It is well known that diabetes affects bone in human and animal models, and leads to osteopenia and osteoporosis. Bone-mineral density and other biochemical markers of bone turnover are very much affected in people with diabetes. Reduced bone mass, occurring with increased frequency in diabetes mellitus, has been attributed to poor glycemic control, but the pathogenic mechanisms remain unknown. High concentrations of glucose (hyperglycemia) in diabetics leads to this complication. Very few in vitro studies using bone-cell lines have been carried out to address this problem. In this study, we examined the effects of different doses of glucose concentration (5.5, 16.5, and 49.4 mmol/L), alone, with insulin (0.6 microg/mL), or with 17beta-estradiol (E2) (10 nmol/L), on rat bone-marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) in the presence of an osteogenic medium. BMSC proliferation and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) were studied after 3 and 7 d of culture, respectively; the area stained for collagen and mineralized nodules was studied after 28 d of culture. With high concentrations of glucose, BMSC proliferation, ALP activity, the number of nodules formed, and the area stained for collagen were greatly reduced. Insulin treatment alone was able to increase [3H]-thymidine uptake or ALP activity, whereas both insulin and estradiol were able to increase the number of mineralized nodules and the area stained for collagen and mineralization. In conclusion, this study suggests that insulin and estradiol are able to contain the deleterious effect of high concentrations of glucose on BMSC-derived osteoblast proliferation and function.

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A speed up technique for the non-local means (NLM) image denoising algorithm based on probabilistic early termination (PET) is proposed. A significant amount of computation in the NLM scheme is dedicated to the distortion calculation between pixel neighborhoods. The proposed PET scheme adopts a probability model to achieve early termination. Specifically, the distortion computation can be terminated and the corresponding contributing pixel can be rejected earlier, if the expected distortion value is too high to be of significance in weighted averaging. Performance comparative with several fast NLM schemes is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Index Terms-Early termination, fast algorithm, image denoising, non-local means (NLM) algorithm, probabilistic algorithm.

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Prostate cancer is a leading cause of death among the aging men. Surgical or radiotherapy is effective when the cancer is confined to the prostate gland but once the cancer spreads beyond the pelvis even chemotherapy and hormonal ablation therapy fails in curing this disease. Our previous studies have shown that diallyl disulfide (DADS) induces cell cycle arrest and also induces apoptosis in PC-3 cells. And now the present study is focused to see whether there is an activation of caspase cascade pathway. Hence, in the present study the apoptotic effect of DADS is studied by Western blot analysis of caspase-3, -9, -10 and Bcl-2, Bad, and Bax protein. The Apoptotic cells were assessed by Hoechst 33342 staining with 25 and 40 microM concentrations of DADS for 24 h. The results have shown that DADS at 25 and 40 microM concentrations has induced the activation of caspases. There is a significant increase in the expression of caspases (3, 9, and 10). The proapoptotic protein Bax has significantly increased at 40 microM of DADS treatment and there is significant increase of Bad protein at both the concentration. Bcl-2 protein has significantly decreased in DADS treated cells. Therefore, the present investigation serves as evidence that DADS may be a therapeutic drug in the treatment of prostate cancer.