Analysis of drug promotional literature and its abidance to WHO guidelines

Background: Drug promotional literature (DPL) is used by the pharmaceutical companies for promotion of their drug. It is the commonest source for providing information about the drug to the physician. According to WHO promotional literature should be reliable, truthful, informative, balanced and up to date.Methods: Study was conducted in Department of Pharmacology, Muzaffarnagar Medical College. 200 drug promotional literatures like advertisements published in medical journal, package insert of medicinal products and brochures were collected and analysed according to WHO criteria.Results: Total 200 promotional literatures were analysed. 100 promotional literatures were from the medical journal, 50 were package inserts of medicinal products and 50 were medicinal brochures. On assessing DPL using WHO criteria, all DPL mentioned brand names and dosage form (100%). Most of them published the generic name (98.5%), therapeutic uses (78%), side- effects (75%), dosage regimen (70%), contraindication (62.5%), warnings (55%), drug interaction (54%), precaution (50%), reference to scientific literature (45%), name of manufacture and distributor (99%), address of manufacturer and distributor (50%). Out of 200 DPL only 151 DPL contain references to scientific literature, 88 DPL references were retrievable and 63 were non retrievable.Conclusions: Our study shows although pharmaceutical companies are trying to adhere to the WHO criteria it is not fulfilled. As DPL are an important source of seeking information by the medical practitioner who rely on them to impart treatment to the patient, strict steps to regulate fulfilment of the WHO criteria should be taken by the government and authorities

Evaluation of the analgesic activity of the water soluble extract of stem of Tinospora cordifolia in experimentally induced pain in albino rats

Background: Pain and pyrexia are the warning signals, primarily protective in nature, that cause discomfort and suffering and may even be unbearable and incapacitating. The modern drugs (like opioids, NSAIDs, corticosteroids) currently used for the management of pain, fever and inflammatory conditions, present with many known adverse effects. Tinospora cordifolia known as Giloe, widely used in folk medicine due to its property to cure a number of diseases. Hence the present study was undertaken to explore the analgesic activity of water-soluble extract of stem of T. cordifolia in albino rats in experimentally induced pain.Methods: Present study was done in the department of pharmacology, albino rats were used to study the analgesic activity of T. cordifolia aqueous extract at the dose of 1.25g/kg,2.5g/kg and 5g/kg p.o. Various methods like Eddy’s hot plate, tail flick test and acetic acid induced writhing were used for the anti- nociceptive study.Results: In Eddy’s hot plate and tail flick test an increase in reaction time was observed with peak effect at 90min. Results were similar to the standard drug Tramadol in acetic acid induced writhing increase in time of onset, decrease in number and duration of writhing was observed.Conclusions: Aqueous extract of T. cordifolia was effective in all the three models of pain suggesting its possible action by central and peripheral mechanisms. Activity of T. cordifolia can be attributed to various phytoconstituents viz. protoberberine alkaloids, terpenoids, glycosides and polysaccharides. It can be developed as potent analgesic agent in future

Conception, realization and characterization of a very high negative chromatic dispersion fiber

International audienceAfter a brief presentation ..

Improving data driven dependency parsing using clausal information

Abstract The paper describes a data driven dependency parsing approach which uses information about the clauses in a sentence to improve the parser performance. The clausal information is added automatically using a partial parser. We demonstrate the experiments on Hindi, a morphologically rich, free-word-order language, using a modified version of MSTParser. We did all the experiments on the ICON 2009 parsing contest data. We achieved an improvement of 0.87% and 0.77% in unlabeled attachment and labeled attachment accuracies respectively over the baseline parsing accuracies