Background: Rituximab is a chimeric IgG1 kappa immunoglobulin that has been genetically modified to incorporate human constant region sequences together with murine light- and heavy-chain variable region sequences. People use it to treat rheumatoid arthritis and certain malignancies. Objective: The study aimed to assess the potential association between the serum levels of Factor I, CD59, interleukins (IL)-6, and interferon-gamma (IFN)-γ and the response to Rituximab treatment in Iraqi rheumatoid arthritis patients. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted at the rheumatology center at Baghdad Teaching Hospital. Ninety adult patients who have been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and are receiving Rituximab intravenous infusions were included. The enrolled patients were divided into a responder group (45 patients) and a non-responder group (45 patients). The response to Rituximab was assessed according to the 28-joint Disease Activity Score (DAS28). Results: The serum levels of Factor I and CD59 were significantly higher in the non-responders group in comparison to the responders group. In addition, the serum IL-6 and IFN-γ levels were significantly elevated in the non-responders group in comparison to the responders group. The estimated marker serum levels showed a strong, significant correlation with the 6-month change in DAS28. Conclusions: In Rituximab nonresponder RA patients, serum levels of Factor I, CD59, Factor H, IL-6, and IFN-γ are higher, and they have good potential to be used in the assessment of the response to Rituximab therapy.
In this study, the radon gas concentration as well as the annual effective dose in leaves of the Malvasylvestris (Khabbaz) plant used in the traditional treatment and as food in Iraq, for this, it is necessary to evaluate the concentrations radon gas, which were measured using solid state nuclear track detectors (SSNTDs) CR-39 technique. The concentration and annual effective dose in samples were collected from Baghdad city ranged from minimum to maximum value 15.815 , 0.498 , 54.445 , 1.717 respectively, while the values of concentration and annual effective dose in a sample collected from Karbala are 15.297 ,0.482 . These values of concentration and annual effective dose less were compared with th
... Show MoreThis research tries to reveal how to manage and control the competitive edge for business by building managerial skills in various organizational levels. Our research aims at finding out the nature of various technical, human and in tellectual skills of a new president whose superiority is his competitive ness in the application field at general company for construe tioual industriesand testing the surveyed minor and major changes through a questionnaire to collect information from officials. The sample was composed of (45) director. The data was analyzed using some methods and statistical programs. The most prominent of these is (SPSS) that was used to extract the arithmetic mean, standard deviation, correlation coefficient
... Show MoreThe current research aims to determine the requirements of Trends of International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2019) and to find out the extent to which the content of science textbooks for grades (1-4) in the Sultanate of Oman includes the requirements of (TIMSS 2019). Only the content dimension has been taken into account when conducting the content analysis. The study population includes all science books from the first to the fourth grade for the academic year 2021-2022. The study identified and organized the requirements in the study tool, which is a list of requirements of (TIMSS 2019). The results showed a general deficiency in all grades (1-4) in the content dimension including many main topics, subtopics, and objectives
... Show MoreThe current study aimed to reveal the moral values available in the Arabic language textbook (Al-Mu’nes) for grades eleven and twelve for post-basic education in the Sultanate of Oman. The researcher adopted the descriptive approach using the sentence as measuring unit in the analysis process. The five fields of moral values and their subcategories values represented the categories of the analysis. Iterations of values and the percentages of iteration were calculated in those textbooks. Moreover and the analysis and stability of the process were confirmed.
After referring to previous studies, it was possible to de
... Show MoreIn this work, the pseudoparabolic problem of the fourth order is investigated to identify the time -dependent potential term under periodic conditions, namely, the integral condition and overdetermination condition. The existence and uniqueness of the solution to the inverse problem are provided. The proposed method involves discretizing the pseudoparabolic equation by using a finite difference scheme, and an iterative optimization algorithm to resolve the inverse problem which views as a nonlinear least-square minimization. The optimization algorithm aims to minimize the difference between the numerical computing solution and the measured data. Tikhonov’s regularization method is also applied to gain stable results. Two
... Show MoreIn a world of fierce competition companies of different activities strive to strengthen their competitiveness in order to be able to deliver greater value to their customers and gain a distinct sites in competition with other companies in the market at the local and international levels. Every company seeks to focus on one or more of the competitive capabilities in order to turn it into an obvious advantage or a number of competitive advantages to contribute in improving the performance and superiority over its competitors. Therefore, the management of companies no longer need only useful information for the internal aspects of the environment, but also need to include the external environment that includes various and constantly changin
... Show MoreThis study was conducted in the plant protection department/ College of Agriculture/ University of Baghdad to evaluate the efficiency of physical agents ozone, ultraviolet radiation, microwave for destroying afla produced in corn seeds. An isolate af A.flavus producing Aflatoxin B1 was obtained from plant protection dept. college of Agric. University of Baghdad. Results showed destroy toxin AFLA B1 the effect of radiation microwave in the media of Japex degree 80 and 100 co 57.14% and 85.71%, respectively, and for 20 sec, compared to the treatment comparison 0.00% as found significant differences were apparent between transactions and the treatment of comparison, as and notes the existence of a significant dif
... Show MoreDetecting and subtracting the Motion objects from backgrounds is one of the most important areas. The development of cameras and their widespread use in most areas of security, surveillance, and others made face this problem. The difficulty of this area is unstable in the classification of the pixels (foreground or background). This paper proposed a suggested background subtraction algorithm based on the histogram. The classification threshold is adaptively calculated according to many tests. The performance of the proposed algorithms was compared with state-of-the-art methods in complex dynamic scenes.
Rutting is mainly referring to pavement permanent deformation, it is a major problem for flexible pavement and it is a complicated process and highly observed along with many segments of asphalt pavement in Iraq. The occurrence of this defect is related to several variables such as elevated temperatures and high wheel loads. Studying effective methods to reduce rutting distress is of great significance for providing a safe and along-life road. The asphalt mixture used to be modified by adding different types of additives. The addition of additives typically excesses stiffness, improves temperature susceptibility, and reduces moisture sensitivity. For this work, steel fibres have been used for modifying asphalt mixture as they incorp
... Show MoreAtmospheric transmission is disturbed by scintillation, where scintillation caused more beam divergence. In this work target image spot radius was calculated in presence of atmospheric scintillation. The calculation depend on few relevant equation based on atmospheric parameter (for Middle East), tracking range, expansion ratio of applied beam expander's, receiving unit lens F-number, and the laser wavelength besides photodetector parameter. At maximum target range Rmax =20 km, target image radius is at its maximum Rs=0.4 mm. As the range decreases spot radius decreases too, until the range reaches limit (4 km) at which target image spot radius at its minimum value (0.22 mm). Then as the range decreases, spot radius increases due to geom
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