ABSTRACT
Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the ten leading causes of death worldwide. Patients with TB have been observed to suffer from depression and anxiety linked to social variables. Previous experiments found that the substantial pulmonary inflammation associated with TB causes neuroinflammation, neuronal death, and behavioral impairments in the absence of brain infection. Curcumin (CUR) is a natural product with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial activities. In this work, we evaluated the CUR effect on the growth control of mycobacteria in the lungs and the anti-inflammatory effect in the brain using a model of progressive pulmonary TB in BALB/c mice infected with drug-sensitive mycobacteria (strain H37Rv). The results have shown that CUR decreased lung bacilli load and pneumonia of infected animals. Finally, CUR significantly decreased neuroinflammation (expression of TNFα, IFNγ and IL12) and slightly increased the levels of nuclear factor erythroid 2-related to factor 2 (Nrf2) and the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels, improving behavioral status. These results suggest that CUR has a bactericidal effect and can control pulmonary mycobacterial infection and reduce neuroinflammation. It seems that CUR has a promising potential as adjuvant therapy in TB treatment.
Subject(s)
Anti-Inflammatory Agents/pharmacology , Antitubercular Agents/pharmacology , Brain/microbiology , Curcumin/pharmacology , Lung/microbiology , Tuberculosis, Pulmonary/drug therapy , Tuberculosis/drug therapy , Animals , Brain/metabolism , Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor/metabolism , Disease Models, Animal , Inflammation/drug therapy , Inflammation/metabolism , Lung/metabolism , Male , Mice , Mice, Inbred BALB C , Mycobacterium tuberculosis/drug effects , Tuberculosis/metabolism , Tuberculosis, Pulmonary/metabolismABSTRACT
We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the conditional variance of stock returns. We look at this effect from a global perspective, so we employ series of major stock market and sector indices. We use the Hansen's Skewed-t distribution with EGARCH extended to control for sudden changes in volatility. We oversee the COVID-19 effect on measures of downside risk such as the Value-at-Risk. Our results show that there is a significant sudden shift up in the return distribution variance post the announcement of the pandemic, which must be explained properly to obtain reliable measures for financial risk management.