Osteoporosis is a common age-related disease characterized by reduced bone mineral density (BMD), micro-structural deterioration, and enhanced fracture-risk. Although, BMD is clinically used to define osteoporosis, there are compelling evidences that bone micro-structural properties are strong determinants of bone strength and fracture-risk. Reliable measures of effective trabecular bone (Tb) micro-structural features are of paramount clinical significance. Tb consists of transverse and longitudinal micro-structures, and there is a hypothesis that transverse trabeculae improve bone strength by arresting buckling of longitudinal trabeculae. In this paper, we present an emerging clinical CT-based new method for characterizing transverse and longitudinal trabeculae, validate the method, and examine its application in human studies. Specifically, we examine repeat CT scan reproducibility, and evaluate the relationships of these measures with gender and body size using human CT data from the Iowa Bone Development Study (IBDS) (n = 99; 49 female). Based on a cadaveric ankle study (n = 12), both transverse and longitudinal Tb measures are found reproducible (ICC > 0.94). It was observed in the IBDS human data that males have significantly higher trabecular bone measures than females for both inner (p less then 0.05) and outer (p less then 0.01) regions of interest (ROIs). For weight, Spearman correlations ranged 0.43-0.48 for inner ROI measures and 0.50-0.52 for outer ROI measures for females versus 0.30-0.34 and 0.23-0.25 for males. Correlation with height was lower (0.36-0.39), but still mostly significant for females. No association of trabecular measures with height was found for males.Osteoporosis is a common age-related disease characterized by reduced bone density and increased fracture-risk. Microstructural quality of trabecular bone (Tb), commonly found at axial skeletal sites and at the end of long bones, is an important determinant of bone-strength and fracture-risk. High-resolution emerging CT scanners enable in vivo measurement of Tb microstructures at peripheral sites. However, resolution-dependence of microstructural measures and wide resolution-discrepancies among various CT scanners together with rapid upgrades in technology warrant data harmonization in CT-based cross-sectional and longitudinal bone studies. This paper presents a deep learning-based method for high-resolution reconstruction of Tb microstructures from low-resolution CT scans using GAN-CIRCLE. A network was developed and evaluated using post-registered ankle CT scans of nineteen volunteers on both low- and high-resolution CT scanners.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/e-7386.html  9,000 matching pairs of low- and high-resolution patches of size 64×64 were randomly harvested from ten volunteers for training and validation. Another 5,000 matching pairs of patches from nine other volunteers were used for evaluation. Quantitative comparison shows that predicted high-resolution scans have significantly improved structural similarity index (p less then 0.01) with true high-resolution scans as compared to the same metric for low-resolution data. Different Tb microstructural measures such as thickness, spacing, and network area density are also computed from low- and predicted high-resolution images, and compared with the values derived from true high-resolution scans. Thickness and network area measures from predicted images showed higher agreement with true high-resolution CT (CCC = [0.95, 0.91]) derived values than the same measures from low-resolution images (CCC = [0.72, 0.88]).The 2019-novel coronavirus (nCoV) is a major source of disaster in the 21th century. However, the lack of specific drugs to prevent/treat an attack is a major need at this current point of time. In this regard, we conducted a systematic review to identify major druggable targets in coronavirus (CoV). We searched PubMed and RCSB database with keywords HCoV, NCoV, corona virus, SERS-CoV, MERS-CoV, 2019-nCoV, crystal structure, X-ray crystallography structure, NMR structure, target, and drug target till Feb 3, 2020. The search identified seven major targets (spike protein, envelop protein, membrane protein, protease, nucleocapsid protein, hemagglutinin esterase, and helicase) for which drug design can be considered. There are other 16 nonstructural proteins (NSPs), which can also be considered from the drug design perspective. The major structural proteins and NSPs may serve an important role from drug design perspectives. However, the occurrence of frequent recombination events is a major deterrent factor toward the development of CoV-specific vaccines/drugs. Copyright © 2020 Indian Journal of Pharmacology.During pregnancy, iron-deficiency anemia if untreated can affect the mother and child and hence iron is supplemented. Intolerance to oral iron therapy and malabsorption are common indications for parenteral iron therapy. The regularly used intravenous iron preparations are iron sucrose, sodium ferric gluconate, and iron dextran, of which iron sucrose has a satisfactory safety profile. We report a case of iron sucrose causing rare reaction with generalized edema in the mother, which was followed by intrauterine death. The oxidative stress due to immune-mediated mechanisms or adjuvant used in iron sucrose could cause mild rashes to severe anaphylactic reactions. This case report warns us toward the use of parenteral iron preparations in pregnant women, as one of the safe formulations could lead to an unusual fatal outcome in the fetus. Copyright © 2020 Indian Journal of Pharmacology.OBJECTIVES Approximately 10%-15% of patients with myasthenia gravis (MG) are refractory to standard treatment. A sizable chunk of these patients is due to muscle-specific tyrosine kinase (MuSK) antibody-positive MG which often runs a severe course with frequent relapses and poor response to conventional treatment. We report six patients with refractory MuSK-positive MG who responded well to the treatment with rituximab. PATIENTS AND METHODS In this prospective institute-based observational study, we report six MuSK antibody-positive MG patients, who did not achieve remission with standard treatment and were later started on rituximab infusion. RESULTS There was a significant clinical improvement in all patients after starting rituximab. CONCLUSION Rituximab is an effective immunomodulatory therapy in MuSK antibody-positive MG patients who are not responding to the standard treatment. Copyright © 2020 Indian Journal of Pharmacology.