Background: Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a common health problem that has a worldwide distribution. Apart from the direct effect of the virus on the liver, there are many extrahepatic manifestations among which the probable effect on bone turnover associated with low bone mineral density (BMD). Objectives: This study aimed to determine the association between treated and untreated chronic HBV infection with BMD. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study which included a total of 48 patients with chronic HBV (28 patients treated with tenofovir-disoproxil-fumarate [TDF] antiviral drug and 20 patients have not yet started treatment). Other age- and sex-matched 30 apparently healthy individuals were recruited to represent the healthy controls. BMD was measured using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry on the anteroposterior lumbar spine (L1–L4 spine) views, from which T-score was calculated. Liver function tests were also evaluated from serum samples. Results: Treated patients showed a lower T‑score (−0.48 ± 0.72) than either healthy individuals (1.08 ± 0.84) or untreated patients (0.78 ± 0.51), with highly significant differences. In multivariate regression, only disease duration (adjusted odds ratio [OR] = 9.71, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 4.8–16.68) and TDF treatment (adjusted OR = 6.4, 95% CI = 4.18–97.05) were significantly associated with BMD. Conclusions: Prolonged use of TDF in the treatment of HBV infection can significantly reduce BMD. Moreover, BMD can also be inversely affected in long-standing HBV, regardless of treatment regimen.
The results of studying the effects of M. anisopiliae spores on mosquito, C. quinquefasciatus showed a biological effects represented by immature mortality. The mortality increased proportionally with the concentrations of fungal spores, which reached (at high concentration 2×1011 spores / ml), to 86.6, 56.6% in first and late instar larvae, respectively. An important to mention that cumulative death rate was significantly associated with the time, which reached to 56% at 7 day after treatment. In addition, M. anisopiliae had a long period permanence in aquatic habitats; in which the residual effects stay 30 days in aquatic habitats after treatment at laboratory conditions. Interestingly, the long period exposure of fungal spores (30 minut
... Show MoreThe piled raft is a geotechnical composite construction consisting of three elements: piles, raft and soil.
In the design of piled rafts, the load shared between the piles and the raft, and the piles are used up to a
load level that can be of the same order of magnitude as the bearing capacity of a comparable single
pile or even greater. Therefore, the piled raft foundation allows reduction of settlements in a very
economic way as compared to traditional foundation concepts.
This paper presents experimental study to investigate the behavior of piled raft system in sandy
soil. A small scale “prototype” model was tested in a sand box with load applied to the system through
a compression machine. The settlement was
The interests toward developing accurate automatic face emotion recognition methodologies are growing vastly, and it is still one of an ever growing research field in the region of computer vision, artificial intelligent and automation. However, there is a challenge to build an automated system which equals human ability to recognize facial emotion because of the lack of an effective facial feature descriptor and the difficulty of choosing proper classification method. In this paper, a geometric based feature vector has been proposed. For the classification purpose, three different types of classification methods are tested: statistical, artificial neural network (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). A modified K-Means clustering algorithm
... Show Morethe behavior of the first-order black and gray solitons propagtedin optical fiber in the presence of frequency chirp is studied analytically and numerically results show that phase profile of black solitons changes abruptly
In recent years, the performance of Spatial Data Infrastructures for governments and companies is a task that has gained ample attention. Different categories of geospatial data such as digital maps, coordinates, web maps, aerial and satellite images, etc., are required to realize the geospatial data components of Spatial Data Infrastructures. In general, there are two distinct types of geospatial data sources exist over the Internet: formal and informal data sources. Despite the growth of informal geospatial data sources, the integration between different free sources is not being achieved effectively. The adoption of this task can be considered the main advantage of this research. This article addresses the research question of how the
... Show MoreHierarchical temporal memory (HTM) is a biomimetic sequence memory algorithm that holds promise for invariant representations of spatial and spatio-temporal inputs. This article presents a comprehensive neuromemristive crossbar architecture for the spatial pooler (SP) and the sparse distributed representation classifier, which are fundamental to the algorithm. There are several unique features in the proposed architecture that tightly link with the HTM algorithm. A memristor that is suitable for emulating the HTM synapses is identified and a new Z-window function is proposed. The architecture exploits the concept of synthetic synapses to enable potential synapses in the HTM. The crossbar for the SP avoids dark spots caused by unutil
... Show MoreThe study attempts to identify 1) the habits of playing video games among students, 2) the effect of playing video games on students’ academic achievement, 3) the statistically significant differences among students in regard of (gender, time of playing video games, number of hours). To this end, a five-likert scale questionnaire included four questions was applied to (250) male and female students chosen randomly from the second-intermediate stage at Al-Karakh side secondary schools. The findings revealed that students play games only on holidays and less than an hour daily, which means playing games does not affect their academic achievement. Additionally, the findings found there is a significant difference between male and female i
... Show MoreIrisin is a myokine that controls energy metabolism by making adipose tissue brown. The present goal in doing this research was to determine how irisin concentration relates to other biochemical markers of disease. Hemodialysis (HD) for chronic kidney failure. The study included 30 individuals with end-stage renal disease on HD and 30 healthy subjects as the control group. The ages of all patients and the control group ranged from (25 to 60) years. The excluded criteria included patients with viral hepatitis and diabetes. Serum irisin concentration and the level of fasting serum glucose (FSG), urea, creatinine (Cr), total protein (TP), albumin (Alb), albumin to creatinine ratio (ACR), total cholesterol (TC), alanine aminotransferase (ALT),
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