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.
New evidence on nanotechnology has shown interest in the creation and assessment of nanoparticles for cancer treatment. Worldwide, a wide range of tumor-targeted approaches are being developed to reduce side effects and boost the efficacy of cancer therapy. One strategy that shows promise is the use of metallic nanoparticles to increase the radio sensitization of the cancer cells while reducing or maintaining the normal tissue complication probability during radiation therapy. In this study, atmospheric plasma was created using argon gas to create Au NPs using the plasma jet scheme, and their ability to induce apoptosis as an anticancer mechanism was tested. Aqueous gold tetrachloride salts (HAuCl4·3H2O) ere used to produce gold nanopartic
... Show MorePoly urea formaldehyde –Bentonite (PUF-Bentonite) composite was tested as new adsorbent
for removal of mefenamic acid (MA) from simulated wastewater in batch adsorption
procedure. Developed a method for preparing poly urea formaldehyde gel in basic media by
using condensation polymerization. Adsorption experiments were carried out as a function of
water pH, temperature, contact time, adsorbent dose and initial MA concentration .Effect of
sharing surface with other analgesic pharmaceuticals at different pH also studied. The
adsorption of MA was found to be strongly dependent to pH. The Freundlich isotherm model
showed a good fit to the equilibrium adsorption data. From Dubinin–Radushkevich model the
mean free
A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the antibacterial effect of Cinnamomum zealynicum bark aqueous , methanol, and chloroform extracts against some gram positive and gram negative pathogenic bacteria which isolated from wound, throat infection, urine and stool during the period from December /2013 to February /2014 from Alkarama hospital in Wasit. All these isolates were identified by using VITEK2 compact system. Antibiotic sensitivity test of the bacterial isolates was determined for ten antibiotics. Chemical analysis showed that Cinnamomum zeylanicum bark extracts contained different active compounds (phenoles, alkaloids, tannins, glycosides, coumarins, saponins, resins flavones and essential oil). The laboratory tests o
... 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 MoreThe issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the p
... Show MoreA new modified differential evolution algorithm DE-BEA, is proposed to improve the reliability of the standard DE/current-to-rand/1/bin by implementing a new mutation scheme inspired by the bacterial evolutionary algorithm (BEA). The crossover and the selection schemes of the DE method are also modified to fit the new DE-BEA mechanism. The new scheme diversifies the population by applying to all the individuals a segment based scheme that generates multiple copies (clones) from each individual one-by-one and applies the BEA segment-wise mechanism. These new steps are embedded in the DE/current-to-rand/bin scheme. The performance of the new algorithm has been compared with several DE variants over eighteen benchmark functions including sever
... Show MoreThis study deal with structural and stratigraphic analysis of the seismic reflection data for Hartha Formation at Nasiriyah field, the area of seismic data is about (1237) km2. Nasiriyah oil field is located in Dhi Qar Governorate, southern Iraq, and the oil field is located to the East of Euphrates River of about (38) km northwest of Nasiriyah city. which includes twenty-four (24) wells. In some wells there are oil evidences in Hartha Formation at Nasiriyah oil field, for this reason, Hartha Formation is studied.
Two reflectors are picked (top and bottom Hartha) they are defined by using synthetic seismograms in time domain for wells (Ns-1, and 3). Time and depth of Hartha Formation are drawn using velocity data of reflectors. The st
In this paper, a numerical model for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis is developed for investigating the aeroelastic response of a single wind turbine blade. The Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory was adopted to calculate the aerodynamic forces considering the effects of wind shear and tower shadow. The wind turbine blade was modeled as a rotating cantilever beam discretized using Finite Element Method (FEM) to analyze the deformation and vibration of the blade. The aeroelastic response of the blade was obtained by coupling these aerodynamic and structural models using a coupled BEM-FEM program written in MATLAB. The governing FSI equations of motion are iteratively calculated at each time step, through exchanging data between
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