The Prevalence of Oral Lesions among Palestinian Dental Patients Attending Oral Medicine Dental Clinics at Al-Quds University

Objectives: In Palestine, there are no data about the prevalence of oral lesions or their associated risk factors. Thus, this study came to assess the prevalence and the risk factors of oral lesions among adult dental patients visiting Al-Quds University (AQU) Dental Clinics. Materials and Methods: Three hundred Twenty patients were diagnosed clinically for the presence of oral lesions at oral medicine clinics at Al-Quds University in the period between 2015 to 2016. Their age ranged from 21 to 60 years old (mean age: 40.2 ± 17.6). Senior students were trained to conduct the oral exam under the direct supervision of Oral Medicine specialist. Trained students also collected data on patients’ demographics, dental history, medical history and other health related habits. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were generated to describe lesions prevalence and associations with other suggested factors. Results: A total of 68 lesions were found in this study (29.4% of study’s sample). Recurrent aphthous ulcer, traumatic ulcer and geographic tongue were the most common oral lesions. Ten oral potentially malignant lesions were diagnosed (8 cases were Leukoplakia, 2 cases were erythroplakia). Non filtered smoking cigarettes were associated with reported lesions. Oral lesions were noticed to increase with age. Oral lesions were more common on the Tongue, labial and buccal mucosain this study. Conclusions: This study revealed high prevalence of apthous and traumatic ulcer while potentially malignant lesions like leucoplakia and erythroplakia were also seen in patients who were smokers. Dentists should have a high level of awareness during oral examination and intervention should be performed to raise awareness among the population about the harmful effects of smoking on oral health.

Production of Spirulina platensis Using Inexpensive Local Resources in Palestine

Spirulina platensis is a special and unique cyanobacteria that is produced worldwide with a varied cost of cultivation media. In this study, five main experiments with different treatments were performed to evaluate the possibility of using cheap aquaculture water for Spirulina production, to test if solutions made by plant ash (PAS) could be used for Spirulina production, to determine if brackish water (BW) and mining water have a good impact on Spirulina production, to create a medium composed of cheap chemicals and fertilizers to be used for Spirulina cultivation, and to test if a mixture made from local components could be used to produce Spirulina. All experiments were performed via growth and dry weight measurements, including determination of chemical and physical characteristics of the samples with a comparison with Zarrouk medium (ZM) as a reference for each experiment, and all experiments were performed for 21 days to determine the best media type that lasts longer for commercial purposes. In all experiments, pH values were between 8 and 11, and EC was between 9.8 and 30 ms/cm, while temperature was at 30°C and 35°C, and light was at 1500 and 5000 Lux for 16 h light and 8 h dark. Spirulina can grow in (FW). It can also grow in FW diluted with BW. Also a 3% PAS can be used as a source to cultivate Spirulina at a very low price compared to ZM. The chemical fertilizer formula was one of the best types among all treatments with a good price. A mixture of these local resources could be a very good cheap alternative source. The main result that was obtained from all experiments in this study is the ability of Spirulina to grow within a wide range of chemical parameters at a lower price.

Aminated (Cyclopropylmethyl)Phosphonates: Synthesis and Anti-Pancreatic Cancer Activity

Buoyed by the extensive research on the wide-range biological activities of aminophosphonates, a novel class of aminated (cyclopropylmethyl)phosphor-nates compounds was synthesized from diethyl ((1-(3-chloropropyl)cyclopropyl)methyl)phosphonate and various amines in the presence of Hunig’s base. Upon biological activity screening these compounds demonstrated encouraging anti-pancreatic cancer properties at low micromolar concentrations.

A Convolutional Neural Network Model for Wheat Crop Disease Prediction

Wheat is the most important cereal crop,and its low production incurs import pressure on the economy.It fulfills a significant portion of the daily energy requirements of the human body.The wheat disease is one of the major factors that result in low production and negatively affects the national economy.Thus,timely detection of wheat diseases is necessary for improving production.The CNN-based architectures showed tremendous achievement in the image-based classification and prediction of crop diseases.However,these models are computationally expensive and need a large amount of training data.In this research,a light weighted modified CNN architecture is proposed that uses eight layers particularly,three convolutional layers,three SoftMax layers,and two flattened layers,to detect wheat diseases effectively.The high-resolution images were collected from the fields in Azad Kashmir(Pakistan)and manually annotated by three human experts.The convolutional layers use 16,32,and 64 filters.Every filter uses a 3×3 kernel size.The strides for all convolutional layers are set to 1.In this research,three different variants of datasets are used.These variants S1-70%:15%:15%,S2-75%:15%:10%,and S3-80%:10%:10%(train:validation:test)are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed model.The extensive experiments revealed that the S3 performed better than S1 and S2 datasets with 93%accuracy.The experiment also concludes that a more extensive training set with high-resolution images can detect wheat diseases more accurately.

Stability and Removal of Commonly Used Drugs in Environmental Water and Wastewater

Introduction:Pharmaceuticals are regarded as emerging contaminants in the environment.In recent years,their destiny and removal have piqued people’s interest.Methods:Examine how well conventional wastewater treatment facilities and cutting-edge technologies(ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis)can remove specific pharmaceutical compounds from water,with a focus on the compounds'environmental status,their origin,deterioration,metabolites,and the capacities of these facilities.Results and discussion:the ability and efficacy of sophisticated treatment technologies such as membrane separation,adsorption,and AOPs(Advanced Oxidation Processes)in eliminating chosen commonly used drugs from water are explored.Batch adsorption experiments were integrated with appropriate adsorption isotherms and appropriate kinetic models to predict the final extent of pollutant removal by this method.Continuous filtration mode was also investigated.Combining filtration(using AC(Activated Carbon)and micelle-clay granule complexes)with AOPs improves the economy of treating wastewater,which contains recalcitrant PhACs(Pharmaceutical Compounds).

Diabetes mellitus: The epidemic of the century

The epidemic nature of diabetes mellitus in different regions is reviewed. The Middle East and North Africa region has the highest prevalence of diabetes in adults(10.9%) whereas, the Western Pacific region has the highest number of adults diagnosed with diabetes and has countries with the highest prevalence of diabetes(37.5%). Different classes of diabetes mellitus, type 1, type 2, gestational diabetes and other types of diabetes mellitus are compared in terms of diagnostic criteria, etiology and genetics. The molecular genetics of diabetes received extensive attention in recent years by many prominent investigators and research groups in the biomedical field. A large array of mutations and single nucleotide polymorphisms in genes that play a role in the various steps and pathways involved in glucose metabolism and the development, control and function of pancreatic cells at various levels are reviewed. The major advances in the molecular understanding of diabetes in relation to the different types of diabetes in comparison to the previous understanding in this field are briefly reviewed here. Despite the accumulation of extensive data at the molecular and cellular levels, the mechanism of diabetes development and complications are still not fully understood. Definitely, more extensive research is needed in this field that will eventually reflect on the ultimate objective to improve diagnoses, therapy and minimize the chance of chronic complications development.

Development and validation of a reversed-phase HPLC method for analysis of tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride in eye drop formulations

A simple, precise, accurate, and stability-indicating method is developed and validated for analysis of tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride in eye drop formulations. Separation was achieved on a reversed-phase C8 column (125 mm 4.6 mm i.d., 5 mm) using a mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile/phosphate buffer of pH 3.0 (20:80, v/v) at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min and UV detection at 240 nm. This method is validated according to United States Pharmacopeia requirements for new methods, which include accuracy, precision, selectivity, robustness, and linearity and range. This method shows enough selectivity, accuracy, precision, and linearity and range to satisfy Federal Drug Administration/International Conference on Harmonization regulatory requirements. The current method demonstrates good linearity over the range of 0.025–0.075 mg/mL of tetrahydrozoline with r2 0.999. The average recovery of the method is 100.8% with a relative standard deviation of 0.47%. The degree of reproducibility of the results obtained as a result of small deliberate variations in the method parameters and by changing analytical operators has proven that the method is robust and rugged.

Determination of Different Trace Heavy Metals in Ground Water of South West Bank/Palestine by ICP/MS

Heavy metal contamination of the groundwater of south West Bank in Palestine was assessed. The groundwater samples were analyzed for different trace heavy metals (Tl, Pb, Bi, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Mo, Ag, and Cd), and Al content by ICP/MS. This study was conducted to determine the water quality of ground water which is used for drinking in the study area. Water samples from ten groundwater wells were obtained in four different dates of the year (October 2012, November 2012, March 2013, and April 2013). Three water samples were obtained from each well for each sampling date. A total of 120 water samples were collected from the ten wells. The samples were analyzed for their pH, electrical conductivity, total dissolved solids, and different trace metals content. The pH, electrical conductivity, and total dissolved solids of all water samples were found to be within the US Environmental protection Agency limits. Results showed that Pb, Al, Cr, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, and Mo were detected in all water samples analyzed in this study, while Tl, Bi, Mn, Ag, and Cd were detected in 80%, 88%, 90%, 75%, and 95% of the water samples analyzed in this study, respectively. In general, 93% of all samples analyzed contained one or more of the 13 metals studied each in varying concentration. Furthermore, results showed that the concentration of Cr, Mn, Ni, Cu, Zn, and Mo is within the allowed WHO limits in drinking water. However the concentration of Pb Cd, and Al are found to be higher than the allowed WHO limits in 40%, 8%, and 33% of the water samples analyzed in this study, respectively. Statistical analyses showed that concentrations of the metals studied in this study vary significantly between the ten ground water wells, indicating that the wells analyzed in this study is different from each other in terms of heavy metal content. Additionally, from the statistical results obtained, it was found that there is a significant difference in the concentration of the metals in each well for the four sampling times (October 2012, November 2012, March 2013, and April 2013), denoting that metal concentration in the wells vary significantly with sampling time. The results obtained from this study suggest a possible risk to the population of the study area given the toxicity of these metals, and the fact that for many people in the study area, ground water is a main source of their water supply.

An Optical Sensor Based on Polyvinyl Benzyl Malonate Cross-Linked with Divinyl Benzene Dispersed in a Hydrogel Membrane for Detection of Some Heavy Metals

In previous work we have developed a dicarboxylate functionalized polymer that demonstrated chemical sensing. It showed good response to pH changes as well as to varying concentrations of copper and calcium ions. Our recent in-vest- tigations showed interesting results upon testing the functionalized sensing polymer on heavy metals. This sensor is composed of microspheres of polyvinyl benzyl malonate lightly-cross-linked with divinyl benzene dispersed in a hydrogel membrane. The response of the optical sensor is based on the interaction between the metal cations with the deprotonated functional group. The polymer, thus, undergoes shrinking as a result of neutralization of adjacent negative charges on the back-bone of the polymer. This causes significant changes in the optical properties of the sensing element. The optical changes were measured as absorbance vs. wavelength as the sensing membrane is exposed to solutions of varying concentrations of heavy metal ions. The sensor showed significant increase in absorbance up to a concentration of 5 × 10-3 M to the following metal ions: Ni2+, Zn2+, and Cd2+. Furthermore, the studied capacity of the derivatized microspheres showed close values to Ni2+, Zn2+, Cd2+ (1.20, 1.09, 1.08 mmol/g respectively). These kinds of properly functionalized polymers appear to be suitable, versatile sensing elements for the detection of low concentrations of heavy metal ions. In addition, all of the tested heavy metals showed a similar value of the equilibrium formation constant, (log Kf1 is 2.63). In contrast, the sensor showed no significant response to varying concentrations of K+ and Mg2+ metal ions.

Analysis of Different Rare Metals, Rare Earth Elements, and other Common Metals in Groundwater of South West Bank/Palestine by ICP/MS-Data and Health Aspects

Ground water samples are collected from south West Bank/Palestine and analyzed for different rare elements (Rb, Zr, U, P, Ti, V), rare earth elements (La, Ce, and Nd), and other common trace metals (Li, Na, Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba, K, Bi) that most of them usually have no maximum acceptable limits as either they are considered not to be toxic to human health or there is no sufficient data about their toxicity to human health. This study was conducted to determine the water quality of ground water which is used for drinking in the study area. Water samples from ten groundwater wells were obtained in three different dates of the year (November 2012, March 2013, and April 2013). Three water samples were obtained from each well for each sampling date;so a total of 90 water samples were collected from the ten wells. The results obtained from this study suggest a possible risk to the population of the study area given the high concentration of some metals that have no maximum allowed concentration, and the fact that for many people in the study area, ground water is a main source of their water supply.

Health Literacy, Self-Care Behavior and Quality of Life in Acute Coronary Syndrome Patients: An Integrative Review

Purpose: The review aimed to find the best evidence on the relationship between health literacy, self-care behavior and perceived quality of life (QoL) among patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Methods: Searching engines included Cumulative Index to Nursing Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Pro Quest, MEDLINE, Google Scholar, SAGE Journals, Wiley on Line Library, and Science Direct electronic databases from 2010 to 2018. Fifteen research articles assessed the main variables and their associations with demographic and clinical variables. Results: Different methodologies and samples were analyzed: analytic descriptive, systematic review, a randomized control trial, retrospective cohort, a prospective Cohort, cross-sectional, and correlational designs. The fifteen studies showed that the patients with ACS have inadequate health literacy. Patients’ ability to understand basic and complex information or to accurately assess health risks was impaired and may hinder patients’ engagement in self-care. Low HL in patients having ACS is consistently associated with poor QoL. Physical domain of QoL remained the significant outcome of both self-care behavior and health literacy after adjusting for demographics and clinical variables in patients with ACS. Conclusion: The literature pointed to the importance of considering health literacy and self-care behaviors as predictors of quality of life among patients with ACS. However, there has been no previous evidence on the best process of the association between these three variables.

Analysis of Different Rare Metals, and Rare Earth Metals in Harvested Rain Water in Gaza Strip/Palestine by ICP/MS-Data and Health Aspects

This rain water samples harvested for drinking and agriculture from Gaza collected in November 2012 were analyzed for different rare metals (Rb, Zr, Ti, Tl, Sb, Sc, Y), and rare earth metals (La, and Ce). These metals usually have no maximum acceptable limits as there is no sufficient data about their toxicity to human health. Their control should be therefore controlled in water to monitor their concentration in water (ground, harvested, etc.). This study was conducted to determine the water quality of harvested water which is used for drinking in the study area. 43 water samples were collected in November 2012 during the first rain from house wells and rain water pools. The concentrations of the metals detected in the collected harvested rainwater vary significantly between the 43 samples, and all of them were detected in all water samples analyzed in this study. The results obtained from this study suggest a possible risk to the population of the study area given the high concentration of some metals that have no maximum allowed concentration, and the fact that for many people in the study area, harvested rain water is a main source of their water supply.

A Bias-Free Time-Aware PageRank Algorithm for Paper Ranking in Dynamic Citation Networks

The process of ranking scientific publications in dynamic citation networks plays a crucial rule in a variety of applications. Despite the availability of a number of ranking algorithms, most of them use common popularity metrics such as the citation count, h-index, and Impact Factor (IF). These adopted metrics cause a problem of bias in favor of older publications that took enough time to collect as many citations as possible. This paper focuses on solving the problem of bias by proposing a new ranking algorithm based on the PageRank (PR) algorithm;it is one of the main page ranking algorithms being widely used. The developed algorithm considers a newly suggested metric called the Citation Average rate of Change (CAC). Time information such as publication date and the citation occurrence’s time are used along with citation data to calculate the new metric. The proposed ranking algorithm was tested on a dataset of scientific papers in the field of medical physics published in the Dimensions database from years 2005 to 2017. The experimental results have shown that the proposed ranking algorithm outperforms the PageRank algorithm in ranking scientific publications where 26 papers instead of only 14 were ranked among the top 100 papers of this dataset. In addition, there were no radical changes or unreasonable jump in the ranking process, i.e., the correlation rate between the results of the proposed ranking method and the original PageRank algorithm was 92% based on the Spearman correlation coefficient.

Photoacoustic Detection in the Michelson Interferometer Cavity

For the first time, we report photoacoustic (PA) signal detection in a cell placed within the Michelson interferometer cavity in an attempt to relate photoacoustic effect to the Michelson fringe shift as a result of changes in the cell. Both detection schemes were investigated using IR absorption and their sensitivities compared. Signals related to Michelson interferometer fringe and PA effect have shown good correlations with each other using different samples including some essential oils and their corresponding plant part from which the essential oil is usually obtained. Results were encouraging and will open the door widely to use the combined Michelson interferometer-photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) in trace gas detection for different applications.

Assessment of Wind Power Potential at Eastern-Jerusalem, Palestine

Due to the energy demand and lack of supplied energy of Palestinian cities, wind resource assessment is important and necessary. The objective of the work is to analyze the wind speed data characteristics and wind power potential at eastern Jerusalem that are collected at 10 m above ground level from 2008 to 2018. The variations of monthly, seasonal, and annual wind speed are analyzed, and the measured maximum, minimum, and mean values are presented in this study. Wind speed characteristics have been analyzed by the well-known Weibull distribution function, and used to evaluate the wind power of the proposed site. Moreover, the relationship between wind power and mean wind speed is fitted by a second-order polynomial. The shape parameter moderate values showed that wind speed was relatively steady at the site. The highest average maximum value was found to be 5.7 m/s in June-2008, whereas the mean maximum values ranged from 5.4 m/s in June to 3.8 m/s in November. The highest mean power value was found to be 31.66 w/m2 in July with a maximum value of 23.18 w/m2 in 2013. R2 of the polynomial fit provides values of 95% for monthly mean and 96% for annual mean.

Energy Spectrum for a Short-Range 1/r Singular Potential with a Non-Orbital Barrier Using the Asymptotic Iteration Method

Using the asymptotic iteration method, we obtain the S-wave solution for a short-range three-parameter central potential with 1/r singularity and with a non-orbital barrier. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at calculating the energy spectrum for this potential, which was introduced by H. Bahlouli and A. D. Alhaidari and for which they obtained the “potential parameter spectrum”. Our results are also independently verified using a direct method of diagonalizing the Hamiltonian matrix in the J-matrix basis.

Depletive Water Balance and High Vulnerability Due to Conflicts over Access and Rights

Sustainable water supply problem becomes strategic when inelastic demand levels are overhauling maximum available supplies. The situation is more acute when the groundwater recharge area is heavily populated, consist of urban, industrial and agricultural areas and above all have typical karstic morphology and extensive regions of thin or null soil cover. During winter season the infiltrated water mixed with the wastewater leaking from poorly designed cesspits and wastewater overflow from the treatment plants of the adjacent settlements. Currently, most of the recharge area is disturbed due to the ongoing urban development in Beitar Elite and Tzur Hadassah in conjunction with the planned Security Fence (apartheid wall) threatens to extend over ~70% of the aquifer recharge area. Such massive destruction in a small watershed leads to considerable decrease in springs discharge and could completely dry-out the springs at the upper part of the valley. The aim of this research is to improve understanding of the hydrologic processes controlling water quantity and quality of springs discharging small (3/yr) basin in the mountain aquifer.