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Background and Aim: There are numerous preventive strategies available globally for dental caries. However, the incidence of dental caries is high among school going children in most of the developing countries. School teachers play a major role in inculcating good habits and behaviour to the children. Thus, we aimed to assess the perception of dental caries among school teachers qualitatively by focus group discussion. Methods: One focus group discussion was conducted among the primary level government and private school teachers in Tamil Nadu. A group of 12 teachers, 6 from Government schools and 6 from Private schools were recruited. The discussion was held in a virtual platform due to COVID-19 Lockdown. The session lasted for 45-60 min. The areas of discussion included attitude towards aetiology, prevention and treatment for dental caries. Results: Analysis of interview transcripts recognized many influences on children's oral health attitudes. Majority of teachers expressed a high efficacy using toothbrushes, tongue cleaners, mouthwashes, oil pulling and massaging gums as plaque control mechanisms. Most of the participants were aware of all treatment modalities for dental caries. However, they were not totally aware of the preventive strategies of dental caries. Conclusion: This qualitative study emphasizes that the overall knowledge, perception of aetiology and treatment for dental caries were superior and noteworthy among private school teachers as compared to government school teachers. Moreover, the teachers have expressed their interest for professional oral health assistance in dietary guidelines at schools, performing preventive strategies such as topical fluoride and pit and fissure sealant application. © 2022 by the Author(s).
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The advent of COVID-19 has tremendously affected the global economy. More people have suffered, and some of them even lost their lives. As the worst part, many countries are seeing second and third waves of COVID-19 cases despite the vaccination. India is one such country that is worse affected by the COVID-19. Understanding what people of India think and how they express their thoughts through social media platforms like Twitter has a vast significance. Therefore, in this project, we aim to use COVID-19-related tweets during the first COVID-19 lockdown in India and apply the nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF) algorithm to elicit spatio-temporal topic dynamics. While knowing the sentiments of people is important, identifying sentiments for each tweet is time-consuming and hard to interpret. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to apply sentiment analysis on the topics identified using NTF. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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Background: Diarrhea is present in up to 36.6% of patients with COVID-19. The mechanism of SARS-CoV-2-induced diarrhea remains unclear. We hypothesized that enterocyte-enteric neuron interactions were important in SARS-CoV-2-induced diarrhea. SARS-CoV-2 induces endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in enterocytes causing the release of Damage Associated Molecular Patterns (DAMPs). The DAMPs then stimulate the release of enteric neurotransmitters that disrupt gut electrolyte homeostasis. The influence of ER stress and enteric neuronderived vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) on the expression of Na+/H+ exchanger 3 (NHE3), an important transporter that mediates intestinal Na+/fluid absorption, was further examined. Methods: SARS-CoV-2 propagated in Vero-E6 cells was used to infect Caco-2, a human colon epithelial cell line that expresses SARS-CoV-2 entry receptor ACE2. The expression of ER stress markers, phospho-PERK, Xbp1s, and DAMP proteins, was examined by Western blotting. Primary mouse enteric neurons were treated with a conditioned medium of Caco- 2 cells that were infected with SARS-CoV-2 or treated with tunicamycin. VIP expression by cultured enteric neurons was assessed by RT-qPCR, Western blotting, and ELISA. Membrane expression of NHE3 was determined by surface biotinylation. Results: SARS-CoV-2 infection of Caco-2 cells led to increased expression of phospho-PERK and Xbp1s indicating increased ER stress. Infected Caco-2 cells secreted DAMP proteins, including HSP70 and calreticulin, as revealed by proteomic and Western analyses. The expression of VIP mRNA in enteric neurons was up-regulated after treatment with a conditioned medium of SARS-CoV-2- infected Caco-2 cells (Mock, 1 ± 0.0885;and SARS-CoV-2, 1.351 ± 0.020, P=.005). CD91, a receptor for HSP70 and calreticulin, is abundantly expressed in cultured mouse and human enteric neurons and was up-regulated by a conditioned medium of SARS-CoV-2-infected Caco-2 cells. Tunicamycin, an inducer of ER stress, also induced the secretion of HSP70 and calreticulin, mimicking SARS-CoV-2 infection. Moreover, co-culture of enteric neurons with tunicamycin-treated Caco-2 cells stimulated VIP production as determined by ELISA. Co-treatment of Caco-2 cells with tunicamycin (apical) and VIP (basolateral) induced a synergistic decrease in the membrane expression of NHE3. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 infection of enterocytes leads to ER stress and the release of DAMPs that up-regulate the expression and release of VIP by enteric neurons. The presence of ER stress together with the secreted VIP, in turn, inhibits fluid absorption through the downregulation of brush-border membrane expression of NHE3 in the enterocytes. These data highlight epithelial-neuronal crosstalk in COVID-19 related diarrhea. (Figure Presented)
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INTRODUCTION-Corona virus disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus causes severe Chronic pain management during COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging process. Management of pain was an important task during the pandemic due to safety protocols and safety measures as the disease showed spread through aerosols. Thus, this study shows the comparison of pain management before covid-19 and during the pandemic. MATERIALS AND METHOD-The study was conducted in Saveetha Dental College and Hospitals, with patients visiting for a period between september 2019 and march 2020. This study was donew based on the pain management records consisting of 151 patients reporting to the out patient ward of saveetha dental college. Patient age ,gender, emergency treatment done as per the records were collected. Telephonic and photographic cross verification of data was done by two examiners. The obtained data was entered in Ms Excel spreadsheet and the tabulated data was subjected to statistical software IBM SPSS version 20.0. Descriptive inferential statistics were done. RESULTS-151 participants took part in the study out of which 63 participants were males and 88 participants were females. The study showed that 22 participants were aged from 0-20, 75 participants were aged between 20-40 years and 54 participants were aged >40 years of age. The study also showed that 66 participants had undergone emergency extraction, 30 participants had undergone emergency access opening and 55 participants were given medications for pain management.correlation between gender and emengery procedure for the management of pain showed that, 26 males underwent emergency extraction, 14 males underwent emergency access opening and 23 males underwent medication management for pain management and 40 females underwent emergency extraction, 16 females underwent emergency access opening and 32 females underwent medication management CONCLUSION-The study showed that pain management was done with increased prevalence during the pandemic and the most common procedure done was emergency extraction which had the highest frequency.
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Background: Dental caries is the most commonly seen disease in a population. It develops when bacteria in the mouth metabolize sugars to produce acid that demineralizes the hard tissues of the teeth. Nutrition indirectly affects oral health and with effective nutritional counselling initiation of dental caries can be controlled. Aim: The aim of the study is to assess the prevalence of dental caries and nutritional counselling during COVID-19. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted in the outpatient of Dental College and Hospital. The data was reviewed and analysed from the records of a total number of 86000 patients between March 2020 to June 2020. Patients with active dental caries were included in this study. The data was manually verified by 2 reviewers and finally tabulated and imported to SPSS and the results were drawn. Results: Out of the total population majority of them were males are 494 when compared with females are 448. Majority of the patients 46(4.7%) who belong to the age group 21-30 yrs have high need for diet counselling. Majority of males 58(5.9%) high need for diet counselling. Conclusion: The study result concluded that Males were more affected than females. Males need poor nutritional status and diet counselling is needed for them when compared with the female patients
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Due to the rapid developments in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and increasing trend in the number of vehicles on road, abundant of road traffic data is generated and available. Understanding spatio-temporal traffic patterns from this data is crucial and has been effectively helping in traffic plannings, road constructions, etc. However, understanding traffic patterns during COVID-19 pandemic is quite challenging and important as there is a huge difference in-terms of people’s and vehicle’s travel behavioural patterns. In this paper, a case study is conducted to understand the variations in spatio-temporal traffic patterns during COVID-19. We apply nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to elicit patterns. The NMF model outputs are analysed based on the spatio-temporal pattern behaviours observed during the year 2019 and 2020, which is before pandemic and during pandemic situations respectively, in Great Britain. The outputs of the analysed spatio-temporal traffic pattern variation behaviours will be useful in the fields of traffic management in Intelligent Transportation System and management in various stages of pandemic or unavoidable scenarios in-relation to road traffic. © 2021, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.