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Background: ß-thalassemia major is microcytic hypochromic anemia disorder inherited from parents, resulting from a mutation in the ß-globin locus. As a result, a quantitative defective hemoglobin synthesis and relative excess in α-globin is occurred. As such, frequent blood transfusion is required, that leads to iron overload. Iron overload results in several pathological complications, including cell death, tissue injury, organ dysfunction, and liver fibrosis. The present study examined the effectiveness of nigella Sativa and manuka honey combination or manuka honey alone to the conventional therapy (Deferasirox + blood transfusion) used for preventing and managing iron overload in pediatric ß-thalassemia major patients. Methods: One hundred sixty-five patients participated in this randomized, double-blind, standard therapy-controlled, parallel-design multisite trial. The patients were randomly allocated into three groups, receiving either 500 mg nigella sativa oil combined with manuka honey lozenge (344 mg) daily or manuka honey alone plus the conventional therapy for ten treatment months. Ferritin level, serum iron, transferrin saturation, total iron binding capacity, alanine transaminase, and aspartate transaminase were determined at baseline and month 10. Results: Eventually, serum ferritin and iron were decreased significantly in the nigella sativa + manuka honey group as compared with the control group. Other clinical parameters were significantly impacted. The level of alanine transaminase and aspartate transaminase were significantly decreased in the nigella sativa plus manuka honey group compared with the control group. Conclusion: Results showed that nigella sativa plus manuka honey was more effective than manuka alone or the conventional treatment alone in managing iron overload of ß-thalassemia major patients.
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INTRODUCTION: Limited data on atrial fibrillation (AF) are available from the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). The aim of the FLOW-AF registry was to evaluate the characteristics, treatment patterns, and clinical and economic outcomes of patients with newly diagnosed non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) in MENA. METHODS: This multi-center, prospective, observational study (the FLOW-AF registry) enrolled patients newly diagnosed with NVAF across Egypt, Lebanon, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. The data collection occurred at enrollment (baseline) and after 6- and 12-months (follow-up). Baseline data included demographics, AF characteristics, medical history, and anti-thrombotic treatment patterns. Clinical events, healthcare resource utilization, and direct costs were collected at follow-up. RESULTS: The study enrolled a total of 1418 patients (52.7% males and 47.3% females). The mean age of the patients was 64.5 years and 90.6% were white. The mean (standard deviation) CHA2DS2-VASc and HAS-BLED risk scores were 2.7 (1.6) and 1.6 (1.2), respectively. Non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants, antiplatelet therapy, and vitamin K antagonists were prescribed to 65.8%, 16.4%, and 12.9% patients, respectively. During follow-up, the following rates of clinical outcomes were observed: bleeding events (1.7%), transient ischemic attack (1.7%), all-cause mortality (1.7%), stroke (0.6%), myocardial infarction (0.2%), and systemic embolism (0.08%). CONCLUSIONS: This MENA patient population was younger and had lower mean baseline CHA2DS2-VASc and HAS-BLED scores. The rates of clinical outcomes over 1-year in this study were low. Longer follow-up is required to comprehensively assess clinical outcomes in this patient population.
Asunto(s)
Anticoagulantes , Fibrilación Atrial , Sistema de Registros , Humanos , Fibrilación Atrial/epidemiología , Fibrilación Atrial/tratamiento farmacológico , Masculino , Femenino , Persona de Mediana Edad , Medio Oriente/epidemiología , África del Norte/epidemiología , Anciano , Estudios Prospectivos , Anticoagulantes/uso terapéutico , Resultado del Tratamiento , Accidente Cerebrovascular/epidemiologíaRESUMEN
Bio-inspired technologies have remarkable potential for energy harvesting from clean and sustainable energy sources. Inspired by the hummingbird-wing structure, we propose a shape-adaptive, lightweight triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) designed to exploit the unique flutter mechanics of the hummingbird for small-scale wind energy harvesting. The flutter is confined between two surfaces for contact electrification upon oscillation. We investigate the flutter mechanics on multiple contact surfaces with several free-standing and lightweight electrification designs. The flutter driven-TENGs are deposited on simplified wing designs to match the electrical performance with variations in wind speed. The hummingbird TENG (H-TENG) device weighed 10 g, making it one of the lightest TENG harvesters in the literature. With a six TENG network, the hybrid design attained a 1.5 W m-2 peak electrical output at 7.5 m/s wind speed with an approximately linear increase in charge rate with the increased number of TENG harvesters. We demonstrate the ability of the H-TENG networks to operate Internet of Things (IoT) devices from sustainable and renewable energy sources.
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Microdroplets have been widely used in various biomedical applications. During droplet generation, parameters are manually adjusted to achieve the desired size of droplets. This process is tedious and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a fully automated system for controlling the size of droplets to optimize droplet generation parameters in a microfluidic flow-focusing device. The developed system employed a novel image processing program to measure the diameter of droplets from recorded video clips and correspondingly adjust the flow rates of syringe pumps to obtain the required diameter of droplets. The system was tested to generate phosphate-buffered saline and 8% polyethylene (glycol) diacrylate prepolymer droplets and regulate its diameters at various flow rates. Experimental results demonstrated that the difference between droplet diameters from the image processing and manual measurement is not statistically significant and the results are consistent over five repetitions. Taking the advantages of the accurate image processing method, the size of the droplets can be optimized in a precise and robust manner via automatically adjusting flow rates by the feedback control. The system was used to acquire quantitative data to examine the effects of viscosity and flow rates. Droplet-based experiments can be greatly facilitated by the automatic droplet generation and optimization system. Moreover, the system is able to provide quantitative data for the modelling and application of droplets with various conditions in a high-throughput way.