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Objective: To assess the knowledge and practice of diabetics towards their disease at tertiary care Hospital. Methods: This is cross sectional study was conducted at department of Diabetic Clinic, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre and Civil Hospital, Karachi from August 2022 to December, 2023.Total 250 diabetic patients of age 18-80 years, either gender, were included in this study. Disabled, blind and patients not willing to participate, were excluded. All relevant features including age, gender, duration of disease, educational status, family history, basic knowledge about diabetes, symptoms, risk factors, complications, prevention, frequency and monitoring of blood glucose, self-exercise practice, weight monitoring, eye checkup, foot care and dietary practice were recorded on a structured questionnaire. SPSS version 10 was used for data analysis. Results: A total of 250 patients were enrolled in this study 100(40%) were males and 150(60%) were females. Majority were in the age group between 41 and 50 years. 65 (26%) were not aware of the term diabetes. Majority had a fairly good knowledge about symptoms, risk factors, complications and prevention of diabetes however most were unaware of its types, 65% were not practicing exercise, 58% were not getting their eye checkup and majority did not practice foot care. Conclusion: Despite having satisfactory knowledge, the practice of the patients was not up to the mark. A multidisciplinary approach is required to motivate patients to actively participate in self-management of the disease

Objective: To evaluate and compare theserum Spexin levels in women with and without polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and to find if there is any association of Spexin levels with metabolic and hormonal parameters among PCOS women. Methods: The case-control study was conducted from August 2021 till September 2022in the Physiology Department at Basic Medical Sciences Institute (BMSI), Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, Karachi and Infertility Clinic, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, Karachi. The present study investigated 160 subjects in reproductive age group 15-45 years with 80 cases of PCOS diagnosed according to Rotterdam criteria and 80 controls without PCOS. The sample size was calculated using the Online Open Epi sample Size Calculator. IBM-SPSS version 20 was used to both store and analyze the data. Results: The levels of serum Spexin were found to be lower in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome 1.85±56ng/ml, compared to the levels of 2.65±50ng/ml in the healthy group (p

Objective: To evaluate the effect of dietary trans-unsaturated fatty acids (TFAs) on ovulatory infertility in young unmarried females. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from 1 august 2023 to 31 December 2023 at the Basic Medical Science Institute (BMSI), Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center Karachi. All healthy unmarried females aged 15-25 were included in the study. Females with a family history of infertility, having existing comorbidity, history of irregular menstruation cycle or hormonal replacement therapy, were excluded. Based on the Food frequency questionnaire score, 300 subjects were divided into 3 groups, Group A were low trans fats Consumers (Score 0-170), Group B was moderate trans fats consumers (Score 171-340) and Group C were high trans fats consumers (Score 341-500). The analysis of results was carried out on SPSS Software version 22. Results: The study’s 300 respondents, who ranged in age from 16 to 25, had a mean age of 21.8 years. Fifteen per cent of those in group “A” had abnormal HDL, 22% had bad LDL, and 23% had abnormal TGA, while 17% had abnormal cholesterol. An abnormal TGA, abnormal HDL, abnormal LDL, and abnormal 31% of the participants in group “B” exhibited abnormal cholesterol levels. A significant correlation between oxidative stress and hormonal indicators was found in three groups: “A” (13%) had aberrant LH, “20%” had abnormal FSH, “11%” had abnormal serum estrogen, “10%” had abnormal serum progesterone, and “C” (49% had abnormal LH, FSH, estrogen, and progesterone). Food frequency questionnaire (FFQ ) scores had a 25% positive correlation with cholesterol, a 40% negative correlation with HDL, a 31% positive correlation with LDL, and a 39% positive correlation with biochemical and hormonal indicators. Conclusion: Trans fats diets significantly increase the risk of ovulatory infertility and reproductive failure in young females

Summary: Functional connectomes (FCs) containing pairwise estimations of functional couplings between pairs of brain regions are commonly represented by correlation matrices. As symmetric positive definite matrices, FCs can be transformed via tangent space projections, resulting into tangent-FCs. Tangent-FCs have led to more accurate models predicting brain conditions or aging. Motivated by the fact that tangent-FCs seem to be better biomarkers than FCs, we hypothesized that tangent-FCs have also a higher fingerprint. We explored the effects of six factors: fMRI condition, scan length, parcellation granularity, reference matrix, main-diagonal regularization, and distance metric. Our results showed that identification rates are systematically higher when using tangent-FCs across the “fingerprint gradient” (here including test-retest, monozygotic and dizygotic twins). Highest identification rates were achieved when minimally (0.01) regularizing FCs while performing tangent space projection using Riemann reference matrix and using correlation distance to compare the resulting tangent-FCs. Such configuration was validated in a second dataset (resting-state).

Studying the association of the brain's structure and function with neurocognitive outcomes requires a comprehensive analysis that combines different sources of information from a number of brain-imaging modalities. Recently developed regularization methods provide a novel approach using information about brain structure to improve the estimation of coefficients in the linear regression models. Our proposed method, which is a special case of the Tikhonov regularization, incorporates structural connectivity derived with Diffusion Weighted Imaging and cortical distance information in the penalty term. Corresponding to previously developed methods that inform the estimation of the regression coefficients, we incorporate additional information via a Laplacian matrix based on the proximity measure on the cortical surface. Our contribution consists of constructing a principled formulation of the penalty term and testing the performance of the proposed approach via extensive simulation studies and a brain-imaging application. The penalty term is constructed as a weighted combination of structural connectivity and proximity between cortical areas. Simulation studies mimic the real brain-imaging settings. We apply our approach to the study of data collected in the Human Connectome Project, where the cortical properties of the left hemisphere are found to be associated with vocabulary comprehension.

OBJECTIVE: Breast carcinoma may display no symptoms in its initial stages; therefore, screening programs are crucial for the early identification of breast malignancies. Moreover, in patients who exhibit breast-related symptoms, breast carcinomas may be located distally from the symptomatic area. The objective of this study was to evaluate the prevalence, anatomical location, and imaging techniques employed in the detection of these incidental malignancies within the symptomatic one-stop breast clinic. METHODS: All individuals who presented at department of Radiology at DHQ hospital exhibiting breast-related symptoms during a two-year timeframe were incorporated into the research. We conducted a correlation analysis between the initial symptoms of patients subsequently diagnosed with breast cancer and the results obtained from imaging modalities (mammography and ultrasound). Incidental malignancies were delineated as histologically verified breast carcinomas that were non-palpable, distant from the symptomatic region, and solely detected through imaging techniques. RESULTS: During the investigative timeframe, a total of 281 female patients were ascertained to have breast cancer from 440 individuals evaluated. A subset of thirty-six patients (12.8%) who received a diagnosis of breast cancer presented with incidental malignancies that were exclusively detected through imaging modalities. The predominant instances of contralateral incidental cancers were discerned utilizing both mammography and ultrasound (US), with all patients being over the age of 35 years. CONCLUSION: We suggest mammography of both breasts and US of the symptomatic breast in order to identify incidental cancers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]