Introduction and Aim: The pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-39, a member of the IL-12 family plays a key role in the inflammatory response by modulating immune cell activity and inflammation. A literature search shows no study undertaken for the effect of IL-39's on arthritis so far. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate the role of IL-39 in rheumatoid arthritis. Materials and Methods: This study involved 80 patients with rheumatoid arthritis registered at the Rheumatology Clinic at Baghdad teaching hospital. The patients were divided into three groups based on treatments received. Group 1 included patients who were not on any treatment for arthritis, Group 2 with patients on hydroxychloroquine and or prednisone treatment,

Double skin ventilated roof is one of the important passive cooling techniques that aims to reduce solar heat gain through roofs by reducing both the conduction and convection heat transfer from the roof to the ceiling of buildings. On the other hand, radiant barrier system (RBS) is very powerful in blocking the radiation heat transfer between the two skins. In this research,the effect of placing a thin layer of aluminium foil at different locations on the thermal insulation performance of a double skin ventilated roof model is investigated experimentally and the optimum location that transmits less heat flux from the lower skinis specified.The model is made of two parallel inclined galvanized steel plates. Galvanized steel has been used

Psoriasis is a common chronic skin condition characterized by infiltration of inflammatory cells into the epidermis and altered keratinocyte differentiation.

In this work, psoriasis was induced by an imiquimod 5% cream, an immune response modifier that can induce psoriasis-like skin inflammation when applied topically in mice. Guggulsterone prepared as a suspension and has been orally given to mice before imiquimod application. The results of the current study showed that guggulsterone suspension can significantly reduce psoriasis area and severity index in (guggul suspension+imiquimod group as compared with both control group and (vehicle suspension+imiquimod ) group.

The current research focuses on examining the isohyets in a set of (3) climatic maps of Iraq. Two of these maps were published in the Iraq Climate Atlas and the third one was published in an English source about the geography of Iraq. The first map represents the period from 1923-to-1944, the second is for the period from 1961-to-1990, whereas the third represents the period from 1971-to-2000. Comparing among these three maps, it has become clear that there are noticeable changes of rain in Iraq. In the first map, which represents the decade of the twenties, thirties and early forties, Iraq was located between two Isohyet lines (127 mm) in the far south and (1270 mm) in the far north. As for the second map, which represents the sixties,

The applications of hot plasma are many and numerous applications require high values of the temperature of the electrons within the plasma region. Improving electron temperature values is one of the important processes for using this specification in plasma for being adopted in several modern applications such as nuclear fusion, plating operations and in industrial applications. In this work, theoretical computations were performed to enhance electron temperature under dense homogeneous plasma. The effect of   power and duration time of pulsed Nd:YAG laser   was studied on the heating of   plasmas  by inverse bremsstrahlung  for  several values for the electron density ratio. There results for these ca

In this paper we use non-polynomial spline functions to develop numerical methods to approximate the solution of 2nd kind Volterra integral equations. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the applications of these method, and to compare the computed results with other known methods.