Urinary excretion of two orally-administered non-metabolizable sugars, lactulose and mannitol, is a valuable marker for evaluating intestinal permeability. Usually this test involves a time consuming procedure of about 5 hour’s urine collection, which makes the test incompatible to some extent. As the results are expressed as the ratio of lactulose and mannitol recovered in urine within certain time, it may be possible to get similar result despite the reduced urine collection time of 2 hours. Moreover, different laboratories do the test by different methods, which make the results incomparable between laboratories. Here, we are also trying to find the correlation between results from most commonly used methods: HPAE-PAD and LC-MSMS. The lactulose: mannitol (LM) test was performed in a cohort of Bangladeshi infants considered at-risk for environmental enteropathy. 208 urine specimens from 104 (52 male and 52 female) infants were collected at 2 and 5 hours after LM solution administration and were tested for lactulose and mannitol by two different methods, one HPAE-PAD platform and another LC-MSMS platform. Median age of the children was 15.0 months (range 6.9 to 25.8 months) and their mean weight-for-age z-score was -0.92. A higher percentage of lactulose and mannitol recovery was found in 5 hours urine collection than in the corresponding 2 hours by both HPAE-PAD and LC-MSMS method, but when results were expressed as lactulose to mannitol ratio (LMR) there was no significant difference between 2 and 5 hours urine collection in both HPAE-PAD (P = 0.138) and LC-MSMS (P = 0.099) method. LMR based on 2 hours urine collection correlated well with LMR based on traditional 5 hours urine collection (Spearman’s correlation coefficient 0.578 and 0.604 respectively for HPAE-PAD and LC-MSMS). In future, LM test to assess intestinal permeability in children can be simplified by shortening the urine collection time from 5 hours to 2 hours.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of conserved endogenous, small non-coding RNA molecules with a length of 18–25 nucleotides that regulate gene expression by RNA interference processes, including mRNA chopping, mRNA deadenylation, and translation inhibition. miRNAs maintain the physiological functions of the intestine and are instrumental in gut pathogenesis. miRNAs play an important role in intercellular communication and are present in all body fluids, including stools with different composition and concentrations. However, under diseased conditions, miRNAs are aberrantly expressed and act as negative regulators of gene expression. The stable and differentially expressed miRNAs in stool enables miRNAs to be used as potential biomarkers for screening of various intestinal diseases. In this review, we summarize the expressed miRNA profile in stool and highlight miRNAs as biomarkers with potential clinical and diagnostic applications, and we aim to address the prospects for recent advanced techniques for screening miRNA in diagnosis and prognosis of intestinal disorders.
Background: Giardiasis identified as a leading cause of gastrointestinal pathogen in young children worldwide, is also common in Bangladesh. There has been an emerging evidence of an association between giardiasis and child growth. This systematic review focuses only on Bangladeshi children. Prevalence of giardiasis with its adverse health effects and the advancement of diagnosis has been reviewed.Methods: A broad review of literature, electronic databases, and books within the time frame of 1970 and 2019 has been searched. Data published on giardiasis prevalence, outcomes (child growth, intestinal permeability, and diarrhea) and advances of diagnosis in Bangladesh has been searched.Results: Both assemblages A and B genotypes of Giardia lamblia are responsible for human giardiasis in Bangladesh. Recent studies on Bangladeshi children suggested Giardia species infections has an adverse impact on poor child growth which have further characterized associations with altered gut epithelial barrier dysfunction, as well as diarrhea. Indeed emerging evidence indicates the key consequence of Giardia colonization is nutrient malabsorption. Conclusions: In Bangladesh giardiasis remains a major public health concern, especially in children age <5 years but is considered as a neglected disease. In order to reduce the burden of giardiasis in developing countries such as Bangladesh, more focus is require to include this disease in public health policies.
Shigella spp. constitutes some of the key pathogens responsible for the global burden of diarrhoeal disease. With over 164 million reported cases per annum, shigellosis accounts for 1.1 million deaths each year. Majority of these cases occur among the children of the developing nations and the emergence of multi-drug resistance Shigella strains in clinical isolates demands the development of better/new drugs against this pathogen. The genome of Shigella flexneri was extensively analyzed and found 4,362 proteins among which the functions of 674 proteins, termed as hypothetical proteins (HPs) had not been previously elucidated. Amino acid sequences of all these 674 HPs were studied and the functions of a total of 39 HPs have been assigned with high level of confidence. Here we have utilized a combination of the latest versions of databases to assign the precise function of HPs for which no experimental information is available. These HPs were found to belong to various classes of proteins such as enzymes, binding proteins, signal transducers, lipoprotein, transporters, virulence and other proteins. Evaluation of the performance of the various computational tools conducted using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis and a resoundingly high average accuracy of 93.6% were obtained. Our comprehensive analysis will help to gain greater understanding for the development of many novel potential therapeutic interventions to defeat Shigella infection.
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