Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurodegenerative autoimmune disease mediated by autoreactive T cells against myelin-basic proteins. Cytokines are suggested to play a role in the etiopathogenesis of the disease. Among these cytokines is interleukin-2 (IL-2). Aim of the study: To investigate the association between IL2+166 G/T single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP: rs2069763) and MS in Iraqi patients. Serum level of IL-2 was also detected. Anti-rubella IgG antibody was further determined in the sera of patients. Patients and methods: Eighty MS patients (28 males and 52 females; age mean ± SD: 39.2 ± 16.1 years) and 80 healthy control matched patients for age (32.15 ± 16.13 years) and gender (28 males and 52 females) were enrolled in the study. IL2+166 was detected by conventional polymerase chain reaction using allele-specific primers. Serum status of IL-2 and anti-rubella IgG antibody was determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: Significantly increased frequencies of IL2+166 GG and GT genotypes were observed in MS patients compared to control (30.0 versus 4.5; odds ratio: 5.29; 95% confidence interval: 2.04–13.72; pc < 0.01 and 55.0 versus 32.5%; odds ratio = 2.54; 95% confidence interval: 1.34–4.81; pc < 0.05 and, respectively). IL-2 level was significantly increased in patients compared to control (36.0 ± 13.3 versus 10.5 ± 5.7 ng/ml). Such level was influenced by IL2+166 genotypes. Twenty-three patients (28.8%) were seropositive for anti-rubella IgG antibody compared to 5% in control. Conclusions: IL2+166 is a susceptibility SNP among Iraqi MS patients. Rubella virus is also suggested to increase the risk of disease.
Biomarkers such as Interleukin-6 (IL-6), Procalcitonin (PCT), C-reactive protein (CRP) and Neutrophil-Lymphocyte Ratio (NLR) have a role in the pathogenesis of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The aim of this study was to explore the differences between serum levels of such biomarkers in severe and non-severe COVID-19 cases and compare them with normal people and to evaluate the sociodemographic variables and chronic diseases effect on the severity of COVID-19. The study included 160 subjects, divided into two groups, a case group of 80 patients, and a control group of 80 normal persons. The case group was divided into two subgroups: 40 severe COVID-19 patients and 40 patients with non-severe disease. Blood IL-6 was asses
... Show MoreSurvival analysis is the analysis of data that are in the form of times from the origin of time until the occurrence of the end event, and in medical research, the origin of time is the date of registration of the individual or the patient in a study such as clinical trials to compare two types of medicine or more if the endpoint It is the death of the patient or the disappearance of the individual. The data resulting from this process is called survival times. But if the end is not death, the resulting data is called time data until the event. That is, survival analysis is one of the statistical steps and procedures for analyzing data when the adopted variable is time to event and time. It could be d
... Show MoreIn this paper, the botnet detection problem is defined as a feature selection problem and the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to search for the best significant combination of features from the entire search space of set of features. Furthermore, the Decision Tree (DT) classifier is used as an objective function to direct the ability of the proposed GA to locate the combination of features that can correctly classify the activities into normal traffics and botnet attacks. Two datasets namely the UNSW-NB15 and the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity Intrusion Detection System 2017 (CICIDS2017), are used as evaluation datasets. The results reveal that the proposed DT-aware GA can effectively find the relevant features from
... Show MoreMaximizing the net present value (NPV) of oil field development is heavily dependent on optimizing well placement. The traditional approach entails the use of expert intuition to design well configurations and locations, followed by economic analysis and reservoir simulation to determine the most effective plan. However, this approach often proves inadequate due to the complexity and nonlinearity of reservoirs. In recent years, computational techniques have been developed to optimize well placement by defining decision variables (such as well coordinates), objective functions (such as NPV or cumulative oil production), and constraints. This paper presents a study on the use of genetic algorithms for well placement optimization, a ty
... Show MoreAbstract: Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a significant field in computational linguistics as it is indispensable for many language understanding applications. Automatic processing of documents is made difficult because of the fact that many of the terms it contain ambiguous. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems try to solve these ambiguities and find the correct meaning. Genetic algorithms can be active to resolve this problem since they have been effectively applied for many optimization problems. In this paper, genetic algorithms proposed to solve the word sense disambiguation problem that can automatically select the intended meaning of a word in context without any additional resource. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a col
... Show MoreAs s widely use of exchanging private information in various communication applications, the issue to secure it became top urgent. In this research, a new approach to encrypt text message based on genetic algorithm operators has been proposed. The proposed approach follows a new algorithm of generating 8 bit chromosome to encrypt plain text after selecting randomly crossover point. The resulted child code is flipped by one bit using mutation operation. Two simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach including execution time of encryption/decryption and throughput computations. Simulations results prove the robustness of the proposed approach to produce better performance for all evaluation metrics with res
... Show MoreThe aim of this study is to assess the influence of some risks factors on the fistula development after palatoplasty to improve the outcome of the patients
A total of 48 patients (the males were 22, The females were 26) were included in this study. All the patients were examined weekly for the first month postoperatively to assess any breakdown in the wound by inspection and by asking the parents for any nasal regurgitation during fluids feeding.
Background: Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life. Autism affects the normal development of the brain in the areas of social interaction and communication skills.Objectives: To identify risk factors for Autism among a sample of autistic children in Baghdad city. Type of the study: this is a case – control, study. Methods: This study was conducted during the period of data collection extended from first of November 2010 until the first of April 2011,The total number of children involved was 100children with diagnosis of autism. Handred children who are free from autism were taken as the control sample. Results: there was a significant association between paternal age and
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