Search results

The purpose of this study is to analyze markers of the progression of kidney damage by a soft computing approach.

Because markers of the progression of kidney damage, namely, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), interleukin-8 (IL-8) and highly sensitive troponin T (cTnhsT), are complex parameters, a soft computing approach was used for the assessment of functional glomerular reserves, through the use of the Modification of the Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) formula based on serum creatinine and EPI creatinine-cystatin C formula (chronic kidney disease epidemiology collaboration).

The soft computing approach was used to detect which factors (PAI-1, IL-8 and cTnhsT) are the most important for the MDRD formula based on serum creatinine or the EPI creatinine–cystatin C formula.

Markers of the progression of kidney damage were analyzed by the soft computing approach.

Three events of significance to this country took place in 1899 – the British Food Journal was launched, Australia retained the Ashes, and the Boer War hostilities commenced. If challenged on the order of their importance, cricketers and Empire‐builders may be excused their preference. However, looking at it purely from the standpoint of pro bono publico, the dispassionate observer must surely opt for the birth of a certain publication as being ultimately the most beneficial of the three.

For most people, especially those with fixed incomes, household budgets have to be balanced and sometimes the balance is precarious. With price rises of foods, there is a switch to a cheaper substitute within the group, or if it is a food for which there is no real substitute, reduced purchases follow. The annual and quarterly reviews of the National Food Survey over the years have shown this to be so; with carcase meat, where one meat is highly priced, housewives switch to a cheaper joint, and this is mainly the reason for the great increase in consumption of poultry; when recently the price of butter rose sharply, there was a switch to margarine. NFS statistics did not show any lessening of consumer preference for butter, but in most households, with budgets on a tight string, margarine had to be used for many purposes for which butter had previously been used. With those foods which have no substitute, and bread (also milk) is a classic example, to keep the sum spent on the food each week about the same, the amount purchased is correspondingly reduced. Again, NFS statistics show this to be the case, a practice which has been responsible for the small annual reductions in the amount of bread consumed per person per week over the last fifteen years or so; very small, a matter of an ounce or two, but adequate to maintain the balance of price/quantity since price rises have been relatively small, if fairly frequent. This artifice to absorb small price rises will not work, however, when price rises follow on one another rapidly and together are large. Bread is a case in point.

One of the major developments of the post‐War years has been the rise of consumer protection ‘watchdog’ committees galore, a flood of legislation and completely changed enforcement methods by existing local authority officers who to all and intents have become a completely new service. Voluntary agencies, national and local, based on the local High Street, have appointed themselves the watchdogs of the retail trade; legislation and central departments, the larger scene. The new service has proved of inestimable value in the changed conditions; it continues to develop. When shopping was a personal transaction, with the housewife making her purchases from the shopkeeper or his staff on the opposite side of the counter; when each was well known to the other and the relationship had usually lasted for many years, often from one generation to the next, things were very different, complaints few, unsatisfactory items instantly replaced, usually without question. This continuing state of equanimity was destroyed by the retail revolution and new methods of advertising and marketing. Now, the numbers of complaints dealt with by consumer protection and environmental health departments of local authorities are truly enormous. We have become a nation of “complainers,” although in all conscience, we have much to complain about. Complaints cover the widest possible range of products and services, of which food and drink form an integral component. The complaints to enforcement authorities include many said to be unjustified, but from the reports of legal proceedings under relevant enactments, it is obvious that the bulk of them now originate from consumer complaints. Not all complainants, however, relish the thought of the case going before the courts. Less is heard publicly of complaints to the numerous voluntary bodies. Enforcement authorities see complaints in terms of infringements of the law, although their role as honest broker, securing recompense to the aggreived customer, has become important; a few departments being able to claim that they secured reimbursements and replacements of value totalling upwards of amounts which annually run into six figures. The broker role is also that adopted by voluntary bodies but with much less success since they lack the supporting authority of legal sanction.

Over the years we have reported prosecutions where the defence has alleged, and with circumstantial support that the presence of a harmful foreign body in food was deliberate through the action of a single disgruntled employee or where the labour relations climate generally has been bad. It makes no difference to the manufacturer's responsibility—the offence is an absolute one—but occasionally courts have allowed it in mitigation. Sometimes, it has been the nature of the extraneous material, e.g. fragments of glass or metal, the like of which did not exist in the factory premises or plant. This may be taken as a symptom of the vandalism of the age, but more recently, two incidents have drawn attention to its dangers and provided a glimpse of the criminal mind which can inflict such injury on employers, and expose innocent consumers, of all ages, to possible harm.

The purpose of this study was to examined the health effects of raw and cooked aqueous and methanol extracts of Vigna unguiculata on kidney function in Wistar rats.

Thirty-six Wistar rats (weighing 160 ± 10 g) were randomly assigned into nine (9) groups (n = 4). Group I (control): no extract. Groups II and III (aqueous extract of the cooked 350 mg/kg and 550 mg/kg). Groups IV and V (methanol extracts of cooked 350 mg/kg and 550 mg/kg). Groups VI and VII (methanol extracts of raw 350 mg/kg and 550 mg/kg). Groups VIII and IX (aqueous extract of raw 350 mg/kg and 550 mg/kg). After the seventh day of the trial, the rats were euthanized with chloroform, and blood samples were collected for biochemical analysis.

Results showed that the doses applied for cooked and raw V. unguiculata significantly (p < 0.05) enhanced kidney functions by increasing the body weight, glucose level, concentration of serum urea, creatinine, total protein, potassium and chloride in test groups compared with control. The packed cell volume and haemoglobin concentrations of raw aqueous extract at 550 mg/kg (36.5 ± 5.1; 12.3 ± 2.8) were significantly (p = 0.001) higher (29.8 ± 11.8; 10.3 ± 3.9) than the 350 mg/kg dose of the same extract, and cooked aqueous extract at 350 mg/kg dose was significantly (p = 0.001) higher (28.0 ± 10.1; 9.3 ± 3.4) than that of 550 mg/kg (25.8 ± 4.9; 8.8 ± 3.9) dose of the extracts.

The nutritional content of V. unguiculata potentially can augment the nutritional content of a diet and to a large extent, the regular consumers’ health. Essentially, V. unguiculata is composed of both macro and micronutrients capable of promoting normal kidney function.

Maintaining an adequate nutritional state, important at all times, is never more so than during the dark days of Winter. The body reserves are then taxed in varying degrees of severity by sudden downward plunges of the thermometer, days when there is no sight of the sun, lashing rains and cold winds, ice, frost, snow, gales and blizzards. The body processes must be maintained against these onslaughts of nature — body temperatures, resistance against infections, a state of well‐being with all systems operating and an ability to “take it”. A sufficient and well balanced diet is vital to all this, most would say, the primarily significant factor. The National Food Surveys do not demonstrate any insufficiency in the national diet in terms of energy values, intake of vitamins, minerals and nutrients, but statistics can be fallacious amd misleading. NFS statistics are no indication of quality of food, its sufficiency for physiological purposes and to meet the economic stresses of the times. The intake of staple foods — bread, milk, butter, meat, &c., — have been slowly declining for years, as their prices rise higher and higher. If the Government had foreseen the massive unemployment problem, it is doubtful if they would have crippled the highly commendable School Meals Service. To have continued this — school milk, school dinners — even with the financial help it would have required would be seen as a “Supplementary Benefit” much better than the uncontrolled cash flow of social security. Child nutrition must be suffering. Stand outside a school at lunch‐time and watch the stream of children trailing along to the “Chippie” for a handfull of chip potatoes; even making a “meal” on an ice lollie.

Factors which influence consumer spending, among the most sought after in any field of market research, things people buy and why, is valuable data on which much industrial planning, advertising techniques and marketing is based, but in no other field of trade is consumer preference so closely related to pure economics, i.e., value received in money terms, as in food. With most other commodities, from clothes to cars, hair‐do's to houses, factors affecting consumer choice have different results; appearance, aesthetic quality and neighbourly competition, all play a part, though appearance in a few foods is not entirely without significance, e.g., white bread. Present high levels of consumer spending are said by politicians to be a danger to the country's economy; a more prosaic thought would be that Government spending, or squandering, constituted the greater threat. In the main, factors which influence household food expenditure are essentially down to earth—palatability, digestibility, keeping quality and how far a food will go in the preparation of meals, its value in money terms. The king‐pin in all market research on food must be the woman of the house; it is her laying out of the household purse that determines the amount of food expenditure and the varieties purchased week by week. A housewife's choice, however, is a complex of her family's likes and dislikes, rarely her own, and also determined by the amount allocated from her purse for this part of the household budget and the number of mouths she has to feed. Any tendency to experiment, to extend the variety of food, is only possible with a well‐filled purse; with a large family, a common complaint is of monotony in the diet. A factor of immense importance nowadays is whether the housewife is employed or not, and whether whole‐time or part‐time, and which part of the day she can be in her own home. To this may be attributed, as much as anything, the rise in consumption of convenience foods. Fortunately for the purposes of reasonable accuracy in the results of enquiries, housewives form a class, reliable and steady, unlikely to be contaminated by the palsied opinions of the so‐called lunatic fringe in this unquiet age. Any differences in food choice are likely to be regional, and settled dietary habits, passed on from one generation to another. Statistics from the National Food Surveys show the extent of these, and also consumer preferences as far as food commodity groups are concerned. The Surveys have been running long enough to show something of consumer trends but, of course, they do not exhibit reasons—why consumers buy and use certain foods, their attitudes to food marketing practices, and, in particular, to advertising. Advertising claims, misleading undoubtedly but within the law, have long been a source of controversy between those who worship at the shrine of truth and others less particular. Elsewhere, we review a special study of consumer reactions to aspects of the grocery trade in the U.S.A., and note that 32 per cent do not accept advertisements as being true, but 85 per cent find them interesting and informative. Advertising practices are probably subject to less statutory control in the United States than here, and the descriptions and verbiage certainly reach greater heights of absurdity, but the British housewife is likely to be no more discerning, able “to read between the lines”, than her counterpart in that country. A major difference, however, is that in Britain, more houswives prepare and cook meals for their families than in the United States. The greatest importance of advertising is in the introductory phase of a commodity; new and more vigorous advertising is necessary later to delay the onset of the decline phase of the commodity's life cycle; to ensure that sales can be maintained to prevent rises in supply costs. Advertising helps considerably in the acceptance of a branded food, but housewives tend to ignore cut‐throat competition between rival brands, and what weans a consumer from a brand is not competition in advertising, nor even new and more attractive presentation, but reduction in real price. The main pre‐occupation of the woman of the house is food adequacy, and especially that her children will have what she considers conforms to a nutritious diet, without argument or rebellion on the part of her progeny and without distinction. She knows that bulk foods, carbohydrates, are not necessarily nutritious, although her ideas of which foods contain vitamins or minerals or other important nutrient factors tends to be hazy. She does not pretend to enjoy shopping for food and therefore tends to follow a routine; it saves time and worry. Especially is this so with young married women, who may have to take small children along. Each housewife has her own mental standard of assessing “value”, and would have difficulty in defining it. Nutritional value forms part of it, however, in most women, who connote their food provision with health. The greatest concern is not necessarily positive health, but prevention or reduction of obesity, which is seen among adult members of the family, especially growing girls, as an adverse effect on their appearance, and the types of clothes they can wear. A few of the more intelligent families have an indefinable fear of ischaemic heart disease and its relation to food. When they take positive steps to control the diet for these purposes, they are quite frequently in the wrong direction and rather confused even when this is done on medical advice.

This Food Standards Committee Report has been with us long enough to have received careful appraisal at the hand of the most interested parties — food law enforcement agencies and the meat trade. The purposes of the review was to consider the need for specific controls over the composition and descriptive labelling of minced meat products, but the main factor was the fat content, particularly the maximum suggested by the Associaton of Public Analysts, viz., a one‐quarter (25%) of the total product. For some years now, the courts have been asked to accept 25% fat as the maximum, based on a series of national surveys; above that level, the product was to be considered as not of the substance or quality demanded by the purchaser; a contention which has been upheld on appeal to the Divisional Court.

This study aims to examine the relationship between neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR), handgrip strength (HGS) and nutritional status in non-critically ill patients and outpatients.

A cross-sectional study was conducted on 80 geriatric patients. Nutritional status was evaluated using the Mini Nutritional Assessment Short Form, Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index, some anthropometric and biochemical parameters. NLR was calculated from the complete blood count results. Data were analyzed using SPSS 24.0.

While 38.3% of patients were malnourished or at risk of malnutrition, 61.7% had normal nutritional status. Mini Nutritional Assessment Short Form was not correlated with NLR, whereas it showed a weak positive correlation with HGS. According to the logistic regression analysis, age, HGS, hemoglobin and platelet to lymphocyte ratio were significant independent factors for predicting malnutrition or risk of malnutrition. The receiver operator characteristic curve analysis showed that the optimum HGS cut-off point for patients with malnourished or at risk of malnutrition was 13.2. In conclusion, HGS was associated with the nutritional status. NLR was not associated with nutritional status but associated with nutritional risk.

It is well known that malnutrition is a serious health problem among older adults, and it is important to assess the nutritional status of older adults because of the adverse health effects. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to determine the relationship between NLR, HGS and nutritional status in non-critically ill patients and outpatients.