An elevated level of plasma homocysteine, sulfur containing amino acid generated through demethylation of methionine has been
widely accepted as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). The increase can result from genetic and/or nutrient related
disturbances in the remethylation or transsulfuration pathways for homocysteine metabolism. A common mutation (C677T) in the
gene encoding for the enzyme 5, 10-methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) or deficiency of the B vitamins namely folic
acid, B12, B6 can lead to hyperhomocysteinemia.
In the present study, we have investigated the incidence of the (C677T) MTHFR polymorphism in the North Indian males. 141
angiographically proven coronary artery disease (CAD) patients and 55 age and sex matched healthy volunteers were examined
for the association between MTHFR gene polymorphism and CAD. The MTHFR genotyping was performed using polymerase chain reaction
(PCR) followed by restriction-isotyping with Hinf 1 endonuclease. A trend for higher ‘T’ allele frequency (0.19) was observed
in patients than in controls (0.16). However no significant association was found between C677T mutation and CAD severity.
The lack of statistical significance could be due to the small sample size studied. Hence a larger study including various
ethnic groups is warranted. 相似文献
During post-analytical phase, critical value notification to responsible caregiver in a timely manner has potential to improve patient safety which requires cooperative efforts between laboratory personnel and caregivers. It is widely accepted by hospital accreditors that ineffective notification can lead to diagnostic errors that potentially harm patients and are preventable. The objective of the study was to assess the variables affecting critical value notification, their role in affecting it’s quality and approaches to improve it. In the present study 1,187 critical values were analysed in the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory catering to tertiary care hospital for neuropsychiatric diseases. During 25 months of study period, we evaluated critical value notification with respect to clinical care area, caregiver to whom it was notified and timeliness of notification. During the study period (25 months), the laboratory obtained 1,279 critical values in clinical chemistry. The analytes most commonly notified were sodium and potassium (20.97 & 20.8 % of total critical results). Analysis of critical value notification versus area of care showed that critical value notification was high in ICU and emergency area followed by inpatients and 64.61 % critical values were notified between 30 and 120 min after receiving the samples. It was found that failure to notify the responsible caregiver in timely manner represent an important patient safety issue and may lead to diagnostic errors. The major area of concern are notification of critical value for outpatient samples, incompleteness of test requisition forms regarding illegible writing, lack of information of treating physician and location of test ordering and difficulty in contacting the responsible caregiver. 相似文献
Blood samples of 40 pregnant women were analysed for glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c) and blood sugar. The patients were followed up till delivery and their obstetric outcome was analysed in conjunction with the glycaemic profile and the level of glycosylated haemoglobin. Group I comprising the normal pregnant women showed a mean HbA1c of 6.23% at 20–40 weeks of gestation. In contrast the diabetic pregnant women (group II) at the same gestation demonstrated an HbA1c of 9.4%. Further group IIA of gestational diabetic women showed an HbA1c of 8.97% and group IIB comprising the overt diabetics had HbA1c of 9.86%. The mother who delivered a congenitally malformed child had an elevated HbA1c of 10.4% during pregnancy. Seven cases of macrosomia were reported and the mean HbA1c of their mothers at 20–40 weeks of gestation was found to be 9.91%. Six mothers delivered infants who developed respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) soon after birth and all these six had elevated HbA1c with a mean of 8.9%. Abortions were also associated with elevated HbA1c of 10.3% antenatally. One case of still birth was reported and the mother demonstrated an elevated glycosylated haemoglobin during pregnancy. An HbA1c of 10% or more was associated with abortion, still-birth, or congenitally malformed babies. 相似文献
The cysteine proteinases like cathepsins B, L and H are main hydrolytic enzymes present in lysosomes and play an important
role in intracellular protein degradation. Tuberculosis and leprosy, both are tissue- destructive diseases. Main drugs used
in chemotherapy of these diseases may inhibit the main lysosomal cysteine proteinases i.e. cathepsins B, L and H released
during tissue destruction and thus prevent the further destruction of tissue by these enzymes. So the aim of this study is
to see the effect of antituberculous and antileprotic drugs on these proteolytic enzymes. The effect of commonly used antituberculous
and antileprotic drugs was screened on the activities of purified brain lysosomal cysteine proteinases namely cathepsins B
[EC 3.4.22.1], L [EC 3.4.22.15] and H [EC 3.4.22.16]. Among the antileprotic drugs, only clofazimine inhibited the enzymic
activities whereas dapsone had no effect whatsoever. In antituberculous drugs, rifampicin was the most inhibitory while isoniazid
had little inhibitory potency. Streptomycin and pyrazinamide did not effect the activities at all. As regards the mechanism
of inhibition, clofazimine and isoniazid inhibited the enzymes in a non-competitive manner with K values of 0.25 mM and 5.0
mM for cathepsin B, 0.071 mM and 0.833 mM for cathepsin L and 1.513 mM and 0.885 mM for cathepsin H, While rifampicin could
effect in a competitive manner with Ki values of 0.03 mM, 0.125 mM and 0.027 mM for cathepsin B, L and H respectively. 相似文献
This study examines the role of alcohol drinking on lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] levels in angiographically assessed coronary artery disease patients. A lower Lp (a) level was noted in the alcohol drinking group as compared to the alcohol non-drinking group. 相似文献
Given the potential negative effects of vicarious racism, we sought to examine the impact of vicarious racism via the media on college students of color. Using a sample of 217 college students of color, we analyzed positive and negative affect and craving for alcohol and marijuana before and after exposure to media stimuli. Split‐plot analysis of variance results revealed a statistically significant interaction effect between time and group for negative affect, but not cravings for substances. 相似文献
Given the growing interest in retrieval practice among educators, it is valuable to know when retrieval practice does and does not improve student learning—particularly for educators who have limited classroom time and resources. In this literature review, we developed a narrow operational definition for “classroom research” compared to previous reviews of the literature. We screened nearly 2000 abstracts and systematically coded 50 experiments to establish a clearer picture of benefits from retrieval practice in real world educational settings. Our review yielded 49 effect sizes and a total n?=?5374, the majority of which (57%) revealed medium or large benefits from retrieval practice. We found that retrieval practice improved learning for a variety of education levels, content areas, experimental designs, final test delays, retrieval and final test formats, and timing of retrieval practice and feedback; however, only 6% of experiments were conducted in non-WEIRD countries. Based on our review of the literature, we make eight recommendations for future research and provide educators with a better understanding of the robust benefits of retrieval practice across a range of school and classroom settings.
WHO-Tropical Disease Research scheme highlighted the need for development of new anti-filarial drugs. Certain antibiotics
have recently been found effective against Wolbachia, co-existing symbiotically with filarial parasites. Inflammatory response
entails oxidative mechanism to educe direct anti-microbial effect. In the present study microfilariae were maintained in vitro
in medium supplemented with varying concentrations of tetracycline, doxycycline (20–100 μg/ml) or ciprofloxacin (50–250 μg/ml)
separately to find out any involvement of oxidative mechanism in the anti-filarial effect of these antibiotics. Loss of motility
of the microfilariae was measured after 48 h and correlated with the levels of MDA, nitric oxide and protein-carbonylation.
Significant loss of microfilarial motility was recorded with increasing concentration of tetracycline and doxycycline but
with ciprofloxacin the effect was not marked. Agents with high antifilarial activity revealed significant association with
oxidative parameters in a dose dependent manner. The result suggests that oxidative effect might be exploited to design novel
antifilarial drug candidate. 相似文献
This paper is concerned with paraphrase detection, i.e., identifying sentences that are semantically identical. The ability to detect similar sentences written in natural language is crucial for several applications, such as text mining, text summarization, plagiarism detection, authorship authentication and question answering. Recognizing this importance, we study in particular how to address the challenges with detecting paraphrases in user generated short texts, such as Twitter, which often contain language irregularity and noise, and do not necessarily contain as much semantic information as longer clean texts. We propose a novel deep neural network-based approach that relies on coarse-grained sentence modelling using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a recurrent neural network (RNN) model, combined with a specific fine-grained word-level similarity matching model. More specifically, we develop a new architecture, called DeepParaphrase, which enables to create an informative semantic representation of each sentence by (1) using CNN to extract the local region information in form of important n-grams from the sentence, and (2) applying RNN to capture the long-term dependency information. In addition, we perform a comparative study on state-of-the-art approaches within paraphrase detection. An important insight from this study is that existing paraphrase approaches perform well when applied on clean texts, but they do not necessarily deliver good performance against noisy texts, and vice versa. In contrast, our evaluation has shown that the proposed DeepParaphrase-based approach achieves good results in both types of texts, thus making it more robust and generic than the existing approaches. 相似文献
Advances in instrument technology and automation have simplified tasks in laboratory diagnostics reducing errors during analysis
thereby improving the quality of test results. However studies show that most laboratory errors occur in the pre-analytical
phase. In view of the paucity of studies examining pre-analytical errors, we examined a total of 1513 request forms received
at our laboratory during a 3 month period. The forms were scrutinized for the presence of specific parameters to assess the
pre-analytical errors affecting the laboratory results. No diagnosis was provided on 61.20% of forms. Type of specimen was
not mentioned in 61.60% of the forms and 89.25% of all forms were illegible. Critical results were encountered in 17.30% of
patients, and of these 76.60% were not communicated due to incomplete forms. Thus, by following standard operating procedures
vigorously from patient preparation to sample processing the laboratory results can be significantly improved without any
extra cost. 相似文献