Formulation and in vitro and in vivo availability of diclofenac sodium enteric-coated beads

OBJECTIVE: The beneficial effects of weight loss with a very-low-calorie diet (VLCD) on cardiovascular risk factors have been reported at the end of energy restriction. As the effects, especially on blood pressure, may not remain constant during weight maintenance, we studied the longer-term effects of weight loss on 24h ambulatory blood pressure (ABP), lipids, glucose and insulin. DESIGN: Prospective study of a 17-week weight loss programme containing an eight-week VLCD period and follow-up visit at one-year. SUBJECTS: Twenty-nine moderately obese, normotensive or mildly hypertensive women. The mean +/- s.d. body mass index (BMI) was 36.0 +/- 2.6 kg/m2 and mean age 40.3 +/- 8.3 y. RESULTS: In the last week of the VLCD, the mean (s.d.) weight loss was 12.4 +/- 3.3 kg (P < 0.001), at the end of the programme 15.1 +/- 4.4 kg (P < 0.001 vs baseline), and at one-year follow-up 10.7 +/- 7.6 kg (P < 0.001 vs baseline). Mean 24 h ABP decreased 8.0/4.6 mmHg (P < 0.001 for both) on the last week of the VLCD, at the end of the programme, the systolic ABP decrease was 4.7 mmHg (P < 0.01 vs baseline) and diastolic 2.1 mmHg (not statistically significant (NS) vs baseline). At one-year follow-up, the mean systolic ABP decrease was 4.1 mmHg (P < 0.01 vs baseline) and mean diastolic 3.0 mmHg (P < 0.05 vs baseline). Sodium excretion decreased 55 mmol/24 h in the last VLCD week (P < 0.01) and returned to baseline after that. At the one-year follow-up, beneficial changes, compared with baseline, were observed in mean serum glucose (-0.28 mmol/l, P < 0.05), triglyceride (-0.35 mmol/l, P < 0.01) and HDL cholesterol (+0.16 mmol/l, P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: This weight loss programme with a VLCD enabled obese subjects to lose weight and decrease cardiovascular risks. Despite some regain in weight during follow-up, the beneficial effects were overall maintained over the year. Sodium intake tended to increase during follow-up. Information on sodium restriction should be included in weight loss programmes.     

Very high strength cement pastes prepared by hot pressing and other high pressure techniques

Very high strengths approaching zero-porosity values have been measured on materials prepared by hot pressing pastes of conventional cements, using pressures of 25, 000–50, 000 psi at temperatures near 150°C. Typical strengths for hot pressed samples are: 73, 900 (compressive); 59, 300; 6320; 11, 820 (compressive, indirect tensile, and shear, all expressed in psi). High pressure specimens prepared at 100, 000 psi without elevated temperatures resulted in strengths of 46, 100; 4020; and 8400 (compressive, indirect tensile, and shear, respectively). The microstructures as revealed by scanning electron microscopy are very dense, and the hot pressed samples, particularly, are dimensionally stable.     

Closure and convergence: a foundation of fault-tolerant computing

The authors formally define what it means for a system to tolerate a class of faults. The definition consists of two conditions. The first is that if a fault occurs when the system state is within the set of legal states, the resulting state is within some larger set and, if faults continue to occur, the system state remains within that larger set (closure). The second is that if faults stop occurring, the system eventually reaches a state within the legal set (convergence). The applicability of the definition for specifying and verifying the fault-tolerance properties of a variety of digital and computer systems is demonstrated. Using the definition, the authors obtain a simple classification of fault-tolerant systems. Methods for the systematic design of such systems are discussed     

Prism: An effective approach for frequent sequence mining via prime-block encoding

Sequence mining is one of the fundamental data mining tasks. In this paper we present a novel approach for mining frequent sequences, called Prism. It utilizes a vertical approach for enumeration and support counting, based on the novel notion of primal block encoding, which in turn is based on prime factorization theory. Via an extensive evaluation on both synthetic and real datasets, we show that Prism outperforms popular sequence mining methods like SPADE [M.J. Zaki, SPADE: An efficient algorithm for mining frequent sequences, Mach. Learn. J. 42 (1/2) (Jan/Feb 2001) 31–60], PrefixSpan [J. Pei, J. Han, B. Mortazavi-Asl, H. Pinto, Q. Chen, U. Dayal, M.-C. Hsu, PrefixSpan: Mining sequential patterns efficiently by prefixprojected pattern growth, in: Int'l Conf. Data Engineering, April 2001] and SPAM [J. Ayres, J.E. Gehrke, T. Yiu, J. Flannick, Sequential pattern mining using bitmaps, in: SIGKDD Int'l Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, July 2002], by an order of magnitude or more.     

Effect of zinc additions on structure and properties of Sn–Ag eutectic lead-free solder alloy

The effects of a third element, i.e., Zn in the range of 0.5–2.5 wt.%, on structure and properties of the binary Sn–Ag eutectic lead-free solder alloy were investigated. To identify the structure of the resulting alloys, X-ray diffraction analysis has been carried out. Resistivity, contact angles, Vickers microhardness and Young’s modulus have been measured. The results showed that all Zn contents were restricted in formation of Ag-Zn compound indicated by X-ray diffraction peaks, which increased continuously in the number and intensity as Zn content increased. Adding Zn up to 1.5 wt.% improved the wetting and mechanical properties. Above that, wetting angle increased due to the increase in AgZn compound, which may accumulated at the interface between solders and copper- substrate resulting a decrease in the adhesive strength. The alloy of composition Sn-3.5Ag-1.5Zn has the most improved properties between the others.     

Screening of the high voltage overhead transmission lines impacts on the neighboring metallic gas pipelines based on the distributed KOH-PCs

Buried metallic pipelines are used to transmit the natural gas and petroleum products to the citizens. Sometimes these pipelines are constructed in the same pathway of the overhead transmission lines (OHTLs) to save the additional right-of-way cost, and to avoid the destruction of agricultural lands. AC voltage is induced on these pipelines by the power lines electric and magnetic fields. There are many mechanisms that describe the AC voltage inducing on these pipelines; capacitive coupling describes the pipelines induced voltage by the power lines electric field, inductive coupling characterizes the induced voltage caused by the OHTLs electromagnetic fields and conductive coupling is created in buried pipelines near to OHTLs by earth fault current. In the present paper the induced voltages of pipelines created by OHTLs due to the different couplings are investigated in normal condition of operation as well as line to ground fault. The current of the coating discharging and AC corrosion are investigated. The induced overvoltage appears on the natural gas pipeline is measured in steady state condition of the transmission circuits operation. Moreover, this paper represents the mitigation of the induced voltages by using two different KOH-PCs systems.     

Protocol Validation by Maximal Progress State Exploration

We discuss an efficient variation of state exploration for two communicating finite state machines. In particular, we propose to divide the task of generating all reachable states into two independent subtasks. In each subtask, only the states reachable by forcing maximal progress for one machine are generated. Since the two subtasks are completely independent, and since in most instances the time and storage requirements for each subtask are less than those for the original task, maximal Progress state exploration can save time and/or storage over conventional state exploration.     

Effect of Storage Conditions on the Hardness, Disintegration and Drug Release from Some Tablet Bases

The effect of storage at relatively high temperature and humidity on tablets prepared from different bases was studied for up to eight weeks. Drug release from tablets was followed by measuring the concentration of a marker (amaranth) in the dissolution medium. Lactose and mannitol based tablets showed an increase in hardness and disintegration time, and a decrease in the initial rate of drug release. Sorbitcl based tablets, stored under 50°C/50% relative humidity (R.H.), showed a decrease in hardness and slower disintegration and dissolution. When stored under 40°C/90% R.H., the tablets were completely deformed within three days. Tricalcium phosphate and cellulose-based tablets did not show any storage related changes in hardness, disintegration or drug release.