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Background and Objectives: New teaching methods are under trial in most of the medical schools. The methodology is changing from usual methods (lectures), which are more teacher - centered to modern techniques which encourage students for self directed learning making them independent, life - long learners. We conducted this study to evaluate the assessment outcomes of two teaching methodologies (Lecture vs. Small group discussion) and their relationship with gender. Methods: A quasi - experimental study was conducted at Wah Medical College, Wah Cantt. Fourth year students of two sessions who appeared in written assessment were included in the study without any exclusion. During the session 2010 - 2011, the method of teaching adopted was lecturing for 'Communicable Diseases' and small group discussion (tutorials) for 'Nutrition and Health', while during the session 2013 - 2014 'Communicable Diseases' were taught in small groups (tutorials) and lectures were delivered for 'Nutrition and Health'. A written assessment was placed at the end of each teaching session. The assessment scores of both teaching methodologies were compared. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 19. Independent samples t-test was applied to compare mean scores of both methodologies. Results: One hundred ninety six (54.3%) students appeared in assessments after Lectures and 165 (45.7%) after small group discussion (tutorials). Mean assessment score after small group discussions (62.80 ± 14.84) was significantly better as compared to Lectures (59.93 ± 12.01). The mean score of girls (63.05 ± 13.55) was significantly higher than that of boys (58.45 ± 12.81). Conclusion: It concludes that assessment scores may be improved by conducting small group discussion which may also improve the focus of boys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antimicrobial and antibacterial activities of bimetallic complexes are very important in variety of biological mechanisms. In this research work, a Schiff base ligand 2-(bis-2-hydroxylphenylidene)-1,2-iminoethane was prepared by condensation reaction between the reactants. Using this ligand, the derivatives of post transition bimetallic complexes were also synthesized by condensation reaction between salicylaldehyde and ethylenediamine followed by transition metals (Cu, Co, Mn, Zn). The synthesized ligand was characterized by FT-IR,1H NMR,13C NMR, and MS techniques, whereas the bimetallic complexes were characterized by FT-IR and X-ray crystallographic techniques. In a later stage, the ligand and bimetallic complexes were screenedin vitrofor antibacterial and antifungal activities by using disc diffusion method. Different bacterial strains such asEscherichia coli,Staphylococcus aureus, andBacillus subtiliswere used to check the antibacterial activities of ligand and bimetallic complexes. Similarly, the used fungal strains wereAspergillus flavus,Alternaria alternata, andAspergillus niger. The biological activity data showed that the bimetallic complexes exhibit higher values of antibacterial and antifungal activities as compared with ligand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT: The novel coronavirus has infected over 609,848,852 individuals throughout the world with a total death of over 6.5 million since its outbreak in December 2019. Since then many therapeutic options have been approached and tested in clinical trials as well to find a potential cure or preventive therapy for the COVID-19 disease. This review summarizes the potential therapeutic options currently available for the treatment of COVID-19 including lopinavir-ritonavir, Hydroxychloroquine, Remdesivir, Ribavirin, dexamethasone, interferon, antibodies, Tocilizumab, Azithromycin, Piperacillin-tazobactam, Moxifloxacin, Ivermectin, Nitazoxanide, Baricitinib, and Arbidol. This study briefly discusses the clinical trials and encompasses the dosage, efficacy, adverse drug reactions, and possible mechanism of action of the potential treatment candidate where applicable. The growing number of reported cases posits an exigent need for a suitable therapy for the prevention and cure of this disease. Therefore, the study aims to provide vital information on each drug to highlight the latest scientific research that could be helpful for better prevention/treatment of COVID-19 disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plankton and physical-chemical analysis is a vital principle for evaluating the quality of a water body. In this study, we attempted to assess the rotifer species richness, diversity, and evenness in four seasons from December 2009 to June 2010 and to predict the state of a natural pond in relation to physical-chemical parameters. A total of 21 rotifer species belonging to 13 genera were recorded. Maximum species of rotifers were present in summer season which were fifteen. The correlation of rotifer population relative to physical-chemical characteristics varied in different seasons. However, rotifers expressed, usually, positive correlation with temperature, and pH whereas negative correlation with other factors. Species diversity and richness was highest in summer and lowest in winter. Analysis of variance showed that there was significant difference in the Physical-chemical characteristics of water in different seasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EEG is a valuable tool that assists in the accurate diagnosis of seizure disorders. The precise interpretation of EEG requires an ability to recognize patterns that are benign in nature but may be misinterpreted as indicative of a seizure tendency. This review will summarize benign variants encountered in adult EEGs including: small sharp spikes, wicket spikes, fourteen- and six-hertz positive bursts, six-hertz spike and wave, rhythmic temporal theta bursts of drowsiness, subclinical rhythmic electroencephalographic discharge in adults, and midline theta rhythms. Although most of these patterns are relatively uncommon, it is imperative that the clinical neurophysiologist identifies them as benign variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing release of toxic heavy metals into marine environments poses significant risks due to their persistence and bioaccumulation. Diatoms are ideal bioindicators because of their sensitivity to environmental changes. Despite traditional methods for detecting these persistent pollutants effectively identify composition and concentration, they are time-consuming, they often require the use of harmful reagents, and do not allow a fast assessment of detrimental impacts on marine organisms. To fill this gap, we have successfully investigated the toxicity of different heavy metals in the marine diatom Skeletonema pseudocostatum thanks to a newly developed high-power terahertz (THz) spectrometer. By combining THz spectroscopy, microscopy and ecotoxicological assays, we found that the formation of long diatom chains is significantly inhibited by the presence of lead, copper, and chromium, which disrupt their metabolism. Although the THz absorption and refractive index spectra were not affected by diatom concentration in undoped samples, THz frequencies were highly sensitive to changes in diatom chain length due to heavy metals exposure. These findings suggest that this approach allows to investigate the biochemical processes involved in chain formation in S. pseudocostatum and related algae. THz spectroscopy could therefore provide deeper insights into the microscopic metabolic activity of diatoms, addressing key biochemical questions surrounding these organisms. Furthermore, we propose this novel approach for environmental pollution monitoring, since it could provide a rapid, harmless and sensitive detection method to assess heavy metal toxicity in marine diatoms, key organisms at the basis of the trophic chain., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Ruqyyah Mushtaq reports financial support was provided by Italian Ministry of University and Research. Fabio Novelli reports financial support was provided by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

This systematic review and meta-analysis aim to establish associations between metabolic syndrome (MetS) and erythrocyte and platelet markers, contributing to improved diagnostic tests for identifying individuals at risk. Observational studies and Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) were included. The standardized mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of erythrocyte and platelet markers between individuals with and without MetS were used as effect size (inverse variance model). Methodological quality assessment was conducted using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS) for observational studies and the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool 2.0 for RCTs. The analysis included 51 articles. Compared to controls, individuals with MetS exhibited significantly higher concentrations of mean red blood cell count [Standardized Mean Difference (95% CI): 0.15 (0.13-0.18); p<0.00001], hemoglobin [0.24 (0.18-0.31); p<0.00001], blood platelet count [5.49 (2.78-8.20); p<0.0001], and red blood cell distribution width [(0.55 (0.05-1.04); p=0.03]. Regarding mean platelet volume [0.16 (- 0.03 to 0.35); p=0.10] and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) [7.48 (-2.85-17.81); p=0.16], a non-significant difference was observed in patients with MetS. There was no statistically significant difference in hematocrit counts between the two groups [0.47 (-0.40 to -1.34); p=0.29]. Biomarkers such as mean red blood cell count, hemoglobin, blood platelet count, and RDW are associated with higher levels in patients in MetS, whereas mean platelet volume and PLR tend to be lower. These markers can potentially provide new avenues for early diagnosis of MetS., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (Thieme. All rights reserved.)

Background: Contrastive learning, a successful form of representational learning, has shown promising results in pretraining deep learning (DL) models for downstream tasks. When working with limited annotation data, as in medical image segmentation tasks, learning domain-specific local representations can further improve the performance of DL models., Purpose: In this work, we extend the contrastive learning framework to utilize domain-specific contrast information from unlabeled Magnetic Resonance (MR) images to improve the performance of downstream MR image segmentation tasks in the presence of limited labeled data., Methods: The contrast in MR images is controlled by underlying tissue properties (e.g., T1 or T2) and image acquisition parameters. We hypothesize that learning to discriminate local representations based on underlying tissue properties should improve subsequent segmentation tasks on MR images. We propose a novel constrained contrastive learning (CCL) strategy that uses tissue-specific information via a constraint map to define positive and negative local neighborhoods for contrastive learning, embedding this information in the representational space during pretraining. For a given MR contrast image, the proposed strategy uses local signal characteristics (constraint map) across a set of related multi-contrast MR images as a surrogate for underlying tissue information. We demonstrate the utility of the approach for downstream: (1) multi-organ segmentation tasks in T2-weighted images where a DL model learns T2 information with constraint maps from a set of 2D multi-echo T2-weighted images (n = 101) and (2) tumor segmentation tasks in multi-parametric images from the public brain tumor segmentation (BraTS) (n = 80) dataset where DL models learn T1 and T2 information from multi-parametric BraTS images. Performance is evaluated on downstream multi-label segmentation tasks with limited data in (1) T2-weighted images of the abdomen from an in-house Radial-T2 (Train/Test = 30/20), (2) public Cartesian-T2 (Train/Test = 6/12) dataset, and (3) multi-parametric MR images from the public brain tumor segmentation dataset (BraTS) (Train/Test = 40/50). The performance of the proposed CCL strategy is compared to state-of-the-art self-supervised contrastive learning techniques. In each task, a model is also trained using all available labeled data for supervised baseline performance., Results: The proposed CCL strategy consistently yielded improved Dice scores, Precision, and Recall metrics, and reduced HD95 values across all segmentation tasks. We also observed performance comparable to the baseline with reduced annotation effort. The t-SNE visualization of features for T2-weighted images demonstrates its ability to embed T2 information in the representational space. On the BraTS dataset, we also observed that using an appropriate multi-contrast space to learn T1+T2, T1, or T2 information during pretraining further improved the performance of tumor segmentation tasks., Conclusions: Learning to embed tissue-specific information that controls MR image contrast with the proposed constrained contrastive learning improved the performance of DL models on subsequent segmentation tasks compared to conventional self-supervised contrastive learning techniques. The use of such domain-specific local representations could help understand, improve performance, and mitigate the scarcity of labeled data in MR image segmentation tasks., (© 2023 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.)

Background: Carotenoids play key roles in photosynthesis and are widely used in foods as natural pigments, antioxidants, and health-promoting compounds. Enhancing carotenoid production in microalgae via biotechnology has become an important area of research., Results: We knocked out the Na + /Ca 2+ antiporter gene slr0681 in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 via homologous recombination and evaluated the effects on carotenoid production under normal (NL) and high-light (HL) conditions. On day 7 of NL treatment in calcium ion (Ca 2+ )-free medium, the cell density of Δslr0681 decreased by 29% compared to the wild type (WT). After 8 days of HL treatment, the total carotenoid contents decreased by 35% in Δslr0681, and the contents of individual carotenoids were altered: myxoxanthophyll, echinenone, and β-carotene contents increased by 10%, 50%, and 40%, respectively, while zeaxanthin contents decreased by ~40% in Δslr0681 versus the WT. The expression patterns of carotenoid metabolic pathway genes also differed: ipi expression increased by 1.2- to 8.5-fold, whereas crtO and crtR expression decreased by ~90% and 60%, respectively, in ∆slr0681 versus the WT. In addition, in ∆slr0681, the expression level of psaB (encoding a photosystem I structural protein) doubled, whereas the expression levels of the photosystem II genes psbA2 and psbD decreased by ~53% and 84%, respectively, compared to the WT., Conclusion: These findings suggest that slr0681 plays important roles in regulating carotenoid biosynthesis and structuring of the photosystems in Synechocystis sp. This study provides a theoretical basis for the genetic engineering of microalgae photosystems to increase their economic benefits and lays the foundation for developing microalgae germplasm resources with high carotenoid contents. © 2023 Society of Chemical Industry., (© 2023 Society of Chemical Industry.)

Background: Leukocyte parameters are predicted to be affected in patients with metabolic syndrome (MetS). We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to study the association between white blood cell parameters (WBC) in people with and without MetS., Methods: PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus and Cochrane Library databases were searched according to the study protocol. The standardized mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of leukocyte markers between individuals with and without MetS were pooled using an inverse variance model. Additionally, a subgroup analysis by sex was performed where possible. Methodological quality assessment was conducted using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS) for observational studies and the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool 2.0 for Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs)., Results: Of 6068 articles identified, 63 were eligible for the study. Compared to controls, individuals with MetS showed significantly higher concentrations of total leukocyte count (SMD [95% CI]: 0.60 [0.55-0.65]; P < .00001; I2 = 100%), neutrophil counts (0.32 [0.28-0.37]; P < .00001; I2 = 99%), lymphocyte counts (0.15 [0.07-0.23]; P = .0004; I2 = 100%), basophil counts (0.01 [0.00-0.02]; P = .02; I2 = 98%), monocyte counts (0.05 [0.02-0.09]; P = .003; I2 = 99%), and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (0.24 [0.15-0.33]; P < .00001; I2 = 98%). There were no significant differences in the eosinophil count (0.02 [-0.01 to 0.05]; P = .19; I2 = 96%) and monocyte-to-lymphocyte ratio (0.06 [-0.05 to 0.17]; P = .27; I2 = 100%) between patients with and without MetS, however, the lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (0.52 [-0.81 to -0.23]; P = .0005; I2 = 52%) tended to be significantly lower in patients with MetS., Conclusion: Biomarkers such as total leukocyte count, neutrophil count, lymphocyte count, basophil count, monocyte count and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio are associated with higher levels in patients in MetS and thus can potentially be used for early detection of MetS., Competing Interests: The authors have no funding and conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 the Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

This study examines the association between zombie firms and their environmental and social performance. Using a global dataset of listed firms from 49 countries between 2002 and 2019, we find that zombie firms perform poorly on environmental and social responsibility fronts. This finding supports the argument that zombie firms are characterized by consistent losses and that their existence is risky without external support. Zombie firms, while struggling for survival, may not be able to undertake environmental and social activities that require huge investments, thus falling behind other firms. Further analysis highlights that eco-innovation, the presence of a sustainability committee, and industry nature (i.e., heavily polluting industries) mitigate the negative impact of firms' zombie status on their environmental and social performance. Moreover, a zombie firm's engagement in environmental and social activities improves its financial performance. Our main findings are robust to a battery of estimation techniques, alternative proxies, selection bias, and endogeneity issues., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors hereby declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding this piece of work., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The current study sought to ascertain the impact of inter-parent conflicts on teenage psychological distress, social and academic adjustment and examine the suicide ideation during the COVID-19. The results found to be alarming as 22% of the individuals displayed suicidal tendencies, with 9% having attempted suicide once, 4.6% having tried suicide twice, and 11% stating that they were likely to do so again. Therefore, the media and the government might host awareness programs and counseling initiatives to promote mental health and prevent suicidal behavior. Moreover, parents may be educated on community level, about the effect of inter-parental arguments on the mental health of their children., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.