Cytokines are signaling molecules between inflammatory cells that play a significant role in the pathogenesis of a disease. Among these cytokines are interleukins (ILs) 17A and 33, and accordingly, the current case-control study sought to investigate the role of each of the two cytokines in the risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS). Sixty-eight relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) Iraqi patients and twenty healthy individuals (control group) were enrolled. Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kits were used to determine serum levels of IL-17A and IL-33. Results revealed that IL-17A and IL-33 levels were significantly higher in MS patients than in controls (14.1 ± 4.5 vs. 7.5 ± 3.8 pg/mL; p < 0.001 and 65.3 ± 16.3 vs. 49.3 ± 20.0 pg/mL; p < 0.001, respectively). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis demonstrated that IL-17A was a very good predictor of MS (area under curve [AUC] = 0.869; 95% CI = 0.779 - 0.960; p < 0.001; cut-off value = 10.2 pg/mL; sensitivity = 80.8%; specificity = 75.0%). A similar prediction was presented by IL-33, but the AUC value was lower (AUC = 0.762; 95% CI = 0.63 - 0.89; p < 0.001; cut-off value = 56.4 pg/mL; sensitivity = 70.6%; specificity = 70.0%). Multinomial logistic regression analysis confirmed the significance of IL-17A and IL-33 in MS risk, and under three models of analysis, the estimated odds ratios for IL-17A (1.50, 1.49 and 1.50, respectively) and IL-33 (1.05, 1.05 and 1.06) were above 1.0. Patients stratified by gender (male and female), expanded disability status scale (EDSS: < 3 and ≥ 3) or medication (pre- and post-medication) showed no significant differences in serum levels of IL-17A and IL-33 for each stratum. However, with regard to response to medication, it was found that responding patients showed significantly higher levels of IL-33 than non-responders (70.9 ± 12.2 vs. 57.2 ± 18.2 pg/mL; p = 0.018). This difference was not observed when considering IL-17A. Pearson correlation analysis between IL-17A and IL-33 revealed that both cytokines were not significantly correlated. In conclusion, the study indicated that IL-17A and IL-33 were up-regulated in serum of MS patients, and this up-regulation was not influenced by age, gender, EDSS or medication status, but the elevated level of IL-33 was more pronounced in patients who responded to medication.
OBJECTIVE: To assess and compare the knowledge, attitudes and practice regarding obesity management among family and non family physicians working in primary health care centers.
The phenomenon of informal building Spread recently in Iraqi residential areas, in general, and in Baghdad, in particular, due to the urgent housing need, on the one hand, and lack of commitment to building controls, on the other hand, to highlight the phenomenon of uncommitted building to controls and housing governing legislation in Iraq, leading to heterogeneity in both building densities and plot areas, and disorder in the urban fabric and urban escape of those areas. Research problem identified as the absence of a clear vision about the General aspects of the phenomenon of informal building in residential street scene, and the role of designed housing projects as a substitute for informal building in built residential areas. The des
... Show MoreMammals are under threat worldwide due to deforestation, hunting, and other human activities. In Iraq, a total of 93 species of wild mammals have been recorded including species with global conservation concern. Bamo Mountain is situated within the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq which is a suitable habitat for wild mammals. Due to scarcity of the field survey efforts and cryptic behavior, monitoring of the wild mammals fauna in Zagros Mountain seems challenging. Therefore, we used a camera trap which seems to be an ideal way to determine species diversity of wild mammals in Bamo Mountain. Moreover, interviews with local villagers were performed. The mammalian diversity of Bamo Mountain is not fully explored but seemed threatened by lo
... Show MoreBackground: Orthodontic mini-implants are increasingly used in orthodontics and the bone density is a very important factor in stabilization and success of mini-implant. The aim of this study was to observe the relationship among maximum bite force (MBF); body mass index (BMI); face width, height and type; and bone density in an attempt to predict bone density from these variables to eliminate the need for CT scan which have a highly hazard on patient. Materials and Methods: Computed tomographic (CT) images were obtained for 70 patients (24 males and 46 females) with age range 18-30 years. The maxillary and mandibular buccal cortical and cancellous bone densities were measured between 2nd premolar and 1st molar at two levels from the alveol
... Show MoreWe report here an innovative feature of green nanotechnology-focused work showing that mangiferin—a glucose functionalized xanthonoid, found in abundance in mango peels—serves dual roles of chemical reduction and in situ encapsulation, to produce gold nanoparticles with optimum in vivo stability and tumor specific characteristics. The interaction of mangiferin with a Au-198 gold precursor affords MGF-198AuNPs as the beta emissions of Au-198 provide unique advantages for tumor therapy while gamma rays are used for the quantitative estimation of gold within the tumors and various organs. The laminin receptor specificity of mangiferin affords specific accumulation of therapeutic payloads of this new therapeutic agent within prostate tumors
... Show MoreAs long as Islamic banks cannot operate in an environment that deals with traditional banking instruments based on the interest rate (bank interest) that is prohibited by Article No. (6) of the Islamic Banking Law No. (43) of 2015 which stipulates that (do not deal in any activity that carries Interest (neither taking nor giving)). Therefore it seeks to provide an alternative strategic solution within the framework of the provisions and rules of Islamic Sharia, on the basis of participating in profit and loss to avoid the method of interest taking and giving, to find investment methods to provide new financial products, such as Islamic certificates of deposit and investment funds according to the method Murabaha, speculation (Mudar
... Show MoreThe successive international changes in the economic, political, cultural and other fields resulted in many phenomena that occupied different levels of interest, and have been followed up, studied and analysed by specialists and researchers especially under the development of the media in the global communication.
Even though these phenomena had reflections in the communication domain like development and changes in the mechanism of behaviours between the international communities, they created in the meantime a phenomenon that caused an imbalance in the production, spread and the use of the informations that were supposed to be for fewer than 5 countries whereas it actually it is for more than 180 countries.
In this work, the study of corona domination in graphs is carried over which was initially proposed by G. Mahadevan et al. Let be a simple graph. A dominating set S of a graph is said to be a corona-dominating set if every vertex in is either a pendant vertex or a support vertex. The minimum cardinality among all corona-dominating sets is called the corona-domination number and is denoted by (i.e) . In this work, the exact value of the corona domination number for some specific types of graphs are given. Also, some results on the corona domination number for some classes of graphs are obtained and the method used in this paper is a well-known number theory concept with some modification this method can also be applied to obt
... Show MoreSome of the main challenges in developing an effective network-based intrusion detection system (IDS) include analyzing large network traffic volumes and realizing the decision boundaries between normal and abnormal behaviors. Deploying feature selection together with efficient classifiers in the detection system can overcome these problems. Feature selection finds the most relevant features, thus reduces the dimensionality and complexity to analyze the network traffic. Moreover, using the most relevant features to build the predictive model, reduces the complexity of the developed model, thus reducing the building classifier model time and consequently improves the detection performance. In this study, two different sets of select
... Show MoreRecently, the internet has made the users able to transmit the digital media in the easiest manner. In spite of this facility of the internet, this may lead to several threats that are concerned with confidentiality of transferred media contents such as media authentication and integrity verification. For these reasons, data hiding methods and cryptography are used to protect the contents of digital media. In this paper, an enhanced method of image steganography combined with visual cryptography has been proposed. A secret logo (binary image) of size (128x128) is encrypted by applying (2 out 2 share) visual cryptography on it to generate two secret share. During the embedding process, a cover red, green, and blue (RGB) image of size (512
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