ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Estrogens has traditionally been known as the female hormone, but this idea has been challenged in early 1990’s and an essential physiological role for estrogen in male fertility was identified. Phytoestrogens are naturally occurring non-steroidal plant chemicals that can act like the female hormone estrogen. The herbs ( anise alfalfa and vervain ) chosen in this study contain phytoestrogens. OBJECTIVE: Previous studies demonstrated controversy of the effects of phytoestrogens on the rat testes .Hence, the present investigation was undertaken to investigate the influence of typical dose of herbs containing phytoestrogen on the rat testis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-four apparently normal mature male rats were divided into four groups of 6 animals each. The first "control" group received only 4ml of distilled water as a placebo. The second group received 40mg/kg of anise seed; the third group received 53.3 mg/kg of dried herb of vervain and the fourth group received 400 mg /kg of alfalfa seeds. All experimental groups received the doses through orogastric tube daily for fourteen days. Testicular histology was evaluated by light and enzyme histochemistry. Plasma FSH and testosterone concentrations were taken to support our results. RESULTS: Histological examination of anise, alfalfa and vervain – treated groups showed an increase in the height of germinal epithelia. There was marked lipoprotein lipase activity in the whole of the interstitial tissue which is more in amount in experimental groups than that in control group. Acid phosphatase granules were infiltered the seminiferous epithelia mildly in control group , moderately in anise and vervain groups and markedly in alfalfa group. The number of interstitial cells showing marked acid phosphatase activity was higher in all experimental groups than that in control group. Alkaline phosphatase exhibited intense activity in the boundary tissue of the seminiferous tubules in testes of control and experimental groups but it appeared thicker in the latter. CONCLUSION: The low dose and short duration of treatment used in our study made these phytoestrogen – containing herbs to have a stimulatory effect on leydig cell steroidogenesis. This study also demonstrated that aniseed being the most potent of the three herbs followed by alfalfa in stimulating testosterone synthesis. This is possibly attributed to the coumarin constituent of aniseed and alfalfa. KEY WORDS: phytoestrogen-containing herbs, testis, acid phosphatase, alkaline phosphatase, lipoprotein lipase
Sensing insole systems are a promising technology for various applications in healthcare and sports. They can provide valuable information about the foot pressure distribution and gait patterns of different individuals. However, designing and implementing such systems poses several challenges, such as sensor selection, calibration, data processing, and interpretation. This paper proposes a sensing insole system that uses force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) to measure the pressure exerted by the foot on different regions of the insole. This system classifies four types of foot deformities: normal, flat, over-pronation, and excessive supination. The classification stage uses the differential values of pressure points as input for a feedforwar
... Show MoreThe issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the proposed LAD-Atan estimator
... Show MoreThe current research aims to determine the necessary linguistic competencies for Arabic language teachers of the preparatory stage (fourth grade preparatory), which were five main competencies: Arabic grammar competencies, literary competencies, cultural competencies, rhetorical competencies, and expression competencies. To achieve the objective of the research, the researcher developed a questionnaire as the main tool for collecting data based on literature, it consists of (28) items including the five main competencies. The questionnaire was administered to (60) male and female teachers at Al-Karkh's first Education Directorate in the city of Baghdad. The findings of the research indicated that Arabic language proficiency got the highe
... Show MoreThis paper presents an efficient methodology to design modified evaporative air-cooler for winter air-conditioning in Baghdad city as well as using it for summer air-conditioning by adding a heating process after the humidification process. laboratory tests were performed on a direct evaporative cooler (DEC) followed by passing the air on hot water through heat exchanger placed in the coolers air duct exit. The tests were conducted on the 2nd of December /2011 when the ambient temperature was 8.1°C and the relative humidity was (68%). The air flow rate is assumed to vary between 0.069 to 0.209 kg/s with constant water flow rate of 0.03 kg/s in the heat exchanger. The performance is reported in terms of effectiveness of DEC, satura
... Show MoreThe commercial job is one of the most important businesses in the cities as there is no city can exist without commercial markets to offer service to its inhabitants. This study aims to distribute the commercial function in Abu Tayara Street located in the municipality of Al-Dora by highlighting the size of such businesses in this street. It focuses on analyzing the change that has occurred due to the usages of the commercial land not only in the residential areas, but also in various aspects associated with the growth of the population in the city. Both expansion and development of the economic and social aspects in the area have increased the demand for commercial services. So, the research focuses on the aspects of functional speciali
... Show MoreIt has increasingly been recognised that the future developments in geospatial data handling will centre on geospatial data on the web: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The evaluation of VGI data quality, including positional and shape similarity, has become a recurrent subject in the scientific literature in the last ten years. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is the most popular one of the leading platforms of VGI datasets. It is an online geospatial database to produce and supply free editable geospatial datasets for a worldwide. The goal of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of the quality assurance of OSM data. In addition, the credibility of open source geospatial data is discussed, highlighting the diff
... Show MorePhoto citation request in examples Of ascetic poetry in the first Abbasid era