Human beta-defenses (hBDs) are antimicrobial peptides involved in innate immune protection, and their association with the risk of respiratory allergy has been proposed. Therefore, this study sought to evaluate this association in allergic rhinitis (AR) and asthma (AS) of Iraqi patients. A case-control study was conducted to investigate serum levels of hBD1, hBD2, hBD3, and hBD4 in 52 AR and 60 AS patients and 61 healthy controls (HC). The hBDs were determined using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kits. Results revealed that median levels of hBD1, hBD2, and hBD3 were significantly elevated in the serum of AR and AS patients compared with HC (p < 0.01). Levels of hBD4 were also elevated in AR and AS patients but the differences were not significant. The levels of hBDs showed no significant differences between AR and AS patients. Age, gender, symptoms, and disease duration of patients influenced some of these variations. Logistic regression analysis indicated that hBD3 was the most important marker associated with the risk of AR and AS, and the estimated Odds ratios were 25.31 (95% confidence interval: 2.97-215.78; p = 0.012) and 32.20 (95% confidence interval: 2.49-415.89; pc = 0.032), respectively. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed that hBD3 occupied a very good area under the curve in AR and AS (0.83 and 0.84, respectively). In conclusion, the role of hBDs in the pathogenesis of AR and AS was indicated. In this context, hBD3 was the most important, and its association with the risk of developing AR and AS was suggested.
Early detection of eye diseases can forestall visual deficiency and vision loss. There are several types of human eye diseases, for example, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, arteriosclerosis, and hypertension. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) which is brought about by diabetes causes the retinal vessels harmed and blood leakage in the retina. Retinal blood vessels have a huge job in the detection and treatment of different retinal diseases. Thus, retinal vasculature extraction is significant to help experts for the finding and treatment of systematic diseases. Accordingly, early detection and consequent treatment are fundamental for influenced patients to protect their vision. The aim of this paper is to detect blood vessels from
... Show MoreFullerene thin films of about 200 nm thicknesses have been deposited by thermal evaporation method on soda lime glass at substrate temperature 303 and 403K under pressure about 10-5 mbar. This study concentrated on the influence of substrate temperature on the optical properties of C60 thin films within the visible range. Optical characterization has been carried out at room temperature using the absorption spectra, at normal incidence, in range (200-900) nm.
The absorption and extinction coefficients of the samples have been evaluated according to the variation in the UV- Visible spectrum. Increasing substrate temperature causes decreasing in optical band gap energy, for direct allowed tran
... Show MoreIn this paper a modified approach have been used to find the approximate solution of ordinary delay differential equations with constant delay using the collocation method based on Bernstien polynomials.
In this research is estimated the function of reliability dynamic of multi state systems and their compounds and for three types of systems (serial, parallel, 2-out-of-3) and about two states (Failure and repair) depending on calculating the structur function allow to describing the behavior of
Rapid worldwide urbanization and drastic population growth have increased the demand for new road construction, which will cause a substantial amount of natural resources such as aggregates to be consumed. The use of recycled concrete aggregate could be one of the possible ways to offset the aggregate shortage problem and reduce environmental pollution. This paper reports an experimental study of unbound granular material using recycled concrete aggregate for pavement subbase construction. Five percentages of recycled concrete aggregate obtained from two different sources with an originally designed compressive strength of 20–30 MPa as well as 31–40 MPa at three particle size levels, i.e., coarse, fine, and extra fine, were test
... Show MoreThe university course timetable problem (UCTP) is typically a combinatorial optimization problem. Manually achieving a useful timetable requires many days of effort, and the results are still unsatisfactory. unsatisfactory. Various states of art methods (heuristic, meta-heuristic) are used to satisfactorily solve UCTP. However, these approaches typically represent the instance-specific solutions. The hyper-heuristic framework adequately addresses this complex problem. This research proposed Particle Swarm Optimizer-based Hyper Heuristic (HH PSO) to solve UCTP efficiently. PSO is used as a higher-level method that selects low-level heuristics (LLH) sequence which further generates an optimal solution. The proposed a
... Show MoreThe interest in green energy in recent years is very noticeable, as this energy is a very important alternative that can replace fuel in many applications, most notably electric power generation, so work must be done to develop a form of this energy such as wind energy by working on the development of turbines. The DMST method provided by Qblade software is an integrated tool for making a simulation of a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT). The simulation was carried out on vertical axis wind turbines, designing turbine blades according to symmetrical NACA0018, and calculating some parameters such as power, torque and power coefficient. It is found that this type of turbine can be improved by treating the blade edges that cont
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