[doi: 10.1063/1.3456499]“
“Pelargonium reniforme Curtis is an herb used for the treatment of various human and animal diseases especially in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The effects of the oral administration of aqueous extract of the plant roots at 100, 200 and 400 mg/kg body weight for 21 days on some haematological and biochemical parameters in male Wistar rats were investigated. Oral treatments with this extract did not cause any significant change in the

white blood cell count, mean corpuscular volume, mean corpuscular haemoglobin, mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration, neutrophils, monocytes, large unsustained cells, basophils, total and conjugated bilirubin. Also, the extract did not affect the level of albumin, gamma glutamyl transferase, alanine aminotransaminase, aspartate aminotransaminase,

cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol and the organ body-weight ratio of the animals. selleckchem The levels of potassium, urea, calcium and magnesium were also not affected by the extract. However, the red blood cell count, haemoglobin, platelets, lymphocytes, total proteins, globulin and sodium levels were increased significantly while the levels of alkaline phosphatase, chloride and uric acid were reduced significantly by the extract. In addition, the levels of packed cell volume, red cell distribution width, eosinophils, triglycerides, creatinine MK-4827 cell line and inorganic phosphorus were altered at specific doses. The available results of this study suggest that the aqueous root extract of P. reniforme is not toxic at the doses used in this study and may be safe for medicinal uses.”
“This paper reviews recent progress in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from

electroencephalograms U0126 mouse (EEG). Three major effects of AD on EEG have been observed: slowing of the EEG, reduced complexity of the EEG signals, and perturbations in EEG synchrony. In recent years, a variety of sophisticated computational approaches has been proposed to detect those subtle perturbations in the EEG of AD patients. The paper first describes methods that try to detect slowing of the EEG. Next the paper deals with several measures for EEG complexity, and explains how those measures have been used to study fluctuations in EEG complexity in AD patients. Then various measures of EEG synchrony are considered in the context of AD diagnosis.

Also the issue of EEG preprocessing is briefly addressed. Before one can analyze EEG, it is necessary to remove artifacts due to for example head and eye movement or interference from electronic equipment. Pre-processing of EEG has in recent years received much attention. In this paper, several state-of-the-art pre-processing techniques are outlined, for example, based on blind source separation and other non-linear filtering paradigms.

In addition, the paper outlines opportunities and limitations of computational approaches for diagnosing AD based on EEG. At last, future challenges and open problems are discussed.