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Background: Calcium channel blockers, including the recently developed cilnidipine, are widely used as first-line medications for treating newly diagnosed cases of primary essential hypertension. Cilnidipine has a unique advantage compared to amlodipine, another common calcium channel blocker. While amlodipine only targets L-type calcium channels, cilnidipine can target both L and N-type channels. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness and safety of these two medications in patients with essential hypertension. Methods: A total of n=80 cases of mild to moderate hypertension were randomly allocated to two groups. Group I n=40 received a daily dose of Amlodipine 5mg, whereas those in Group II n=40 received Cilnidipine 10mg once daily, 30 minutes after breakfast, for 8 weeks. Participants were prohibited from using any other medications during the study period. Each patient underwent three visits: a baseline visit (Visit 0) on recruitment day, visit 1 after 30 days of medication, and Visit 2 after 60 days of treatment. Systolic and diastolic blood pressures, as well as heart rate, were measured at each visit. Clinical and laboratory parameters were reassessed at the end of the 8 weeks. Results: Both medications significantly reduced Systolic and Diastolic Blood Pressure (SBP and DBP) and heart rate in both groups over 8 weeks. While Group II (Cilnidipine) consistently showed slightly lower blood pressure and heart rate, these differences were statistically insignificant, suggesting similar effectiveness between the two medications in this study. Both groups reported mild/moderate adverse events, with Group I having a consistently higher number and wider range of events compared to Group II. The most common events were fatigue and headache, with Group I experiencing additional events like headache + GI upset, vomiting, and ankle edema. Conclusion: Both the calcium channel blockers amlodipine and cilnidipine exhibit equivalent efficacy in reducing systolic and diastolic blood pressure in patients with mild to moderate essential hypertension. Cilnidipine, as a fourth-generation calcium channel blocker, offers a promising pharmacological profile. In addition to its blood pressure-lowering effects, cilnidipine demonstrates notable safety and provides additional benefits including renoprotective, cardioprotective, and neuroprotective effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hemoglobinopathy is a condition in which an individual carries an abnormal variant of hemoglobin gene and common genetic abnormalities in India. In heterozygous conditions particularly thalassemia trait is reported to be associated adverse phenotypes such as anemia, kidney problem, etc. The aim of the present study is to understand the status of anemia with special reference to β-thalassemia carriers. A total of 2969 individuals of both sexes in the age group of 13-30 years were recruited and screened for hemoglobinopathies, where 199 cases and same recruited cohort 199 age and sex matched controls. The hematological parameter levels were estimated by CBC and HPLC to confirm and distinguish between different hemoglobinopathies and thalassemia. The frequency of anemia was higher (74.4%) among cases as compared to that of the controls (31.2%). Microcytic anemia is significantly higher among cases (87.8%) whereas normocytic anemia is significantly higher among controls (66.1%). β-thalassemia carriers are found to be affected by anemia specifically microcytic anemia. The indices, RBC count and hematological parameters provided high consistencies for differentiating β-thalassemia carriers and anemia.

Feeding attributes of phytophagous insects are greatly influenced by abiotic and biotic factors. Therefore, we assessed the combined effect of temperature, age and sex on food consumption and utilization efficiencies of Zygogramma bicolorata Pallister. This Mexican beetle is known as one of the most promising candidates for the biocontrol of Parthenium hysterophorus Linnaeus, a noxious weed of barren, grazing and farming lands. Temperature, age and sex influenced food consumption, its utilization and ecological efficiencies of the beetle. Temperature between 27°C and 30°C was found optimal for 20-day-old adults of Z. bicolorata to convert and utilize the food biomass to body mass. Above and below the optimal temperature and age, the feeding attributes declined. Young females kept at 27°C consumed more food and laid more number of eggs compared to other females at different temperatures. This study reveals that females are more voracious feeders than the males regardless of temperature regimes. The present findings can be helpful to mass-multiply Z. bicolorata in the laboratory for the biocontrol of Parthenium weed in fields and agricultural farms. The results also suggest that global climate change may affect the biocontrol potential of the insect, but field investigations are needed to support the present findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to create a heterogeneous network of billions or trillions of connected things with self-aware, self-configuration capabilities that will exchange data with each other. This heterogeneous IoT network requires standard protocols, secure and energy-efficient wireless communication, and the allocation of unique identities such as IPv6 addresses. One of the key challenges in such a heterogeneous network is the maintenance of device location and unique identity to ensure the smooth functioning of location-aware applications. Hence, this paper presents a stateless spatiotemporal IPv6 addressing scheme called four-dimensional IP addressing (FDIPA). It is founded on the idea that two objects can not be in the same place at the same time. It uses the time and location information of the device to generate the target IPv6 address and assigns it to the device after verifying its uniqueness with the duplicate address detection (DAD) protocol. It not only maintains spatial and temporal information but also guarantees a unique identity for a large-sized network. Analytically, it is proved that FDIPA will always generate a unique identity if there is no technological limitation. However, the performance of FDIPA is evaluated based on metrics such as Assignment Success Rate (ASR), communication overhead, and total energy consumption in the assignment of a unique IPv6 address. The experimental results show that FDIPA achieves good ASR while keeping low energy consumption and less overhead in the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The device equipped with a multi-homing feature optimally exploits multiple network interfaces in modern communications networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine communication using the concurrent multipath transfer (CMT). This enhances system performance by concurrently scheduling data chunks on multiple network paths. For a while, several scheduling criteria have been developed to optimize performance. However, it has been identified that CMT still suffers from many serious problems, such as spurious retransmission, receiver buffer blocking, improper congestion window (CWND) growth, re-ordering and long round trip time, resulting in poor performance. These problems occur due to the asymmetric nature of path characteristics. Thus, this paper introduces a path rank-based CMT (R-CMT) that schedules data chunks according to the rank of the path. The proposed scheduling method calculates the rank of each network path based on the ratio of successfully received and transmitted chunks. The simulation results indicate that the proposed R-CMT scheduling achieves higher performance in terms of network latency, throughput and CWND growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Gyanendra. Kumar, Nitin. Sethi, Deepanjali. Pant, Jayashree. Sood, Amarjeet. Singh, Shashank. Pandey, Amitabh. Dutta Background and Aims: Reduced inhalational anaesthetic requirement in end-stage liver disease during living donor orthotopic [...]