Global oral health policies and recommendations for children with special health care needs and their applicability and effectiveness during the COVID -19 pandemic: a systematic review.

AIM: This systematic review aims to assess effectiveness of oral health policies, recommendations and guidelines in safeguarding oral health of children with special healthcare needs during COVID-19. BACKGROUND: This systematic review evaluated the adaptation of global oral health policies for children with special healthcare needs (SHCN) during the COVID-19 pandemic, to provide evidence-based insights to inform policymakers and healthcare providers amid the ongoing global health crisis. The study focused on assessing the effectiveness of these adaptations in ensuring equitable access to quality dental care for this vulnerable group. METHODS: A PRISMA guided online search through LILIACS, PubMed, Scopus, COCHRANE and grey literature was conducted. The search strategy incorporated a combination of subject headings (MeSH terms) and free-text terms related to "oral health," "dental health," "policy," "effectiveness," "dental practice guidelines," "oral health policies," and "special care needs children." Eligibility criteria included oral health policies, recommendations and guidelines targeting individuals/children with special care needs. Both qualitative and quantitative studies published in English from 2008 to 2023 were included. RESULTS: Sixteen guidelines, recommendations and policies, from six authorities were identified. These documentations addressed six different areas mentioned broadly as comprehensive care, ethical considerations, preventive and therapeutic measures, equity, patient-centric treatment, and reducing disparities signaling a paradigm shift. International collaborations and standardization of guidelines indicated a unified approach. The review also emphasized on a commitment to continuous improvement through quality measurement, systematic referral management, and needs assessment. With the exception of two documents, the remaining guidelines did not address COVID-19 or provide specific adaptations for it. The lack of emphasis on individual condition was notable, as the guidelines generally took a more generalized approach toward individuals with special healthcare needs. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, this review assessed the impact of COVID-19 on oral healthcare for individuals with special needs. It underscores global and local efforts for equitable access, patient-centric care, and preventive measures. The lessons learned advocate for a resilient, inclusive healthcare framework capable of meeting diverse needs. PROSPERO REGISTRATION: CRD 42023452475.

MicroRNAs Targeting Critical Molecular Pathways in Diabetic Cardiomyopathy Emerging Valuable for Therapy.

MicroRNAs have emerged as an important regulator of post-transcriptional gene expression studied extensively in many cancers, fetal development, and cardiovascular diseases. Their endogenous nature and easy manipulation have made them potential diagnostic and therapeutic molecules. Diseases with complex pathophysiology such as Diabetic Cardiomyopathy display symptoms at a late stage when the risk of heart failure has become very high. Therefore, the utilization of microRNAs as a tool to study pathophysiology and device-sustainable treatments for DCM could be considered. The present review focuses on the mechanistic insights of diabetic cardiomyopathy and the potential role of microRNAs.

Study of the effectiveness of wavelet genetic programming model for water quality analysis in the Uttar Pradesh region.

Water constitutes an essential part of the earth as it helps in making the environment greener and support life. But water quality and availability are drastically affected by rising water pollution and its poor sanitation. Water gets contaminated due to the excessive use of chemicals by the industries, fertilizers, and pesticides by the farmers. Not only the surface water, groundwater and river water are also getting contaminated. Several published work in Indian context have used different models for the prediction of water quality. Some of them performed poorly due to the presence of irrelevant and missing data in the training samples. Moreover, these studies have assessed water quality on the basis of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and coliform and chemical oxygen demand (COD), whereas dissolved oxygen(DO) is one of the most important parameters in terms of water quality assessment as it is considered a key determinant of pollution. Thus, there is a strong need to categorically identify and visualize the DO as one of the key components responsible for deteriorating the quality of water in Indian context. The main objective of this work is to build a wavelet genetic programming (WGP)-based workflow model for the assessment of water quality in 13 rivers of Uttar Pradesh region. WGP model has a unique feature of discarding the redundant and irrelevant data values from the source data. The proposed WGP model has given promising results which can be attributed to two factors: firstly, the novel use of Morlet wavelet in place of the widely popular Db wavelet, as the mother wavelet, and secondly, the use of MICE technique for missing value imputation in the pre-processing stage. The proposed model not only cleans the data but also demonstrates the feasibility of using DO values as one of the prime factors to assess the water quality.

Insights into the molecular aspects of salt stress tolerance in mycorrhizal plants.

Salt stress is one of the major abiotic stresses that severely affect plant growth and yield, and also affect the livelihood of people all around the world. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) colonize majority of terrestrial plants, including halophytes, xerophytes and glycophytes, and facilitate their functioning by various physiological, biochemical and molecular processes. In the past two decades, significant progress has been made to understand the role of AMF in mitigating salt stress and improving plant growth and productivity under saline conditions. Several studies focusing on the biochemical and physiological mechanisms that mycorrhizal plants employ to combat salt stress have been carried out. This review reinforces such studies and gives further insights into the molecular aspects of tolerance to salt stress in the plants colonized by AMF. It emphasises on the role of AMF in sensing and signalling salt stress, expression of aquaporin-encoding genes, Na+/H+ antiporters and transporters involved in Na+ exclusion, CNGCs and late embryogenesis abundant proteins in relation to salt stress tolerance. Further, this paper also reviews the accrual of compatible osmolytes, phytohormones and nitric oxide for understanding the benefits of this symbiosis under saline environment, and provides a benchmark information to understand the contribution of mycorrhizal symbiosis at molecular level and will attract attention of researchers to develop and highlight the future research programs in this field.

Metabolic engineering of chloroplasts for artemisinic acid biosynthesis and impact on plant growth.

Chloroplasts offer high-level transgene expression and transgene containment due to maternal inheritance, and are ideal hosts for biopharmaceutical biosynthesis via multigene engineering. To exploit these advantages, we have expressed 12 enzymes in chloroplasts for the biosynthesis of artemisinic acid (precursor of artemisinin, antimalarial drug) in an alternative plant system. Integration of transgenes into the tobacco chloroplast genome via homologous recombination was confirmed by molecular analysis, and biosynthesis of artemisinic acid in plant leaf tissues was detected with the help of 13C NMR and ESI-mass spectrometry. The excess metabolic flux of isopentenyl pyrophosphate generated by an engineered mevalonate pathway was diverted for the biosynthesis of artemisinic acid. However, expression of megatransgenes impacted the growth of the transplastomic plantlets. By combining two exogenous pathways, artemisinic acid was produced in transplastomic plants, which can be improved further using better metabolic engineering strategies for commercially viable yield of desirable isoprenoid products.