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Introduction Amyloidosis is a disease caused by infiltration of tissues by an amyloid protein. The most frequent cardiac amyloidosis is light chain (AL) amyloidosis, hereditary transthyretin (TTR-h) and wild transthyretin (w-TTR). Objective Describe baseline clinical, biological, echocardiographic characteristics and prognostic of patients referred for cardiac amyloidosis in the Amyloidosis expert center. Methods From 2010 to July 2016, all patients referred to the expert center of our Hospital for suspected cardiac amyloidosis were included. Baseline demographic, clinical, laboratory and ultrasound characteristics were recorded and patients were followed-up for major events including death, cardiac transplantation and left ventricular assistance implant. Results Of the 942 patients referred for suspicion of CA, 502 had confirmed CA of whom162 had AL amyloidosis, 203 h-TTR and 141 w-TTR. CA were men in 60%, the median age was 69 years w-TTR amyloidosis were older (83 [79; 87], P Conclusion Cardiac amyloidosis is more frequent than initially thought and has poor prognosis. The challenge is to achieve earlier diagnosis to improve prognosis and treatment.

Securing routing protocols in ad hoc networks is a very complex and still topical domain due to the binding characteristics of these networks, and their high vulnerability to attacks. OLSR is among the most used proactive routing protocols. Several secure extensions have been proposed to deal with its security, but they often involve a very high resource consumption that degrades network performances. The protocol ADVSIG is one of these extensions. It presents an efficient security approach, but generates very high computational costs due to the cryptographic operations it performs on the control messages. In this paper, we present a secure mechanism for OLSR, based on ADVSIG protocol, that we call HCA_OLSR. Its purpose is to improve ADVSIG performances using hash chains to reduce the cost of securing HELLO control messages. A watching mechanism is also proposed to counter the wormhole attack. The whole solution is simulated and analyzed using NS2.

The use of unconventional biological materials as biomarkers in trace element studies has increased in terms of published research studies. In the present study, human scalp hair samples (n = 65) were used to be a possible biomarker for the arsenic level in the human body as no study has been published in Karbala city, Iraq yet. The level of arsenic was determined by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). The validity, precision and accuracy of the methodology were evaluated using a “pooled” sample and certified reference materials, respectively. The validation methods provided acceptable levels of precision and accuracy with lower range of RSD (1.1%) and acceptable range of elemental recovery (97.72%), respectively. The influence of various factors including health status, gender, smoking activity, interaction, individual's age and drinking water on arsenic levels in washed scalp hair was investigated using the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), analysis of variance (ANOVA), F-test and a two-tailed pooled t-test. The arsenic levels in washed scalp hair of breast cancer patients (8.270 ± 4.345 mg/km) were significantly increased when compared with healthy individuals (6.266 ± 1.892 mg/km) (p