ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Estrogens has traditionally been known as the female hormone, but this idea has been challenged in early 1990’s and an essential physiological role for estrogen in male fertility was identified. Phytoestrogens are naturally occurring non-steroidal plant chemicals that can act like the female hormone estrogen. The herbs ( anise alfalfa and vervain ) chosen in this study contain phytoestrogens. OBJECTIVE: Previous studies demonstrated controversy of the effects of phytoestrogens on the rat testes .Hence, the present investigation was undertaken to investigate the influence of typical dose of herbs containing phytoestrogen on the rat testis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-four apparently normal mature male rats were divided into four groups of 6 animals each. The first "control" group received only 4ml of distilled water as a placebo. The second group received 40mg/kg of anise seed; the third group received 53.3 mg/kg of dried herb of vervain and the fourth group received 400 mg /kg of alfalfa seeds. All experimental groups received the doses through orogastric tube daily for fourteen days. Testicular histology was evaluated by light and enzyme histochemistry. Plasma FSH and testosterone concentrations were taken to support our results. RESULTS: Histological examination of anise, alfalfa and vervain – treated groups showed an increase in the height of germinal epithelia. There was marked lipoprotein lipase activity in the whole of the interstitial tissue which is more in amount in experimental groups than that in control group. Acid phosphatase granules were infiltered the seminiferous epithelia mildly in control group , moderately in anise and vervain groups and markedly in alfalfa group. The number of interstitial cells showing marked acid phosphatase activity was higher in all experimental groups than that in control group. Alkaline phosphatase exhibited intense activity in the boundary tissue of the seminiferous tubules in testes of control and experimental groups but it appeared thicker in the latter. CONCLUSION: The low dose and short duration of treatment used in our study made these phytoestrogen – containing herbs to have a stimulatory effect on leydig cell steroidogenesis. This study also demonstrated that aniseed being the most potent of the three herbs followed by alfalfa in stimulating testosterone synthesis. This is possibly attributed to the coumarin constituent of aniseed and alfalfa. KEY WORDS: phytoestrogen-containing herbs, testis, acid phosphatase, alkaline phosphatase, lipoprotein lipase
In this search, a new bioluminescent technique was proved for pyrophosphate which was employed to single- nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) diagnosis using one-base extension reaction. Four Mycobacterium tuberculosis genes were chosen (Rpob, InhA, KatG, GyrA) genes. Fifty-four specimens were used in this study fifty-three proved as drug-resistant specimens by The Iraqi Institute of Chest and Respiratory Diseases in Baghdad., also one specimen was used as a negative control. The procedure of this assay was as follows. A specific primer within each aliquot owning a short 3-OH end of the base of the target gene was hybridized to the single-stranded DNA template. Then, (exo-) Klenow DNA polymerase and one of either ?-thio-dATP, dTTP, dGTP, or dCTP
... Show MoreToday we are witnessing huge scientific and technical progress so we need more skills and methods of thinking that needs to be acquired by the teacher, as the importance of computers in education there are many teachers suffering of the difficulty in teaching for pupils . researchers tried to find a good suitable way with the technological interests for now which represent by computer design software and the introduction of enrichment activities in the curriculum because it is one of a contemporary trends for the development of the Arabic language with various levels of education and knowing if this program has negative or positive impact.
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... Show MoreThe records of Primary Health Care Centres (Al-Risafa section of Baghdad) were inspected for communicable diseases during the period January-April 2006. There were 8622 recorded cases (the diagnosis was based on a clinical examination and laboratory findings), which were distributed as 4782 (55.5%), 1430 (16.6%), 1604 (18.6%) and 806 (9.3%) for Sadar city, Risafa, A'adhamyiah and Mada'in, respectively. The highest frequency was reported for chicken pox (42.7%), followed by mumps and typhoid fever (20 and 13.7%, respectively), while diphtheria and cholera were not recorded. These three most frequent diseases were further analyzed, and their distribution showed a significant difference (P ? 0.001). April was the month of the highest recorded
... Show MoreStatic loads exposing to mechanical components can cause cracks, which are lead to form stress concentration regions causing the failure of structure. Generally, from 80% to 90% of structure failure is due to initiation of the cracks. Therefore, it is necessary to repair the crack and reduce its effect on the structure where the effect of the crack is modelled as an additional flexibility to the structure. In the last few years, piezoelectric materials have been considered as one of the most favourable repairing techniques. The piezoelectric material converts the applied voltage on it to a bending moment to counter the bending moment caused by the external load on the beam at the crack location. In this study, the design of the piez
... Show MoreThis research dealt with shedding light on the nature of material misrepresentations, in addition to knowing the extent to which the quality of accounting information systems contributes to reducing material misrepresentations On the theoretical side, a number of sources were relied upon in dealing with the research problem and presentation of the topic, while in the practical side, it was relied on the questionnaire form, where the research sample was (accountants and auditors), where 50 forms were distributed and 50 were received, and the data was analyzed and hypotheses tested through the program Statistical spss to show the relationship between the variables. The research reached a number of conclusions, the most important of which is t
... Show MoreIn this research is estimated the function of reliability dynamic of multi state systems and their compounds and for three types of systems (serial, parallel, 2-out-of-3) and about two states (Failure and repair) depending on calculating the structur function allow to describing the behavior of
The region-based association analysis has been proposed to capture the collective behavior of sets of variants by testing the association of each set instead of individual variants with the disease. Such an analysis typically involves a list of unphased multiple-locus genotypes with potentially sparse frequencies in cases and controls. To tackle the problem of the sparse distribution, a two-stage approach was proposed in literature: In the first stage, haplotypes are computationally inferred from genotypes, followed by a haplotype coclassification. In the second stage, the association analysis is performed on the inferred haplotype groups. If a haplotype is unevenly distributed between the case and control samples, this haplotype is labeled
... Show MoreNative speakers of English from different parts of the world have different accents,but the differences of accents are mainly the result of differences in the sound of vowels and consonants . The actual use of all these sounds in combination leads the speaker to produce a number of segments which only appear on the production level and realized on the perceptual one . RP pronunciation represents the teachable variety in all Iraqi universities because it is the most acceptable and understandable accent all over the world and not only in South East London ..The structure of the English syllable in RP pronunciation is influenced by the appearance of certain allophones especially aspiration and glottalization which ch
... Show MoreUndoped and Iodine (I)–doped chrome oxide (Cr2O3)thin films have been prepared by chemical spray pyrolysis technique at substrate temperatures(773K) on glass substrate. Absorbance and transmittance spectra have been recorded as a function of wavelength in the range (340-800 nm) in order to study the optical properties such as reflectance, Energy gap of allowed direct transition, extinction coefficient refractive index, and dielectric constant in real and imagery parts all as a function of wavelength. It was found that all the investigated parameters affect by the doping ratios.