Search

Hypercholesterolemia is a kind of hyperlipidemia in which an individual's blood contains excessive non-high-density lipoprotein (non-HDL) cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, which has emerged as a significant covariate of coronary heart disease. Descriptive, bivariate and multivariable regression analyses were used to unearth the current hypercholesterolemia levels, probable risk factors, and its impact on other metabolic diseases among adolescents using data on 35,830 adolescents aged 10-19 years from the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey, India, 2016-18. Findings suggest that the mean lipid levels for total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and triglycerides were 140.6, 84.1, 47.3, and 95.3, respectively, with females bearing the higher burden. The study further identified early adolescents, urban residents, and overweight individuals at a higher risk of having elevated non-HDL. Western and Eastern regions bore higher LDL levels. Further, for a unit increase in TSFT risk of having high LDL increased by 2.55 times. Zinc deficits are at 2.13 times higher risk compared to zinc sufficient. Adolescents consuming unhealthy diets were at higher risk of elevated LDL. The study contends that it is essential to prevent the increasing levels of lipid profiles among Indian adolescents. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies and unhealthy dietary habits are significantly associated with high LDL and non-HDL levels. In the longer run, this might cause the early onset of complex cardiometabolic disorders, which would disrupt the individual's social and economic well-being. Hence, appropriate interventions are needed to curtail these early onsets by primarily focusing on adolescents. Key messages

Background: The nationwide lockdown imposed in four phases incited by the spread of the COVID in India led simultaneous ramifications, the most rampant of them being the mass exodus of labor migrants to their native places enhancing their multidimensional vulnerability. This paper analyses five dimensions of the vulnerability of the migrant workers returning from high contagion zones in million-plus cities to low-risk rural areas, its contribution to the surge of COVID infections in their native places, and challenges to the public health system. Data and methods: The SARS-CoV-2 attributable cases and deaths have been taken from the COVID19 India Org website (https://www.covid19india.org/. The total number of COVID cases per lakh population is computed using a district-level projected population as on March 31, 2020. The data on reverse migration has been collated from the Ministry of Railways. It deals with six states having the maximum share of reverse migration in the country. Indicators measuring vulnerability towards preventive practices of COVID at the household level are obtained from the fourth round of Indian DHS.1 Results: There was a sixteen fold increase in clusters of COVID cases once workers employed in the unorganized sectors distressed across the country started reverse migration in May 2020. The increasing number of COVID cases in the rural dominated districts of the migrant-receiving states overburdened their hitherto stressed public health system. States receiving the maximum share of return migrants during the lockdown was Uttar Pradesh, followed by Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha, and Jharkhand. The two most unsettling vulnerabilities were their inability to follow social distancing norms and lack of water, soap, or detergent for ensuring hand hygiene. Massive unemployment and disadvantage for the urban economy in terms of shortage of workers were other components of the multidimensional vulnerability of labor migrants engaged in unorganized sectors. Conclusions: The spread of awareness among the returnees about precautions, ensuring norms of micro-level social distancing in their households and villages is the need of the hour. Public health’s response to COVID-19 should establish a COVID care center in each of around 700 district hospitals with all necessary infrastructures, including trained human resources, medicines, oxygen ventilators, etc. The governments at the origins and the destinations should ensure mechanisms to protect the migrants against multidimensional vulnerabilities that pose a threat to their entities during socio-economic and health emergencies.

Thirty eight of diverse genotypes oat (Avena sativa L.) were evaluated to examine the genetic variability, heritability, genetic advance, correlation, path coefficient analysis and genetic divergence during rabi 2015-16. Observations were recorded for days to 50% flowering, plant height, number of leaves per plant, flag leaf area, number of tillers per plant, stem girth, number of green pods per spike, length of spike, leaf stem ratio, dry fodder yield and green fodder yield per plant. Analysis of variance revealed substantial amount of variability among the genotypes for all the characters under study, indicated wide spectrum of variability among the genotypes. High heritability coupled with high genetic advance were revealed number of leaves per plant, stem girth, number of green pods per spike, leaf stem ratio, dry fodder yield per plant and green fodder yield per plant, indicating the preponderance of additive gene effects for these traits and hence may prove useful for effective selection. Green fodder yield showed significant and strong positive correlation with plant height, flag leaf area, stem girth and dry fodder yield per plant at both genotypic and phenotypic level. Therefore, these characters are useful to the breeders in selecting suitable plant type. Path coefficient analysis exhibited high positive and direct influence of number of leaves per plant, dry fodder yield per plant, stem girth and flag leaf area towards green fodder yield. By improving number of leaves per plant, flag leaf area, stem girth and dry fodder yield per plant, the green fodder yield in oats might be improved. Those traits were influenced green fodder yield via other traits, should also be given importance while improving the green fodder yield in oats. The inter cluster distances were higher than intra cluster distances suggesting presence of high genetic diversity between lines of any two cluster than the lines present within the cluster. Cluster II is characterized by line having maximum number of prominent traits studied and contributed more towards divergence, so the direct selection for these would be helpful. The study provided the opportunity to identify genotypes to be used in future breeding programme.

The different physicochemical parameters, including pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), alkalinity, chloride, total hardness, sulphate, and nitrate, were used to analyse ground water samples near Bhalswa Lake in the North West Delhi area of India. water samples were obtained from locations across Bhalswalake, such as: In order to determine the groundwater quality surrounding Bhalswa Lake, the concentration of pH, electrical conductivity, total dissolved solids (TDS), hardness, alkalinity, chloride, sulphate, nitrate, and phosphate was measured in groundwater samples. Bhalswa Lake is both a residential neighbourhood and a trash dump. Effects of this analysis revealed that groundwater is heavily polluted and unsafe for drinking and household operations since it includes strong chemical contaminants. Water Quality Index of groundwater at various locations around Bhalswa Lake was also found to be unsuitable, reflecting extremely polluted groundwater status at almost all sampling sites.

The present investigation was carried out the genetic analysis of breeding material through components of variance, nature and magnitude of gene effects, genetic variability, heritability, genetic advance, correlation coefficients, general and specific combining ability effects and heterosis among yield and it components in parents and F1’s hybrids. Ten diverse parents i.e., UP Chari-1, HC-308, UP Chari-2, HC-171, Pant Chari-8, CSV-17, Pant Chari-6, CSV-84, Pant Chari-5 and Rajasthan Chari-1, germplasm selected from SVPUA&T, Meerut, U.P. Ten parents diallel set excluding reciprocals was made during the season of kharif 2018 by raising the crop at Crop Research Centre of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel University of Agriculture & Technology, Meerut. All the 45 crosses and their ten parents were grown during kharif season 2019. All the 45 F1’s hybrids along with ten parents were sown in randomized block design with three replications. Observations were recorded on days to 50% flowering, plant height, leaf breadth, leaf length, stem girth, leaves per plant, leaf area, leaf stem ratio, total soluble solids and green fodder yield. Analysis of variance for parents and crosses showed highly differed significantly for all the characters. Parents vs crosses exhibited highly significant for the attributes namely, days to 50% flowering, plant height, leaf breadth, leaf length, leaf area and green fodder yield, which indicated that wide genotypic differences among the parental lines and F1’s hybrids. High heritability coupled with high genetic advance as percent of mean was observed for the traits viz., plant height, and leaves per plant, leaf area, stem girth, leaf stem ratio and green fodder yield, suggesting that the genes governing these characters may have additive effect.

Background: Medulloblastoma (MB) is the most common solid malignant pediatric brain neoplasm. Group 3 (G3) MB, particularly MYC amplified G3 MB, is the most aggressive subgroup with the highest frequency of children presenting with metastatic disease, and is associated with a poor prognosis. To further our understanding of the role of MSI1 in MYC amplified G3 MB, we performed an unbiased integrative analysis of eCLIP binding sites, with changes observed at the transcriptome, the translatome, and the proteome after shMSI1 inhibition. Methods: Primary human pediatric MBs, SU_MB002 and HD-MB03 were kind gifts from Dr. Yoon-Jae Cho (Harvard, MS) and Dr. Till Milde (Heidelberg) and cultured for in vitro and in vivo experiments. eCLIP, RNA-seq, Polysome-seq, and TMT-MS were completed as previously described. Results:MSI1 is overexpressed in G3 MB. shRNA Msi1 interference resulted in a reduction in tumour burden conferring a survival advantage to mice injected with shMSI1 G3MB cells. Robust ranked multiomic analysis (RRA) identified an unconventional gene set directly perturbed by MSI1 in G3 MB. Conclusions: Our robust unbiased integrative analysis revealed a distinct role for MSI1 in the maintenance of the stem cell state in G3 MB through post-transcriptional modification of multiple pathways including identification of unconventional targets such as HIPK1.

The present study describes pathological findings in 25 cases of Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR) infection. Out of 462 goats carcass examination, in which 262 cases were from slaughtered animals and 200 cases were from fallen animals. On post mortem examination, pathological findings included erosive ulcerative stomatitis, severe haemorrhagic enteritis along with enlarged mesenteric lymph node. The large intestine of affected animals showed pathognomonic haemorrhages like zebra striping (zebra marking) and ecchymotic haemorrhages in abomasum. Histopathological lesions were characterized by syncytial cell formation, infiltration of mononuclear cells with eosinophilic intranuclear inclusions in alveolar macrophages of lungs section. Gross and histopathological lesions were suggestive for PPR infection, which was further confirmed from the specialized PPR laboratory in Mukteshwar (Uttarakhand) Regional Station of ICAR, IVRI using s-ELISA.

16 month old child was brought to the hospital with loose motions, vomiting and a history of failure to gain weight. Examination revealed hepatomegaly. Investigations revealed a space occupying lesion in the right lobe of the liver. She was diagnosed as a case of hepatoblastoma and was given 7 cycles of chemotherapy following which she was taken up for Right hepatectomy. Hepatic malignancies being rare in this age group and the surgery planned being extensive, the anaesthetic management was challenging. The child was taken up as a high risk case and successfully managed with the use of balanced anaesthesia in conjunction with epidural analgesia and invasive pressure monitoring.

Context: Hypothyroidism affects cognitive functions especially memory. However, most of the previous studies have generally evaluated older hypothyroid patients and sample size of these studies varied in terms of age range. Aims: To see whether hypothyroidism affects memory in young patients. Settings and Design: The sample consisted of 11 hypothyroid patients with an age of 18–49 and 8 healthy controls matched on age and education. Subjects and Methods: Verbal episodic memory was assessed using Hindi adaptation of Rey-Auditory Verbal Learning Test. Statistical Analysis Used: An independent t-test was used to see the difference between mean performance of the patient group and healthy control on memory measures. Results: Results indicated nonsignificant difference between verbal episodic memory of patient group and healthy controls. Conclusions: On the basis of these findings, it was concluded that hypothyroidism may not affect younger patients in terms of episodic verbal memory the same way as it does in the older patients.

paper implements a hand gesture recognition technique by using the SIFT based feature extraction. The matching point threshold has been calculated by using the neural network on the basis of the input gesture and the training. The paper implements the work by using the MATLAB and analyzes the results on the various sign of ASL. The system shows the accuracy of 93.3% i.e. improved by approx. &% as compared to the existing 85.9%. The system discussed in the paper is also robust as it shows the accurate results on the manipulated gestures. KeywordsHand Gesture, SIFT, Neural network, Threshold.

The trend of day for object oriented software is highly complex objects, interacting with each other very rapidly. As a result it is becoming more and more difficult to manage and measure the complexity of the systems being developed. Relation-based testability measure is a metric, to provide the highly desirable insight to the inherent complexity of any object oriented system. We apply relation-based testability measure (RTM) to a University Automation product to measure the complexity of the system at an earlier stage of the development. Based on the approach we have developed an algorithm to measure the overall relational complexity of any object oriented system. The algorithm is very generic, accommodating both the flavors of traditional procedural approach and the modern object oriented approach. Applied at an early development stage, it can be very helpful for design, development and testing teams to co-ordinate their efforts and produce a much better and easy way to handle software product.

Objectives: To evaluate and compare the efficacy of tamsulosin and alfuzosin as medical therapy in ureteric stones.Patients and Methods: A total of 87 patients with ureteral stones of size ≤10 mm were randomly divided into 3 groups. Group I patients (n-30) received 0.4 mg of tamsulosin daily, group II patients (n-29) received 10 mg of alfuzosin daily and group III patients (n-28) received no alpha blockers. All patients were given analgesia when needed. Follow up was done in weekly basis for 4 weeks.Results: The mean stone size (5.33±1.58, 5.79±1.84, 5.67±1.64) and age (29.1±6.3, 30.31±7.22, 29.4±7.63) were comparable in each groups. The stone expulsion rate was 83.3%, 79.3% and 50% in group I, II and III respectively. The drugs related side effects reported by patients were mild and transient.Conclusion: The use of tamsulosin and alfuzosin for the medical treatment of ureteric stones proved to be safe and effective and neither did have any significant benefits over the other

Rajkumar, R., Singh, S.K., Agarwal, S.K., Mahmood, S. and Shankar, U. 2010. Effect of selective COX- 2 inhibitor on conception rate, progesterone and PGFM profile in buffalo (Bubalus bubalis). J. Appl. Anim. Res, 38: 209–212. To determine the effect of selective COX-2 inhibitor (Meloxicam) on conception rate, progesterone and 13, 14-dihydro-15-keto-prostaglandin F2α(PGFM) profile, buffaloes in estrus were inseminated and divided into two equal groups. Meloxicam was injected @ 0.5 mg/kg body weight in tramuscularly on d 13, 14 and 15 post-insemination to treatment group and normal saline into control group. Conception rate was higher (20%) in the meloxicam treated buffaloes. Serum progesterone concentration did not differ (P>0.05) between the two groups. However, it was higher (P

This abstract was not presented at the symposium.

Singh, S., Singh, V.P., Kumar, A.A., Joseph, S., Cheema, P.S., Srivastava, S.K. and Singh, N. 2007. Molecular characterization of ompA gene of Pasteurella multocida serotype B: 2. J. Appl. Anim. Res., 31: 97–100. The ompA gene of Pasteurella multocida serotype B: 2 (strain P52) was cloned in InsT/A vector for sequencing and gene sequence was compared with that of other strains (232, 95010872, T94289 and 95120769) of serogroup A. It revealed a 1077 nucleotide and it had additional 30 bp than that of serotype A: 3. About 11.5 to 14% divergence in ompA gene sequence was observed between serotype B: 2 and various strains of serogroup A of P. multocida. A variation of about 20% in the amino acid sequence of outer membrane protein A (OmpA) was also recorded between serogroups A and B.

Objective: Age and tooth loss are expected to have a complex relationship with oral health-related quality of life. So the purpose of this study was to explain the impact of age and tooth loss on oral health-related quality of life using the short form 14-item oral health impact profile (OHIP-14) among two population samples of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire-based survey was conducted among 1441 subjects collected from two major cities of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Both questionnaire approaches using OHIP-14 scale and clinical examination were conducted in accordance with WHO criteria using type III procedure on the same day. Chi square test, ANOVA and stepwise multiple regression analysis were applied using SPSS software version 15.0. Results: With the increase of age, OHIP mean score in both states increased, but that among Rajasthan state was higher, depicting poor oral health. Whereas, in the remaining 23–27 number of teeth both states showed higher OHIP mean, however again the score was much higher among Rajasthan subjects showing worse oral hygiene. Hence, overall all mean OHIP score for Gujarat was lower indicating good oral health; whereas, that among Rajasthan was higher indicating poor oral health-related quality of life. Conclusion: Both age and tooth loss are associated with each other, but they have an independent effect on the oral health-related quality of life. Thus, all studied populations with complete natural dentition showed good oral health-related quality of life.

BACKGROUND: Intestinal schistosomiasis caused by Schistosoma mansoni(S. mansoni) infection is a widely distributed disease in several localities of Ethiopia. However, very limited information is available on the level of community’s awareness about the disease. The aim of this study was to assess community’s awareness about intestinal schistosomiasis as well as the prevalence of the disease in two rural communities of Ethiopia. METHODS: In June 2004, a cross-sectional study on awareness and prevalence of intestinal schistosomiasis was conducted in rural communities living in Dudicha and Shesha Kekel peasant associations. RESULTS: Among 176 respondents from Dudicha, only 45 (25.6%) individuals heard about Bilharzia. Similarly, among 241 respondents from Shesha Kekel only 78 (32.4%) subjects heard about Bilharzia. The proportion of males who heard about Bilharzia was higher than that of females both in Dudicha (38% vs 7%, p< 0.001) and Shesha Kekel (51.6% vs 20%, p< 0.001). There was no significant difference in level of awareness about schistosomiasis between the two communities (Dudicha, 25. 6% vs Shesha Kekel, 32.4%, p> 0.05). Only 1(0.6%) individual from Dudicha and 6(2.5%) participants from Shesha Kekel had knowledge of the intermediate host. The prevalence of the disease was 43.2% in Dudicha and 31.6% in Shesha Kekel. The prevalence of infection was higher in males than in females in Dudicha community (56.7% vs 21.5%, p< 0.05). CONCLUSION: Although the disease was prevalent in the two sites, majority of the people had no awareness about schistosomiasis. Therefore, provision of health education could raise community’s awareness of schistosomiasis in such endemic areas of the country.

Background: Involutional lower eyelid entropion is a common ophthalmic condition requiring surgical correction. Objective: To compare the efficacy of lid everting sutures in the management of involutional lower lid entropion using 4-0 silk versus 4-0 chromic catgut. Materials and methods: Fifty eyes with involutional lower eyelid entropion were enrolled into the study and divided randomly into two groups, A and B. Group A underwent lid everting suture with 4-0 chromic catgut and group B with 4-0 silk. The parameters assessed were pre- and post-operative lower lid excursion (LLE) and horizontal lid laxity (HLL). Statistical analysis: Data were plotted in the excel spread sheet and analyzed using SPSS 11.0 software program. The difference between the two groups was compared using Chi square test and unpaired t test. Results: While comparing the pre-operative and post-operative changes of HLL within the two groups separately, there was 63% reduction of HLL in group A (p=0.001) and 68% reduction (p=0.001) in group B. In group A, there was 48.2% improvement in LLE and in group B 52% postoperatively (p=0.001). The success rate in each group was 92%. The cost of surgery in group A was higher than that in group B (p=0.003). Conclusion: Lid everting suture by 4-0 silk is as effective as 4-0 chromic catgut. The cost of lid everting suture by 4-0 catgut is higher than that of 4-0 silk. The silk suture can be recommended for correction of lower lid involutional entropion in a country with low socioeconomic status. Key words: involutional entropion; lid laxity; lid excursion; lid everting suture DOI: 10.3126/nepjoph.v1i1.3672 Nep J Oph 2009;1(1):37-42