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JNMA; Journal of the Nepal Medical... Mar 2022Neonatal sepsis is a serious condition in which the pathogens infiltrate the bloodstream, multiply and produce toxins causing deleterious effects to the health of... (Review)
Review
UNLABELLED
Neonatal sepsis is a serious condition in which the pathogens infiltrate the bloodstream, multiply and produce toxins causing deleterious effects to the health of neonates. It is divided into two types on the basis of the time of onset. Early onset sepsis occurs within 72 hours of birth and late onset sepsis begins after 72 hours of delivery. Neonatal sepsis continues to be a common and significant health care burden, especially in very low birth weight infants (with birthweight less than 1500 grams). Though intrapartum antibiotic prophylaxis has decreased the incidence of early-onset group B streptococcal infection dramatically, it still remains a major cause of neonatal sepsis. As the signs and symptoms of neonatal sepsis are nonspecific, early diagnosis and prompt treatment remain a challenge.
KEYWORDS
cytokines; immunoglobulin; neonatal sepsis; procalcitonin.
Topics: Antibiotic Prophylaxis; Birth Weight; Humans; Incidence; Infant, Newborn; Infant, Very Low Birth Weight; Neonatal Sepsis; Sepsis
PubMed: 35633256
DOI: 10.31729/jnma.7324 -
Nature Apr 2020Present estimates suggest that of the 359 million tons of plastics produced annually worldwide, 150-200 million tons accumulate in landfill or in the natural...
Present estimates suggest that of the 359 million tons of plastics produced annually worldwide, 150-200 million tons accumulate in landfill or in the natural environment. Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is the most abundant polyester plastic, with almost 70 million tons manufactured annually worldwide for use in textiles and packaging. The main recycling process for PET, via thermomechanical means, results in a loss of mechanical properties. Consequently, de novo synthesis is preferred and PET waste continues to accumulate. With a high ratio of aromatic terephthalate units-which reduce chain mobility-PET is a polyester that is extremely difficult to hydrolyse. Several PET hydrolase enzymes have been reported, but show limited productivity. Here we describe an improved PET hydrolase that ultimately achieves, over 10 hours, a minimum of 90 per cent PET depolymerization into monomers, with a productivity of 16.7 grams of terephthalate per litre per hour (200 grams per kilogram of PET suspension, with an enzyme concentration of 3 milligrams per gram of PET). This highly efficient, optimized enzyme outperforms all PET hydrolases reported so far, including an enzyme from the bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis strain 201-F6 (even assisted by a secondary enzyme) and related improved variants that have attracted recent interest. We also show that biologically recycled PET exhibiting the same properties as petrochemical PET can be produced from enzymatically depolymerized PET waste, before being processed into bottles, thereby contributing towards the concept of a circular PET economy.
Topics: Actinobacteria; Burkholderiales; Carboxylic Ester Hydrolases; Disulfides; Enzyme Assays; Enzyme Stability; Fusarium; Hydrolases; Models, Molecular; Phthalic Acids; Plastics; Polyethylene Terephthalates; Polymerization; Protein Engineering; Recycling; Thermobifida
PubMed: 32269349
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2149-4 -
International Journal of Environmental... May 2020There are conflicting reports regarding the efficacy of plant versus animal-derived protein to support muscle and strength development with resistance training. The... (Randomized Controlled Trial)
Randomized Controlled Trial
No Significant Differences in Muscle Growth and Strength Development When Consuming Soy and Whey Protein Supplements Matched for Leucine Following a 12 Week Resistance Training Program in Men and Women: A Randomized Trial.
There are conflicting reports regarding the efficacy of plant versus animal-derived protein to support muscle and strength development with resistance training. The purpose of this study was to determine whether soy and whey protein supplements matched for leucine would comparably support strength increases and muscle growth following 12 weeks of resistance training. Sixty-one untrained young men ( = 19) and women ( = 42) (18-35 year) enrolled in this study, and 48 completed the trial (17 men, 31 women). All participants engaged in supervised resistance training 3×/week and consumed 19 grams of whey protein isolate or 26 grams of soy protein isolate, both containing 2 g (grams) of leucine. Multi-level modeling indicated that total body mass (0.68 kg; 95% CI: 0.08, 1.29 kg; < 0.001), lean body mass (1.54 kg; 95% CI: 0.94, 2.15 kg; < 0.001), and peak torque of leg extensors (40.27 Nm; 95% CI: 28.98, 51.57 Nm, < 0.001) and flexors (20.44 Nm; 95% CI: 12.10, 28.79 Nm; < 0.001) increased in both groups. Vastus lateralis muscle thickness tended to increase, but this did not reach statistical significance (0.12 cm; 95% CI: -0.01, 0.26 cm; = 0.08). No differences between groups were observed ( > 0.05). These data indicate that increases in lean mass and strength in untrained participants are comparable when strength training and supplementing with soy or whey matched for leucine.
Topics: Body Composition; Dietary Supplements; Double-Blind Method; Female; Humans; Leucine; Male; Muscle Strength; Muscle, Skeletal; Resistance Training; Soybean Proteins; Whey Proteins; Young Adult
PubMed: 32486007
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph17113871 -
Computational Intelligence and... 2016We propose an efficient method for compressing Vietnamese text using -gram dictionaries. It has a significant compression ratio in comparison with those of...
We propose an efficient method for compressing Vietnamese text using -gram dictionaries. It has a significant compression ratio in comparison with those of state-of-the-art methods on the same dataset. Given a text, first, the proposed method splits it into -grams and then encodes them based on -gram dictionaries. In the encoding phase, we use a sliding window with a size that ranges from bigram to five grams to obtain the best encoding stream. Each -gram is encoded by two to four bytes accordingly based on its corresponding -gram dictionary. We collected 2.5 GB text corpus from some Vietnamese news agencies to build -gram dictionaries from unigram to five grams and achieve dictionaries with a size of 12 GB in total. In order to evaluate our method, we collected a testing set of 10 different text files with different sizes. The experimental results indicate that our method achieves compression ratio around 90% and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Topics: Algorithms; Asian People; Data Compression; Dictionaries as Topic; Humans; Vocabulary
PubMed: 27965708
DOI: 10.1155/2016/9483646 -
Medicine Aug 2019Magnesium sulfate is the ideal drug for the prevention and treatment of eclampsia. Nevertheless, the best regimen for protection against eclampsia with minimal side... (Randomized Controlled Trial)
Randomized Controlled Trial
Serum magnesium levels during magnesium sulfate infusion at 1 gram/hour versus 2 grams/hour as a maintenance dose to prevent eclampsia in women with severe preeclampsia: A randomized clinical trial.
BACKGROUND
Magnesium sulfate is the ideal drug for the prevention and treatment of eclampsia. Nevertheless, the best regimen for protection against eclampsia with minimal side effects remains to be established. This study aimed to compare serum magnesium levels during intravenous infusion of magnesium sulfate at 1 gram/hour versus 2 grams/hour as a maintenance dose to prevent eclampsia in pregnant and postpartum women with severe preeclampsia.
METHODS
A randomized, triple-blind clinical trial was conducted, comparing serum magnesium levels during the intravenous infusion of magnesium sulfate at 1 gram/hour versus 2 grams/hour as a maintenance dose for the prevention of eclampsia in 62 pregnant and postpartum women with severe preeclampsia, 31 in each group. An intravenous loading dose of 6 grams of magnesium sulfate was administered over 30 minutes in both groups. The patients were then randomized to receive a maintenance dose of either 1 or 2 grams/hour for 24 hours. Primary outcomes consisted of serum magnesium levels at the following time points: baseline, 30 minutes, every 2 hours until the end of the first 6 hours, and every 6 hours thereafter until the termination of magnesium sulfate infusion. Side effects, maternal complications, and neonatal outcomes were the secondary outcomes.
RESULTS
Serum magnesium levels were higher in the 2-gram/hour group, with a statistically significant difference from 2 hours after the beginning of the magnesium sulfate infusion (P <.05). Oliguria was the most common complication recorded in both groups, with no significant difference between the 2 regimens (RR 0.88; 95% CI: 0.49-1.56; P = .65). No cases of eclampsia occurred. Side effects were more common in the 2-gram/hour group (RR 1.89; 95% CI: 1.04-3.41; P = .02); however, all were mild. There were no differences between the 2 groups regarding neonatal outcomes, except for admission to neonatal intensive care, which was more frequent in the 1-gram/hour group (25% vs 6.3%; P = .04).
CONCLUSION
Magnesium sulfate therapy at the maintenance dose of 1 gram/hour was just as effective as the 2-gram maintenance dose, with fewer side effects.
Topics: Adult; Drug Administration Schedule; Eclampsia; Female; Humans; Infusions, Intravenous; Magnesium Sulfate; Postpartum Period; Pre-Eclampsia; Pregnancy; Pregnancy Outcome; Young Adult
PubMed: 31393402
DOI: 10.1097/MD.0000000000016779