No abstract

Psoriasis is an auto-immune chronic inflammatory skin disease, which affects about 3.5% of the world's population. Prevalence of psoriasis among children aged 0 to 18 years is 1% in the United State of America, 5.3% in eastern Saudi Arabia and is on constant rise in other parts of the world. An effective treatment of psoriasis in children may often be challenging mainly because of the lack of established therapeutic guidelines. The objective of this review, therefore, is to provide an update on the prevalence and the pharmacotherapeutic management of pediatric psoriasis, which could be beneficial to clinical pharmacists and other healthcare workers. This multifactorial papulosquamous disorder is linked with the genetic makeup of an individual although the various risk factors like obesity, stress, emotional imbalance, psychological disturbances, cold weather, skin irritation, infection in the respiratory tract and the presence of hemolytic streptococcus could trigger psoriasis. Plaque psoriasis is the most common; but, guttate, pustular disease, erythrodermic (red skin) and rheumatoid psoriasis diseases are also noticed in children. The successful approach for treating psoriasis in children depends on the precise selection of line of therapy on case-by-case basis to enhance benefit-risk ratio, with careful attention of its impact on the patient and family. Therefore, treatment of pediatric psoriasis must be rationalized based on the type and intensity of the disease to reduce probable side effects of drugs in children.

No abstract

In this review article the basic principle of separation process during Micellar electro kinetic chromatography (MEKC) are described. The separation mechanism in MEKC is based on differences in equilibrium between an aqueous Phase and micellar Phase. These Phases are moving different velocities, due to a combination of electrophoresis & electro osmosis. It is a useful branch of capillary electrophoresis (CE) that utilizes surfactant above critical micelle concentration (CMC) as pseudo-stationary phase. MEKC can be employed to separate both charged and neutral molecules, individually or simultaneously, including chiral compounds. MEKC benefits from high peak efficiency due to electro-osmotic flow (EOF) in the separation capillary, compounded with large variety of synthetic surfactants, organic modifiers, temperature and variable separation voltage has made MEKC the method of choice for separation scientists. In this review, we present the introduction of CE, fundamentals of surfactant chemistry as it relates to MEKC, separation principles in MEKC including equations involved in calculating separation parameters (capacity factor, resolution etc.).

There is a renewed focus on developing formulation strategies for the regional drug targeting. Magnetic drug targeting provides an innovative approach that may include two and three dimensional arrays of magnetic drug delivery systems. Applications of magnetic microsphere-based drug delivery include chemotherapy, arthritis, gene, and cell transplantation therapy. This article describes different formulation approaches, routes of administration, and mechanisms of magnetic-based drug targeting. Magnetic materials have to be synthesized before considering the formulation development. Although the preparation evaluation of magnetic drug delivery is comparable with conventional microspheres and nanoparticles, characterization of magnetic properties of the final formulation is very essential for success of this approach.  In vivo evaluation studies include tumor targeting in animals, histological evaluation using MRI and course of the magnetic drug delivery system by image mapping using suitable biological markers.