Seema S

According to World Health Organization, 70-80% of the world’s population depends on the herbal medicines for their primary health care. Regardless of extensive applications of herbal medicines, this fact cannot be denied that, the plant materials are exposed to various contaminants like toxic elements, pesticide residues, insects etc. But, the main contaminants chiefly responsible for the deterioration of the herbal products are the microbes. They exert a bad impact on the overall quality and shelf life of the herbal products. Thus, evaluation techniques for contamination should be pointed out at every manufacturing step to assess the microbial contamination level on crude drug.

Geriatrics accounts for 7% of the total world population. As age advances apartfrom health, sleep quality also becomes compromised in geriatrics. In addition, an increased incidenceof insomnia has been noted in the elderly. As a result geriatric population constitutes the largestconsumers of hypnotics. The aim of the study was to assess the effectiveness of hypnotics prescribedfor insomnia in the geriatric population. A prospective study for a period of ten months wascarried out in the geriatric population who consumed at least one hypnotic during their hospital stay. A total of 93 patients were included in the study. Data was collected from the patient's case report forms.The sleep quality was assessed using Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the patients were categorizedbased on their PSQI score. A total of 93 patients who met the inclusion criteria were includedin the study. Among them 49(53%) were female and 44(47%) were male. 59(63%) patients of thestudy population were experiencing trouble in falling asleep, 47(51%) were complaining of lessduration of sleep and 43(46.2%) were complaining early morning awakening as their major sleepcomplaint. The analysis of sleep quality by PSQI revealed that a total of 29% (27) patients had scoredless than 5 points (PSQI score) and had good quality sleep and the rest 71% (66) patients were foundto have poor quality of sleep. Zolpidem was found to be most effective for providing fast onset of sleep,diazepam for duration of sleep and clonazepam to reduce the early morning awakening. A statisticallysignificant improvement of sleep quality was observed in alprazolam 0.5mg and 0.25mg with a p-valueof 0.001 and 0.002 respectively.

Mitochondrion plays an important role in cellular metabolism and in energy production. Free radicals contribute damage to mitochondria during various pathological conditions. Tamoxifen is an anti-estrogen drug given to treat breast cancer. Tamoxifen and its metabolites induce varied cellular effects. It was therefore planned to study the impact of tamoxifen on mitochondria to observe its mechanism of action in promoting cell death. Mitochondrion was isolated from sheep liver and different concentrations of tamoxifen were added to study its impact on oxidative stress. Tamoxifen induced swelling of mitochondria which in turn produced lipid peroxides in a dose-dependent manner. Tamoxifen significantly increased the levels of nitrite and nitrate in mitochondria with depletion of glutathione. It was observed that tamoxifen increased NADH oxidation leading to the release of calcium from mitochondria. These changes observed are correlated with the mechanism of action of tamoxifen in treating breast cancer.