Background: Chromogranin A is a useful tumor marker for neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) diagnosis & follow-up, Octreotide (somatostatin-long acting repeatable (SAS-LAR)) is an established treatment for NETs. Studies regarding the relation between response to SAS-LAR & the change in Chromogranin A (CgA) plasma level are still lacking.
Objectives: To determine the association between the using of Octreotide (SAS-LAR) and CgA level on time sequence & clinical status.
Patients & methods: a prospective observational study included 38 neuroendocrine patients in The Oncology Teaching Hospital/medical city complex/Baghdad, started at September 2013 till May 2016; assessing their circulating chromogranin A (CgA) plasma levels on multiple occasions(0,2 and 4 months) by ELISA technique and its correlation with response to somatostatin analogues (SAS-LAR) in those patients.
Results: the study recruited 38 neuroendocrine patients. 21 (55%) of them were males, 23 (60%) patients were older than 50 years old & 17 (44%) had metastasis to different sites. Somatostatin analogues (octreotide 30mg) was administered to 20 out of 38 (52.6%) studied patients. Serial CgA tests were performed in (17 out of 20) patients used SAS-LAR, with a change in mean value from (225.3 U/L) pre-using the agent to (17.5 U/L) two months after its use & to (8.7 U/L) four months after its use (p=0.009, p=0.002 respectively) while the change in mean of CgA level was from (205.9 U/L) to (200.9 U/L) in 10 patients who did not use Octreotide (p=0.2).Also results showed that no statistically significant difference in mean value of CgA pre & two months after using Octreotide with regard to grade of the tumor.
Conclusions: Plasma CgA is a reliable marker for NETs (regarding diagnosis, prognosis and response to treatment including somatostatin analogues).All patients with NETs should undergo a baseline plasma CgA level at diagnosis. Serial assessment of circulating CgA could be done for NET patients when there is baseline elevation of CgA level in circulation
Background: Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) is a term refers to the overarching group of conditions to which autism spectrum disorder (ASD) belongs .
Objective: This study was designed to determine the existing behavior of children with autism in dental sitting, the behavior improvements in recall dental visits and evaluate the improvement in oral hygiene with using specific visual pedagogy chart.
Type of the study: Cross-sectional study.
Methods: Forty children of both genders, ages ranged from 4 – 6 years having primary teeth only were selected whose medical history included a diagnosis
... Show MoreIn this paper a WLAN network that accesses the Internet through a GPRS network was implemented and tested. The proposed network is managed by the Linux based server. Because of the limited facilities of GPRS such as dynamic IP addressing besides to its limited bandwidth a number of techniques are implemented to overcome these limitations.
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server was added to provide a single central control for all TCP/IP resources. Squid Proxy was added to provide caching of the redundant accessed Web content to reduce the Internet bandwidth usage and speeding up the client’s download time. Network Address Translation (NAT) service was configured to share one IP ad
... Show MoreHe mentioned in this article the main types of corruption, which are political, moral, financial and administrative. Others may add other types of corruption, such as religious, scientific, media, informational and statistical corruption. At the global level, the focus is largely on financial corruption, although other types of corruption are no less bad than it. Financial corruption can be defined as all financial deviations in violation of general laws or the provisions of regulations, legislation, and procedures regulating the work of the state, private institutions and individuals and applied in state institutions and the private sector in general and inconsistent with the controls and instructions of financial control.
In th
... Show MoreIn Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) the non-linear data projection provided by a one hidden layer Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), trained to recognize phonemes, and has previous experiments to provide feature enhancement substantially increased ASR performance, especially in noise. Previous attempts to apply an analogous approach to speaker identification have not succeeded in improving performance, except by combining MLP processed features with other features. We present test results for the TIMIT database which show that the advantage of MLP preprocessing for open set speaker identification increases with the number of speakers used to train the MLP and that improved identification is obtained as this number increases beyond sixty.
... Show MoreBackground: Hypertension occurs in some patients with primary nephritic syndrome it may be mediated by changes in vasopressin activities or intravascular volume.
Aim of study: is to find out how many patients with idiopathic nephritic syndrome hare hypertension. Subj. & Methods: The study included 50 children (29 males and 21 females) with age ranger between
1- 13 years. Sixteen patients (32%) were with initial attack of nephritic syndrome, while thirty four patients (68%) presented with relapse.
Results: Nine (18%) patients had hypertension, eight (16%) patients were relapse cases, and one (2%>) patient was with initial attack. Hypertension was found in four (8%) patients with steroid resistant neurotic syndrome, three (
Background: pain is frequently listed among initial symptoms of MS or an occurring in the course of the disease.
Patients and Methods: one hundred thirty MS patients diagnosed according to Macdonald's criteria compared with 115 matched age and sex control were interviewed about pain Neuropathic, somatic and headache.
Results: Neuropathic pain was significantly higher in MS than control group, while LLD and ARP were of no significance difference between two groups. For somatic pain there was significant increase in MS.
Conclusion: pain is common in MS especially LLD. There is no significant difference between pain subtypes and duration of disease and FS, EDSS.
Low conversion copolymerization of acrylamide AM (monomer-1) have been conducted with acrylic acid AA in dry benzene at 70°C , using Benzoyl peroxide BPO as initiator . The copolymer composition has been determined by elemental analysis. The monomer reactivity ratios have been calculated by the Kelen-Tudos and Finman-Ross graphical procedures. The derived reactivity ratios (r1, r2) are: (0.620, 0.996) for (AM / AA) systems , and found that the reactivity of the monomer AA is more than the monomer AM in the copolymerization of (AA/AM) system. The reactivity ratios values were used for microstructures calculation.
The research gained its importance from the importance of technical reserves in the insurance activity and its impact on the result of the activity of insurance companies and their financial position and thus reflected on the insurance prices as the technical reserves are one of the most important and most valuable budget items usually, as well as that the insurance activity has a role in maintaining economic development where some countries develop laws and instructions for the formation of those reserves binding application to insurance companies and the fact that the financial statements in general are of interest to shareholders, banks, the General Tax Authority and other beneficiaries In the insurance activity as policyholders and t
... Show MoreATTAPULGITE clay was modified in this study by the graphene oxide sheets and the clay was diagnosed before and after modification using several techniques (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy FT-IR, X-ray powder diffraction XRD, Scanning electron microscope SEM , energy dispersive spectroscopy EDX ) ,The surface of the attapulgite clay (before (Ata) after modification by graphene oxide (Ata-GO) ) was applied to adsorption of the Alizarin dye from its water solutions through the application of several kinetic models (pseudo first-order model , pseudo second -order model , intraparticle diffusion model ),It was found that the practical results follow pseudo second -order model. The process of modification on the surface of the mud has imp
... Show MoreMT Abed, ALSG Irhayyim, TH Rija, International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, 2020 - Cited by 1