Chitinase-3-like 1 protein (YKL-40) is a glycoprotein primarily produced in the arthritic joint and plays a crucial role in inflammatory processes. The aim of the study is to establish the role of YKL-40 as a biomarker for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) compared to proinflammatory biomarkers and disease activity. The study included 58 patients and 18 control. Diseases activity score (DAS-28) and clinical disease activity index (CDAI) were measured. Serum level of YKL-40, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-1B (IL-1β), erythrocyte sedimentation (ESR), rheumatoid factor (RF), C-reactive protein (CRP), and anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) were assessed. The results showed that the median serum YKL-40 level which was 5.42 ng/ml, the TNF-a level which was 123.6 ng/ml, and the IL-1B level which was 204.365 pg/dl were significantly higher in patients compared to control 3.28 (1.58–4.99) ng/ml, 56.47 (9.38–77.01) ng/ml and 67.887 (15.493–122.689)pg/dl respectively. There was no correlation between serum YKL-40 and disease activity, while there were significant associations observed with TNF-α (r=0.5,p =0.0001) and IL-1β (r=0.41, p=0.001). YKL-40 indicating good levels of RA prediction at 2.47 ng/ml, sensitivity 87.9%, specificity 58.6%, accuracy 78.1%, PPV 80.9%, and NPV 70.8%. In conclusion, a higher level of serum YKL-40 is found in RA patients. The findings from our study suggest a strong association between YKL-40 and the proinflammatory biomarkers. As a result, these biomarkers together might play a role in RA pathogenesis, and YKL-40 may be used as a potential diagnostic biomarker for RA.
This study had succeeded in producing a new graphical representation of James abacus called nested chain abacus. Nested chain abacus provides a unique mathematical expression to encode each tile (image) using a partition theory where each form or shape of tile will be associated with exactly one partition.Furthermore, an algorithm of nested chain abacus movement will be constructed, which can be applied in tiling theory.
The purpose of this study is to investigate learners' listening comprehension problems with Englishlectures. The study was guided by research question (What are the listening comprehension problems learners have with lectures in English).Furthermore; the main significant goal were declared through conducting this study, as well as providing some procedures of distribution the questionnaire of the study.Moreover, it presents several definitions of listening. This study definitely depends on questionnaire instrument to gathering the required data. The participants of the study were 30 learners completed their secondary school and joined at the college. Based on the findings among the five factors (text, speaker, task, environment, and list
... Show MoreBackground:Oriental sore occurs mostly in the
mediteranian region , North Africa ,and the Middle East .
Rodents are the main reservoir for the parasite . The wet
type caused by L. major is rural and the dry type caused by
L. tropica is urban and humans are presumably the only
reservoir. Sand fly vectors are involved in all forms.
Objectives: This study aimed to show the most
important bacterial infections concomitant with cutaneous
leishmaniasis .
Methods; The study was performed on 75 patients (ages
1-50 years ) from both sexes were attending Skin Diseases
Department of Ramadi General Hospital during the period
extended from January to June 2000. These patients were
clinically diagnosed as patients
In this paper a WLAN network that accesses the Internet through a GPRS network was implemented and tested. The proposed network is managed by the Linux based server. Because of the limited facilities of GPRS such as dynamic IP addressing besides to its limited bandwidth a number of techniques are implemented to overcome these limitations.
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server was added to provide a single central control for all TCP/IP resources. Squid Proxy was added to provide caching of the redundant accessed Web content to reduce the Internet bandwidth usage and speeding up the client’s download time. Network Address Translation (NAT) service was configured to share one IP ad
... Show MoreTransactions on Engineering and Sciences
Spelling correction is considered a challenging task for resource-scarce languages. The Arabic language is one of these resource-scarce languages, which suffers from the absence of a large spelling correction dataset, thus datasets injected with artificial errors are used to overcome this problem. In this paper, we trained the Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model using artificial errors to correct Arabic soft spelling mistakes. Our T5 model can correct 97.8% of the artificial errors that were injected into the test set. Additionally, our T5 model achieves a character error rate (CER) of 0.77% on a set that contains real soft spelling mistakes. We achieved these results using a 4-layer T5 model trained with a 90% error inject
... Show MoreObjective (s): To determine factors associated with the pregnancy complications (Maternal age, education,
obstetrical history, gravidity, birth space interval, and smoking).
Methodology: A cross-sectional study conducted at Al- washash & Bab-almoadham primary health care
centers. The sample was (non probability convenient sample) which included (550) pregnant women. The
study started from 1st April 2014 to 1
st of April 2015. The data was collected by direct interview using
special questionnaire to obtain socio-demographic information.
Results: the result shows that mean age of the subjects was 26.5± 4.39 years, 57.8% were housewives, the
sample included 103 premature uterine contractions, 98 pregnancy induce
Inventory or inventories are stocks of goods being held for future use or sale. The demand for a product in is the number of units that will need to be removed from inventory for use or sale during a specific period. If the demand for future periods can be predicted with considerable precision, it will be reasonable to use an inventory rule that assumes that all predictions will always be completely accurate. This is the case where we say that demand is deterministic.
The timing of an order can be periodic (placing an order every days) or perpetual (placing an order whenever the inventory declines to units).
in this research we discuss how to formulating inv
... Show MoreBackground: Dental caries is a localized, progressive destructive, largely irreversible microbial based disease of multifactorial nature; these factors include (host, microbes and food) they influence differently on the initiation and progression of dental caries. The aims of the study: was to evaluate the effect of smoking on salivary flow rate, secretory immunoglobulin (SIgA) level and viable count of mutans streptococci (M.S) bacteria in oral cavity and their relation to dental caries experience. Material and method: The samples were collected from 80 male students ranging in ages from 18-22 years old. Where they divided in to two groups, 40 non-smokers (control group) and 40 smokers (study group). Unstimulated salivary samples were c
... Show MoreA seemingly uncorrelated regression (SUR) model is a special case of multivariate models, in which the error terms in these equations are contemporaneously related. The method estimator (GLS) is efficient because it takes into account the covariance structure of errors, but it is also very sensitive to outliers. The robust SUR estimator can dealing outliers. We propose two robust methods for calculating the estimator, which are (S-Estimations, and FastSUR). We find that it significantly improved the quality of SUR model estimates. In addition, the results gave the FastSUR method superiority over the S method in dealing with outliers contained in the data set, as it has lower (MSE and RMSE) and higher (R-Squared and R-Square Adjus
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