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Copyright of Karbala Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent research has focused on analysing megakaryocyte images to extract the information needed to track the progression of nervous system diseases. Segmentation is a fundamental step in describing and analysing the core contents of megakaryocytes, including the cytoplasm and nucleus. In this study, 45 megakaryocyte images were obtained. A new segmentation image technique was proposed, called the updating fuzzy c-means technique, through the intelligent selection of the centres of each cluster to separate cell components. The first step of this technique (fuzzification) was based on a knowledge analysis of the local parameters (entropy, contrast and standard deviation) that had a substantial influence on the grey-level distribution between the cytoplasm and nucleus. The second important step was the construction of fuzzy rules in terms of the variation in these local parameters to control the intelligent pick-out or update the centroid of each cluster and obtain a successful separation of the cytoplasm and nucleus. The final step was defuzzification to obtain the output images. The results revealed the superiority of the proposed method over recent technique. The accuracy of the segmented nucleus was greater than 7.46%; in the case of the cytoplasm, the accuracy was higher at 18%. These results indicated that this technique may be applied on other biomedical images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heavy alcohol drinking alters glucose metabolism, but the inheritability of this effect of alcohol is not well understood. We used an animal model of preconception alcohol exposure in which adult female rats were given free access to 6.7% alcohol in a liquid diet and water for about 4 weeks, went without alcohol for 3 weeks, and then were bred to generate male and female offspring. Control animals were either ad lib–fed rat chow or pair-fed an isocaloric liquid diet during the time of alcohol-feeding in the experimental animals. Our results show that the female rats fed with alcohol in the liquid diet, but not with the isocaloric liquid diet, prior to conception had an altered stress gene network involving glucose metabolism in oocytes when compared with those in ad lib–fed chow diet controls. The offspring born from preconception alcohol-fed mothers showed significant hyperglycemia and hypoinsulinemia when they were adults. These rats also showed increased levels of inflammatory cytokines and cellular apoptosis in the pancreas, altered insulin production and actions in the liver, and a reduced number of proopiomelanocortin neurons in the hypothalamus. Replenishment of proopiomelanocortin neurons in these animals normalized the abnormal glucose to restore homeostasis. These data suggest that preconception alcohol exposures alter glucose homeostasis by inducing proopiomelanocortin neuronal functional abnormalities. Our findings provide a novel insight into the impact of high doses of alcohol on the female gamete that may cause inheritance of an increased susceptibility to diabetes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classical view of Vitamin D is responsible for regulation of hemostasis of bone, calcium, and phosphorus intestinal absorption. In addition to the classical function of Vitamin D, VitD plays non-skeletal biological actions like bone metabolism, cell proliferation and immune cells activation because VitD receptors spread in different types of tissues including intestine, prostate, skeletal muscle, heart muscle, breast, colon, pancreas, brain and immune cells. Type 2 diabetes mellitus is spread around the world which caused by inadequate insulin secretion following long time insulin resistance. There several proposed causes that connect insulin resistance with overweight or obesity, genetic background and genes polymorphism. Similar studies have studied the possible association of insulin resistance with immune regulation and inflammatory cells. The purpose of this review to handle the new information regarding the possible association of VitD deficiency with insulin resistance and deactivating inflammatory cells like macrophages and monocytes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]