Pharmacodynamic effects following co-administration of cannabinoids and opioids: A scoping review of human experimental studies.

BACKGROUND: Cannabinoids are increasingly used in the management of chronic pain. Although analgesic potential has been demonstrated, cannabinoids interact with a range of bodily functions that are also influenced by chronic pain medications, including opioids. OBJECTIVE: We performed a scoping review of literature on the pharmacodynamic effects following co-administration of cannabinoids and opioids. METHODS: We systematically searched EMBASE, PubMed, and PsycINFO for studies that experimentally investigated the co-effects of cannabinoids and opioids in human-subjects. Available evidence was summarized by clinical population and organ system. A risk of bias assessment was performed. RESULTS: A total of sixteen studies met inclusion criteria. Study populations included patients with chronic non-cancer and cancer pain on long-term opioid regimens and healthy young adults without prior exposure to opioids who were subject to experimental nociceptive stimuli. Commonly administered cannabinoid agents included Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol and/or cannabidiol. Co-administration of cannabinoids and opioids did not consistently improve pain outcomes; however, sleep and mood benefits were observed in chronic pain patients. Increased somnolence, memory and attention impairment, dizziness, gait disturbance, and nauseousness and vomiting were noted with co-administration of cannabinoids and opioids. Cardiorespiratory effects following co-administration appeared to vary according to duration of exposure, population type, and prior exposure to cannabinoids and opioids. CONCLUSIONS: The available evidence directly investigating the pharmacodynamic effects following co-administration of cannabinoids and opioids for non-analgesic outcomes is scarce and suffers from a lack of methodological reporting. As such, further research in this area with comprehensive methodologic reporting is warranted.

Rifaximin potentiates clarithromycin against Mycobacterium abscessus in vitro and in zebrafish.

Background: Mycobacterium abscessus is a non-tuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) that causes chronic pulmonary infections. Because of its extensive innate resistance to numerous antibiotics, treatment options are limited, often resulting in poor clinical outcomes. Current treatment regimens usually involve a combination of antibiotics, with clarithromycin being the cornerstone of NTM treatments. Objectives: To identify drug candidates that exhibit synergistic activity with clarithromycin against M. abscessus. Methods: We performed cell-based phenotypic screening of a compound library against M. abscessus induced to become resistant to clarithromycin. Furthermore, we evaluated the toxicity and efficacy of the top compound in a zebrafish embryo infection model. Results: The screen revealed rifaximin as a clarithromycin potentiator. The combination of rifaximin and clarithromycin was synergistic and bactericidal in vitro and potent in the zebrafish model. Conclusions: The data indicate that the rifaximin/clarithromycin combination is promising to effectively treat pulmonary NTM infections.

Preponderance of mixed infection of Cucumber mosaic virus and Candidatus Phytoplasma australasia on brinjal in India.

Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) has broad host range by infecting major stable food crops and causes heavy loss especially in brinjal. In major brinjal growing tracts of Tamil Nadu, Krishnagiri recorded the highest combined infection of CMV and Candidatus Phytoplasma australasia (Ca. P. australasia) with 26%. The symptoms ranged from mild to severe mosaic, mottling, filiformity of leaves and little leaf. The virus was successfully transmitted to cowpea cv. CO7 and ridge gourd through mechanical inoculation and the presence of virus was detected both by DAC-ELISA and RT-PCR. Electron microscopy of CMV exemplified isometric particles with 28-35 nm under TEM and phytoplasma with 700-820 nm in SEM analysis. Among the different test hosts, Luffa acutangula was found to be the best indicator host for brinjal CMV isolate as it requires shorter period (4-5DPI) to express symptoms with good virus titer (A405nm 2.318). The genome characterization of CMV TNB isolate revealed that the RNA1, RNA2 and RNA3 have 97, 96 and 99% homology with other 1B sub group CMV isolates, respectively. Recombination analysis of RNA2 of CMV TNB has tomato Egyptian isolate (KT921315) as major parent and black pepper Indian isolate (KU947030) as minor parent at the conserved region (52-805nt). The characterization of phytoplasma using iphy classifier reveled Ca. P. australasia belonging to 16SrIID subgroup was present along with CMV infection. In addition, the Solanum torvum grown in and around brinjal ecosystem showed severe mosaic and exhibited 99% nucleotide identity with CMV TNB isolate and these plants also act as inoculum source during the on and off cropping season in India. To our knowledge this is the first record of mixed infection of CMV and Ca. P. australasia in brinjal and first record of CMV infection in S. torvum in India.

Multimodal Medical Image Fusion of Positron Emission Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Using Generative Adversarial Networks.

Multimodal medical image fusion is a current technique applied in the applications related to medical field to combine images from the same modality or different modalities to improve the visual content of the image to perform further operations like image segmentation. Biomedical research and medical image analysis highly demand medical image fusion to perform higher level of medical analysis. Multimodal medical fusion assists medical practitioners to visualize the internal organs and tissues. Multimodal medical fusion of brain image helps to medical practitioners to simultaneously visualize hard portion like skull and soft portion like tissue. Brain tumor segmentation can be accurately performed by utilizing the image obtained after multimodal medical image fusion. The area of the tumor can be accurately located with the information obtained from both Positron Emission Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Image in a single fused image. This approach increases the accuracy in diagnosing the tumor and reduces the time consumed in diagnosing and locating the tumor. The functional information of the brain is available in the Positron Emission Tomography while the anatomy of the brain tissue is available in the Magnetic Resonance Image. Thus, the spatial characteristics and functional information can be obtained from a single image using a robust multimodal medical image fusion model. The proposed approach uses a generative adversarial network to fuse Positron Emission Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Image into a single image. The results obtained from the proposed approach can be used for further medical analysis to locate the tumor and plan for further surgical procedures. The performance of the GAN based model is evaluated using two metrics, namely, structural similarity index and mutual information. The proposed approach achieved a structural similarity index of 0.8551 and a mutual information of 2.8059.

Comparative Study Based on Analysis of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Detection and Prediction Using Machine Learning Models.

As the number of COVID-19 cases increases day by day, the situation and livelihood of people throughout the world deteriorates. The goal of this study is to use machine learning models to identify disease and forecast whether or not a person is infected with the virus or another common illness. More articles about COVID-19 will be released starting in 2020, but we still do not have a reliable prediction mechanism to diagnose the disease with 100% accuracy. This comparison is done to see which model is the most effective in detecting and predicting disease. Despite the fact that we have immunizations, we require a best-prediction strategy to assist all humans in surviving. Researchers claimed that the supervised learning method predicts more accurately than the unsupervised learning method in the majority of studies. Supervised learning is the process of mapping inputs to derived outputs using a set of variables and created functions. This will also help us to optimize performance criteria using experience. It is further divided into two categories: classification and regression. According to recent studies, classification models are more accurate than other models.

Low-Light Image Enhancement Based on Generative Adversarial Network.

Image enhancement is considered to be one of the complex tasks in image processing. When the images are captured under dim light, the quality of the images degrades due to low visibility degenerating the vision-based algorithms' performance that is built for very good quality images with better visibility. After the emergence of a deep neural network number of methods has been put forward to improve images captured under low light. But, the results shown by existing low-light enhancement methods are not satisfactory because of the lack of effective network structures. A low-light image enhancement technique (LIMET) with a fine-tuned conditional generative adversarial network is presented in this paper. The proposed approach employs two discriminators to acquire a semantic meaning that imposes the obtained results to be realistic and natural. Finally, the proposed approach is evaluated with benchmark datasets. The experimental results highlight that the presented approach attains state-of-the-performance when compared to existing methods. The models' performance is assessed using Visual Information Fidelitysse, which assesses the generated image's quality over the degraded input. VIF obtained for different datasets using the proposed approach are 0.709123 for LIME dataset, 0.849982 for DICM dataset, 0.619342 for MEF dataset.

Co-existence of chlorosis inducing strain of Cucumber mosaic virus with tospoviruses on hot pepper (Capsicum annuum) in India.

Cucumo- and tospoviruses are the most destructive viruses infecting hot pepper (chilli). A diagnostic survey was conducted to assess the prevalence of cucumo and tospoviruses in chilli growing tracts of Tamil Nadu. Infected plants showing mosaic with chlorotic and necrotic rings, veinal necrosis, mosaic mottling, leaf filiformity and malformation were collected. Molecular indexing carried out through reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) with coat protein gene specific primer of Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) and tospovirus degenerate primer corresponding to the L segment (RdRp). Ostensibly, amplifications were observed for both CMV and tospoviruses as sole as well for mixed infections. The sequence analysis indicated that the Capsicum chlorosis virus (CaCV) and Groundnut bud necrosis virus (GBNV) to be involved with CMV in causing combined infections. The co-infection of CMV with CaCV was detected in 10.41% of the symptomatic plant samples and combined infection of CMV with GBNV was recorded in around 6.25% of the symptomatic plants surveyed. The amino acid substitution of Ser129 over conserved Pro129 in coat protein of CMV implies that CMV strain involved in mixed infection as chlorosis inducing strain. Further, the electron microscopy of symptomatic plant samples explicated the presence of isometric particles of CMV and quasi spherical particles of tospoviruses. This is the first molecular evidence for the natural co-existence of chlorosis inducing CMV strain with CaCV and GBNV on hot pepper in India.

Aberrant root formation - An unreported complication of dental trauma.

Trauma and infection to immature teeth can result in a number of complications. Discontinuity in the formation of root is one such complication which has never been documented before. In the following article, a case report of this aberrancy which was observed in the root of a permanent central incisor, subsequent to a traumatic injury is discussed. In spite of this discontinuity, complete root formation and vital pulp were noted in the tooth. Since such a case has not been reported in literature till date, this complication is described and the possible cause of its occurrence is discussed in this article.