Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a prevalent clinical condition, that affects millions of individuals worldwide. Objective: To assess the level of soluble HLA-E (sHLA-E) as a biomarker in the diagnosis and immunopathogenesis of GERD patients. Methods: The case-control prospective study included 40 GERD patients who were consulted at the Gastroenterology Unit of AlKindy Teaching Hospital, as along with 40 healthy control subjects. The study period extended from January 2023 to May 2024. Blood was drawn from both groups and serum was separated to assesssHLA-E using a sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit. Results: There was a statistically significant difference in sHLA-E levels between GERD patients and healthy controls (P=0.021). The median sHLA-E level was significantly higher in GERD patients (0.370 ng/mL) compared to controls (0.148 ng/mL). A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was generated to evaluate the diagnostic performance of soluble HLA-E (sHLA-E) in predicting GERD. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was calculated to assess the discriminatory ability of sHLA-E with a vlue of 0.649 (95% CI: 0.534-0.752, p = 0.021). The optimal cutoff value for sHLA-E was determined to be ≤0.65 ng/mL, with a sensitivity of 85.1%, specificity of 27.3%, positive predictive value of 65.9%, negative predictive value of 69.4%, and accuracy of 35.0%. Conclusion: The study provides evidence of an association between elevated sHLA-E levels and GERD. It also suggests that sHLA-E has a moderate discriminatory ability as a biomarker in predicting GERD. © 2025, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT : Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most common inflammatory neurodegenerative diseases linked with dementia, it is characterized by the deposition of amyloid beta-peptide (Ab) in the brain. The present study aims to innovate a biochemical relationship between AD and interleukin 38 (IL-38) as an anti-inflammatory cytokine, expose novel mechanisms and concepts regarding other biochemical parameters studied previously or recently in AD patients and also examine the biochemical action of memantine (10 mg daily) on AD patients. Sixty (60) diagnosed AD patients participated in the present study and classified into four (4) groups: G3 were composed of (15) newly diagnosed males (52-78) years / without treatment, G4 composed of (15
... Show MoreIn this paper, an analytical solution describing the deflection of a cracked beam repaired with piezoelectric patch is introduced. The solution is derived using perturbation method. A novel analytical model to calculate the proper dimensions of piezoelectric patches used to repair cracked beams is also introduced. This model shows that the thickness of the piezoelectric patch depends mainly on the thickness of the cracked beam, the electro-mechanical properties of the patch material, the applied load and the crack location. Furthermore, the model shows that the length of the piezoelectric patches depends on the thickness of the patch as well as it depends on the length of the cracked beam and the crack depth. The additio
... Show MoreThe advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), within the previous decades, has significantly changed people’s transmit or store their information over the Internet or networks. So, one of the main challenges is to keep these information safe against attacks. Many researchers and institutions realized the importance and benefits of cryptography in achieving the efficiency and effectiveness of various aspects of secure communication.This work adopts a novel technique for secure data cryptosystem based on chaos theory. The proposed algorithm generate 2-Dimensional key matrix having the same dimensions of the original image that includes random numbers obtained from the 1-Dimensional logistic chaotic map for given con
... Show MoreA novel demountable shear connector is proposed to link a concrete slab to steel sections in a way that resulting steel-concrete composite floor is demountable, i.e. it can be easily dismantled at the end of its service life. The proposed connectors consist of two parts: the first part is a hollow steel tube with internal threads at its lower end. The second part is a compatible partially threaded bolted stud. After linking the stud to the steel section, the hollow steel tube can be fastened over the threaded stud, which create a complete demountable shear connector. The connector is suitable for use in both composite bridges and buildings, and using cast in-situ slabs, precast solid slabs, or hollow-core precast slabs. A series of push-off
... Show MoreBackground: osteoporosis is characterized by a reduction in bone mineral density, skeletal microstructure breakdown, increased bone fragility, and fracture susceptibility. Osteopenia is the preceding step to osteoporosis because it causes a decrease in bone mass, osteoporosis reduces a person's quality of life. Periostin (encoded by Postn), its name is derived from the fact that it was first detected in periosteal osteocytes and osteoblasts. Periostin deficiency has been linked to osteoporosis and weak bones. Study objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine periostin levels in serum of Iraqi patients with osteoporosis and osteopenia, and it is also possible to consider periostin as a diagnostic factor to follow the progression o
... Show MoreIn this work a flowsheet has been put for the recovery of uranium and plutonium from 2.5M nitric acid solutions using 17.5% tributyl phosphate (TBP) and 2.5% trioctylamine (TOA) in kerosene diluent . The fission products (resulting from irradiated of uranium samples in nuclear research reactor) were removed from the desired actinides U & Pu .The organic phase TBP/TOA/Kerosene, containing both actinides U&Pu were stripped using 0.1 M HNO3. Trioctylamine (2.5 volume ratio ) in mesitylene , has been used in conditions appropriate for the recovery of Pu . From the experiments done using mixer- settler , the concentration of uranium in the organic phase in such conditions was very low ,not exceeding parts of a million .
Most of the medical datasets suffer from missing data, due to the expense of some tests or human faults while recording these tests. This issue affects the performance of the machine learning models because the values of some features will be missing. Therefore, there is a need for a specific type of methods for imputing these missing data. In this research, the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is used for generating and imputing the missing values in the pain in my ass (also known Pima) Indian diabetes disease (PIDD) dataset, the proposed algorithm is called (ISSA). The obtained results showed that the classification performance of three different classifiers which are support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), and Naïve B
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