Background: Psoriasis is an immune-mediated inflammatory disease with unknown aetiology that may be associated with the defect in proliferation and differentiation of the keratinocytes related to inflammatory cell infiltration. According to published reports, it is universal in occurrence; its prevalence in different populations varies from 0.1% to 11.8%. Receiving Apremilast resulted in a strong reduction in interleukin 17 and interleukin 23, as well as reduced expression of other inflammatory cytokines and improvement of psoriatic lesions. Objectives: This study aimed to assess the impact of Apremilast on levels of IL-17, IL-23, and lipids in obese psoriatic patients. Methods: Thirty obese patients with psoriasis were included in this prospective interventional study to measure serum levels of lipid profile, IL-17, and IL-23, before and after receiving Apremilast treatment. A t-test was used to compare between means. Results: The mean age of the participants was 38 years. The most common age group was 30–40 years. The levels of IL-17 before the administration of Apremilast were 225.55 ± 7.70 pg/mL. After six months of treatment with Apremilast, a statistically significant reduction was seen, with the value decreasing to 183.41 ±2.33 pg/ml. IL-22 levels before the administration of Apremilast were measured to be 76.42 ± 4.03 pg/mL. After six months of treatment with Apremilast, these levels exhibited a non-significant decrease to 67.15 ± 5.40 pg/ml. Modest alterations were noted in the lipid profile. Conclusion: The use of Apremilast is effective in decreasing IL-17 levels, which have pro-inflammatory effects; this leads to improvement in psoriatic lesions. Moreover, receiving Apremilast in obese psoriatic individuals led to a reduction in TG levels and an elevation in HDL-C levels. Additionally, a rise in TC levels and LDL-C was seen.
Objective: To identify barriers to healthcare access, to assess the health literacy levels of the foreign-born Arabic speaking population in Iowa, USA and to measure their prevalence of seeking preventive healthcare services. Methods: A cross-sectional study of native Arabic speaking adults involved a focus group and an anonymous paper-based survey. The focus group and the Andersen Model were used to develop the survey questionnaire. The survey participants were customers at Arabic grocery stores, worshippers at the city mosque and patients at free University Clinic. Chi-square test was used to measure the relationship between the characteristics of survey participants and preventive healthcare services. Thematic analysis was
... Show MoreMany purposes require communicating audio files between the users using different applications of social media. The security level of these applications is limited; at the same time many audio files are secured and must be accessed by authorized persons only, while, most present works attempt to hide single audio file in certain cover media. In this paper, a new approach of hiding three audio signals with unequal sizes in single color digital image has been proposed using the frequencies transform of this image. In the proposed approach, the Fast Fourier Transform was adopted where each audio signal is embedded in specific region with high frequencies in the frequency spectrum of the cover image to sa
... Show MoreCanonical correlation analysis is one of the common methods for analyzing data and know the relationship between two sets of variables under study, as it depends on the process of analyzing the variance matrix or the correlation matrix. Researchers resort to the use of many methods to estimate canonical correlation (CC); some are biased for outliers, and others are resistant to those values; in addition, there are standards that check the efficiency of estimation methods.
In our research, we dealt with robust estimation methods that depend on the correlation matrix in the analysis process to obtain a robust canonical correlation coefficient, which is the method of Biwe
... Show MoreBreast cancer constitutes about one fourth of the registered cancer cases among the Iraqi population (1)
and it is the leading cause of death among Iraqi women (2)
. Each year more women are exposed to the vicious
ramifications of this disease which include death if left unmanaged or the negative sequels that they would
experience, cosmetically and psychologically, after exposure to radical mastectomy.
The World Health Organization (WHO) documented that early detection and screening, when coped
with adequate therapy, could offer a reduction in breast cancer mortality; displaying that the low survival rates
in less developed countries, including Iraq, is mainly attributed to the lack of early detection programs couple
Polycystic ovary syndrome(PCOS) is a heterogeneous disorder of uncertain etiology , it is the most common endocrinopathy in women and most common cause of anovulatery infertility ,characterized by chronic anovulation and hyperandrogenemia .The present study was designed to investigate the effect of silymarin which is known to have antioxidant and insulin sensitivity effects on the levels of glucose, insulin ,testosterone ,leutinizing hormone(LH) and progesterone .Ovulation rate and Homeostasis Model Assessment of insulin Resistance (HOMA) ratio were determined .A 3-months of treatment were conducted in 60 PCOS patients in three well-matched groups .The first one (n=20),received silymarin(750mg/day) .The second group received
... Show MoreIn data transmission a change in single bit in the received data may lead to miss understanding or a disaster. Each bit in the sent information has high priority especially with information such as the address of the receiver. The importance of error detection with each single change is a key issue in data transmission field.
The ordinary single parity detection method can detect odd number of errors efficiently, but fails with even number of errors. Other detection methods such as two-dimensional and checksum showed better results and failed to cope with the increasing number of errors.
Two novel methods were suggested to detect the binary bit change errors when transmitting data in a noisy media.Those methods were: 2D-Checksum me
Improving students’ use of argumentation is front and center in the increasing emphasis on scientific practice in K-12 Science and STEM programs. We explore the construct validity of scenario-based assessments of claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) and the structure of the CER construct with respect to a learning progression framework. We also seek to understand how middle school students progress. Establishing the purpose of an argument is a competency that a majority of middle school students meet, whereas quantitative reasoning is the most difficult, and the Rasch model indicates that the competencies form a unidimensional hierarchy of skills. We also find no evidence of differential item functioning between different scenarios, suggesting
... Show MoreStrong and ∆-convergence for a two-step iteration process utilizing asymptotically nonexpansive and total asymptotically nonexpansive noneslf mappings in the CAT(0) spaces have been studied. As well, several strong convergence theorems under semi-compact and condition (M) have been proved. Our results improve and extend numerous familiar results from the existing literature.