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
Three types of zeolite A were prepared from Iraqi kaoline which are 3A, 4A and 5A by ion exchange method .They were characterized by XRD and atomic absorption techniques .They were used as adsorbents to examine their applicability for H2S adsorption .The adsorption process was performed in a static form and constant volume system which constructed from stainless steel .The effect of zeolite type and temperature on the adsorption properties of H2S at -5 , 25 and 55 oC was studied .The zeolite type 5A has the highest adsorption value (79.384 µmol/g ) and the three types may be arranged in a sequence toward H2S adsorption as 5 A> 4A>3A .The amount of H2S adsorbed increased as temperature decreased from 55 to -5 for all samples. Langmuir , Fre
... Show MoreIn spite of the disappearing of a clear uniform textbook for teaching ESP at different departments and different colleges in both scientific and humanistic studies, the practitioners at those departments and colleges have to teach translation as one of the important requirements to pass the English language exam. The lack of defined translation activities is a noticeable problem therefore; the problem of teaching translation is diagnosed in that the students lack the ability to comprehend the text in English language and other translation knowledge and skills.
The study aims to suggest a translation strategy and then find out the effect of the translation strategy on ESP learners’ achievement in translation. A sample of 50 stud
... Show MoreThe introduction of concrete damage plasticity material models has significantly improved the accuracy with which the concrete structural elements can be predicted in terms of their structural response. Research into this method's accuracy in analyzing complex concrete forms has been limited. A damage model combined with a plasticity model, based on continuum damage mechanics, is recommended for effectively predicting and simulating concrete behaviour. The damage parameters, such as compressive and tensile damages, can be defined to simulate concrete behavior in a damaged-plasticity model accurately. This research aims to propose an analytical model for assessing concrete compressive damage based on stiffness deterioration. The prop
... Show MoreThe aim of the present work to study the effect of changing velocity (Reynold's number) on oxygen cathodic polarization using brass rotating cylinder electrode in 0.1, 0.3 and 0.5N NaCl solutions (PH = 7) at temperatures 40, 50 and 600 C. Cathodic polarization experiments were conducted as a function of electrode rotational speed and concentration.
The impact of management control systems (MCS) on organizations performance empirical research has been the subject of numerous studies during the past decade in developed and emerging economies. In the contemporary competitive, complex and changing global business environment, firms are being challenged to adopt business models that enable them to address the strategic uncertainties and risks they face in their business environments. The main issue of this study is that management accounting researchers argue that one of the ways firms can continually rejuvenate themselves to survive and succeed in these complex and uncertain environments is to understand the role of management control systems in Formulating a b
... Show MoreThe advent of UNHCR reports has given rise to the uniqueness of its distinctive way of image representation and using semiotic features. So, there are a lot of researches that have investigated UNHCR reports, but no research has examined images in UNHCR reports of displaced Iraqis from a multimodal discourse perspective. The present study suggests that the images are, like language, rich in many potential meanings and are governed by clearly visual grammar structures that can be employed to decode these multiple meanings. Seven images are examined in terms of their representational, interactional and compositional aspects. Depending on the results, this study concludes that the findings support the visual grammar theory and highlight the va
... Show MoreDistributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Web-based services have grown in both number and sophistication with the rise of advanced wireless technology and modern computing paradigms. Detecting these attacks in the sea of communication packets is very important. There were a lot of DDoS attacks that were directed at the network and transport layers at first. During the past few years, attackers have changed their strategies to try to get into the application layer. The application layer attacks could be more harmful and stealthier because the attack traffic and the normal traffic flows cannot be told apart. Distributed attacks are hard to fight because they can affect real computing resources as well as network bandwidth. DDoS attacks
... Show MoreSoftware Defined Network (SDN) is a new technology that separate the control plane from the data plane. SDN provides a choice in automation and programmability faster than traditional network. It supports the Quality of Service (QoS) for video surveillance application. One of most significant issues in video surveillance is how to find the best path for routing the packets between the source (IP cameras) and destination (monitoring center). The video surveillance system requires fast transmission and reliable delivery and high QoS. To improve the QoS and to achieve the optimal path, the SDN architecture is used in this paper. In addition, different routing algorithms are used with different steps. First, we eva
... Show MoreThis paper presents the results of the slope failure analyses from fracture distributions and their relation to tectonic activity; the analytical results have indicated that the phenomena of plane failure, wedge failure and toppling failure can occur at almost of the survey sites within the study area.
The statistical data show that the fracture orientation mainly develop in the E-W, N-S and NW-SE due to the influence of tectonic activity. The occurrence of them together with the rock slope surface orientation has formed plane failure on the slope surface of the 3B highway in the E-W direction and the types of wedge failure and toppling failure on the slope surface of the highw
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