Background: Direct measurement of intracellular magnesium using erythrocytes has been suggested as a sensitive indicator for the estimation of body magnesium store. Marked depletion in plasma and erythrocyte magnesium levels was particularly evident in diabetic patients with advanced retinopathy and poor diabetic control. While insulin has been shown to stimulate erythrocyte magnesium uptake, hyperglycemia per se suppressed intracellular magnesium in normal human red cells.
Aim of the study: To investigate the erythrocyte magnesium level in Iraqi type I and II diabetic patients, with specific emphasis on the effect of both, metabolic control and the type of antidiabetic treatments.
Methods: Sixty two diabetic patients (7 with type I and 55 with type II diabetes mellitus) recruited from the outpatient diabetes clinic at the Specialized Center For Endocrine Diseases-Baghdad, during the period from 1st October 2005 to 28th February 2006. Eighteen non-diabetic normomagnesemic healthy controls matched for age and sex were participated in this study. Of the diabetics, 22 were using insulin (7 with type I and 15 with type II diabetes mellitus), 40 were taking oral antidiabetic agents (All with type II diabetes mellitus) and none were using both. Serum and erythrocyte magnesium concentration were measured for both groups, and Glycated hemoglobin levels were estimated only for diabetics.
Results : Mean serum and erythrocyte magnesium levels were significantly (p<0.001) lower in the diabetic group as compared to controls. Serum level of magnesium was not a significant predictor of erythrocyte magnesium concentration. No significant correlation was observed between HbA1c and erythrocyte magnesium. Significantly (p<0.001) lower serum magnesium levels were consistently evident through the entire diabetic subgroups as compared to controls. Erythrocyte magnesium contents were significantly (p<0.001) reduced in patients with type I , type II and type II receiving oral antidiabetic agents, but not in patients with type II receiving insulin (p= 0.120 ), as compared to controls. Significant difference in erythrocyte magnesium levels was observed between patients with type II receiving oral antidiabetic agents and those receiving insulin (p<0.001). The frequency of magnesium deficiency in diabetic patients, as judged by a lower serum magnesium reference limit was constantly 100% in all subgroups. While, judgments based upon a lower erythrocyte magnesium reference limit, discloses variable frequencies in diabetic subgroups.
conclusion: The near normal erythrocyte magnesium levels in type II insulin-receiving patients, could be credited to the stimulatory action of exogenous insulin on cellular magnesium uptake and may indicate a possible role of insulin treatment as a potential implications on health policy, by ameliorating cellular magnesium depletion in the continuously expanding diabetic population.
Understanding, promoting, and teaching media literacy is an important societal challenge. STEM educators are increasingly looking to incorporate 21st century skills such as media literacy into core subject education. In this paper we investigate how undergraduate Computer Science (CS) students can learn media literacy as a by-product of collaborative video tutorial production. The paper presents a study of 34 third-year CS undergraduates who, as part of their learning, were each asked to produce three video tutorials on Raspberry Pi programming, using a collaborative video production tool for mobile phones (Bootlegger). We provide results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the production process and resulting video tutorials,
... Show MoreThe goal of this work is demonstrating, through the gradient observation of a of type linear ( -systems), the possibility for reducing the effect of any disturbances (pollution, radiation, infection, etc.) asymptotically, by a suitable choice of related actuators of these systems. Thus, a class of ( -system) was developed based on finite time ( -system). Furthermore, definitions and some properties of this concept -system and asymptotically gradient controllable system ( -controllable) were stated and studied. More precisely, asymptotically gradient efficient actuators ensuring the weak asymptotically gradient compensation system ( -system) of known or unknown disturbances are examined. Consequently, under convenient hypo
... Show MoreSensing insole systems are a promising technology for various applications in healthcare and sports. They can provide valuable information about the foot pressure distribution and gait patterns of different individuals. However, designing and implementing such systems poses several challenges, such as sensor selection, calibration, data processing, and interpretation. This paper proposes a sensing insole system that uses force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) to measure the pressure exerted by the foot on different regions of the insole. This system classifies four types of foot deformities: normal, flat, over-pronation, and excessive supination. The classification stage uses the differential values of pressure points as input for a feedforwar
... Show MoreObjectives The strategies of tissue-engineering led to the development of living cell-based therapies to repair lost or damaged tissues, including periodontal ligament and to construct biohybrid implant. This work aimed to isolate human periodontal ligament stem cells (hPDLSCs) and implant them on fabricated polycaprolactone (PCL) for the regeneration of natural periodontal ligament (PDL) tissues. Methods hPDLSCs were harvested from extracted human premolars, cultured, and expanded to obtain PDL cells. A PDL-specific marker (periostin) was detected using an immunofluorescent assay. Electrospinning was applied to fabricate PCL at three concentrations (13%, 16%, and 20% weight/volume) in two forms, which were examined through field emission
... Show MoreThe issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the p
... Show MoreIn this paper, wavelets were used to study the multivariate fractional Brownian motion through the deviations of the random process to find an efficient estimation of Hurst exponent. The results of simulations experiments were shown that the performance of the proposed estimator was efficient. The estimation process was made by taking advantage of the detail coefficients stationarity from the wavelet transform, as the variance of this coefficient showed the power-low behavior. We use two wavelet filters (Haar and db5) to manage minimizing the mean square error of the model.
As one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord
... Show MoreThis study concerns the removal of a trihydrate antibiotic (Amoxicillin) from synthetically contaminated water by adsorption on modified bentonite. The bentonite was modified using hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (HTAB), which turned it from a hydrophilic to a hydrophobic material. The effects of different parameters were studied in batch experiments. These parameters were contact time, solution pH, agitation speed, initial concentration (C0) of the contaminant, and adsorbent dosage. Maximum removal of amoxicillin (93 %) was achieved at contact time = 240 min, pH = 10, agitation speed = 200 rpm, initial concentration = 30 ppm, and adsorbent dosage = 3 g bentonite per 1L of pollutant solution. The characterization of the adsorbent, modi
... Show More