Public Awareness on Perio-systemic Interplay: A Cross-Sectional Survey in South India

BACKGROUND

The oral cavity has been referred to as "the gateway to overall health." It is also said to be the meeting point of medicine and dentistry.

AIMS

Our study sought to determine the extent to which the public was aware of the connection between oral/periodontal conditions and general health.

SETTINGS AND DESIGN

The observational cross-sectional study's questionnaire was sectioned into oral health awareness, systemic influence on oral health, and personal oral health assessment.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A total of 994 responses were recorded and a Chi-square test was performed to uncover the relationships using SPSS version 22.0. According to responses, 70% of the population on average comprehended the responses to the majority of the oral health awareness-related questions.

RESULTS

It has been noticed that only 30% of the general public was aware of the prevalent health issues like diabetes, hypertension, and malnutrition's impact on dental health. However, more than 60% had confidence in their oral health and gave a rating of at least 5.

CONCLUSION

The study indicates that a good number of the population was prioritizing their oral health. However, there exists a definitive need to improve oral health awareness thereby ameliorating the overall health of an individual.

More than a Feeling: Dermatological Changes Impacted by Spaceflight

Spaceflight poses a unique set of challenges to humans and the hostile Spaceflight environment can induce a wide range of increased health risks, including dermatological issues. The biology driving the frequency of skin issues in astronauts is currently not well understood. To address this issue, we used a systems biology approach utilizing NASA's Open Science Data Repository (OSDR) on spaceflown murine transcriptomic datasets focused on the skin, biomedical profiles from fifty NASA astronauts, and confirmation via transcriptomic data from JAXA astronauts, the NASA Twins Study, and the first civilian commercial mission, Inspiration4. Key biological changes related to skin health, DNA damage & repair, and mitochondrial dysregulation were determined to be involved with skin health risks during Spaceflight. Additionally, a machine learning model was utilized to determine key genes driving Spaceflight response in the skin. These results can be used for determining potential countermeasures to mitigate Spaceflight damage to the skin.

Dynamics of a stochastically perturbed two-body problem

In classical mechanics, the two-body problem has been well studied. The governing equations form a system of two-coupled second-order nonlinear differential equations for the radial and angular coordinates. The perturbation induced by the astronomical disturbance like ‘dust’ is normally not considered in the orbit dynamics. Distributed dust produces an additional random force on the orbiting particle, which can be modelled as a random force having ‘Gaussian statistics’. The estimation of accurate positioning of the orbiting particle is not possible without accounting for the stochastic perturbation felt by the orbiting particle. The objective of this paper is to use the stochastic differential equation (SDE) formalism to study the effect of such disturbances on the orbiting body. Specifically, in this paper, we linearize SDEs about the mean of the state vector. The linearization operation performed above, transforms the system of SDEs into another system of SDEs that resembles a bilinear system, as described in signal processing and control literature. However, the mean trajectory of the resulting bilinear stochastic differential model does not preserve the perturbation effect felt by the orbiting particle; only the variance trajectory includes the perturbation effect. For this reason, the effectiveness of the dust-perturbed model is examined on the basis of the bilinear and second-order approximations of the system nonlinearity . The bilinear and second-order approximations of the system nonlinearity allow substantial simplifications for the numerical implementation and preserve some of the properties of the original stochastically perturbed model. Most notably, this paper reveals that the Brownian motion process is accurate to model and study the effect of dust perturbation on the orbiting particle. In addition, analytical findings are supported with finite difference method-based numerical simulations.