effective on P. aeruginosa. Materials and Methods: All required information was obtained by searching keywords such as P. aeruginosa, medicinal plant extracts or essential oils in published articles in authentic scientific databases such as Science Direct, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Google scholar, Scientific Information Database (SID) and Magiran. Results: According to the literature review, our results showed 12 different native medicinal plants were effective against P. aeruginosa in Iran including Eucalyptus camadulensis, Marticaria chamomilla, Ferula gummosa Boiss, Lawsonia inermis, Ocimumgra tissimum, Allium sativum, Satureja hortensis L, Satureja bachtiarica Bunge, Satureja khuzestanica (Jamzad), Thymus daenensis Celak, Thymus carmanicus Jalals and Camellia sinensis. Conclusion: Phytochemical analysis has shown that bioactive compounds of medicinal plants with their antioxidant and antimicrobial properties can be good alternatives for the synthetic medicines in food and drug industry. © Tehran University of Medical Science. All rights reserved

The study of intensity and frequency of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from war in Ilam city

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a set of a person's reactions to stresses which are beyond one's mental capacity and precedes a severe stress. The aim of this Research was to study the intensity and frequency of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from war in Ilam city. This descriptive- analytic study was investigated the PTSD among the residents of Ilam city who were involved directly or indirectly in the war issues. The sample size was 5110 people chosen through cluster sampling technique. Data were analyzed through statistical methods such as K2 test, t-test, linear regression test, and variance analysis in SPSS software. The results of the study revealed that 26 of the cases who had residence background in Ilam city during Iraqi war against Iran suffered from mental disorder (PTSD). Most of these patients were married, illiterate, or primary educated people and mostly the young and middle aged housewives. The war-induced posttraumatic stress disorder has had negative effects on different aspects of Ilam city residents' health. Therefore, identifying the vulnerable groups to apply medical treatment seemed important and necessary

A tight lower bound instance for k-means++ in constant dimension

The k-means++ seeding algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms that is used for finding the initial $k$ centers when using the k-means heuristic. The algorithm is a simple sampling procedure and can be described as follows: Pick the first center randomly from the given points. For $i > 1$, pick a point to be the $i^{th}$ center with probability proportional to the square of the Euclidean distance of this point to the closest previously $(i-1)$ chosen centers. The k-means++ seeding algorithm is not only simple and fast but also gives an $O(\log{k})$ approximation in expectation as shown by Arthur and Vassilvitskii. There are datasets on which this seeding algorithm gives an approximation factor of $\Omega(\log{k})$ in expectation. However, it is not clear from these results if the algorithm achieves good approximation factor with reasonably high probability (say $1/poly(k)$). Brunsch and R\"{o}glin gave a dataset where the k-means++ seeding algorithm achieves an $O(\log{k})$ approximation ratio with probability that is exponentially small in $k$. However, this and all other known lower-bound examples are high dimensional. So, an open problem was to understand the behavior of the algorithm on low dimensional datasets. In this work, we give a simple two dimensional dataset on which the seeding algorithm achieves an $O(\log{k})$ approximation ratio with probability exponentially small in $k$. This solves open problems posed by Mahajan et al. and by Brunsch and R\"{o}glin.Comment: To appear in TAMC 2014. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1306.420

The effect of most important medicinal plants on two importnt psychiatric disorders (anxiety and depression)-a review

Anxiety and depression are highly comorbid psychiatric conditions that the prevalence will be increased to the second greatest risk of morbidity, causing a significant socioeconomic burden. Due to side effects and destructive effects of some chemical drugs, many patients prefer herbal medicines to treat diseases. Although there are key review papers in the area of medicinal plants and psychiatry disorders, they have either covered the area in a relatively cursory manner or focused on a specific plant medicine. In the present study, we tried to present the effect of most important medicinal plants on two important highly comorbid psychiatric conditions-anxiety and depression