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Papers by sakina fatima

This prospective observational study investigates antibiotic prescription patterns among 460 Inte... more This prospective observational study investigates antibiotic prescription patterns among 460 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients in Karachi, Pakistan, with a specific focus on extended-spectrum antibiotics. The study analyzes data from the first to the last day of admission, exploring mono and combination antibiotic therapies and their association with extended-spectrum regimens. The findings reveal dynamic shifts in antibiotic utilization, with a notable decrease in combination therapies over the ICU stay. Examining the extended-spectrum antibiotic, the study identifies a significant increase in monotherapy on the last day of admission. This reflects a potential refinement in antibiotic choices as patients progress through their ICU stay. Notably, the association analysis highlights a significant link between extended-spectrum antibiotics and the choice between mono and combination therapy on the last day, emphasizing the evolving nature of antibiotic decisionmaking in critical care settings. The results underscore the importance of ongoing monitoring and adaptation of antibiotic regimens based on clinical responses and microbial data. The study contributes valuable insights for antibiotic stewardship in the ICU, emphasizing the need for regular reassessment and adjustment of treatment plans. While acknowledging study limitations, including its prospective nature, these findings provide a foundation for future research aimed at optimizing antibiotic use and improving patient outcomes in critical care settings.

PubMed, Jul 1, 2019

Opioids and non-opioids have long been used as analgesic, anti-inflammatory and antipyretic. Long... more Opioids and non-opioids have long been used as analgesic, anti-inflammatory and antipyretic. Long-term use of these drugs may lead to severe toxicities. Therefore natural remedies are now being explored to avoid risk of adverse effects associated with the use of these conventional medicines. Bioactive components from milk of different species have been identified as nutraceuticals, but no experimental or clinical study is conducted so far to explore the analgesic and anti-inflammatory potential of camel milk. In this study we evaluated camel milk for its possible analgesic and antiinflammatory activity. The anti-inflammatory effects of camel milk was studied in rats using paw edema method (induced by acetic acid) while tail-flick method was used to evaluate its analgesic effect in mice. Significantly increased tail-flick latency was shown after camel milk (33ml/kg) treatment when compared with acetylsalicylic acid at all time intervals. Anti-inflammatory activity of camel milk was significant (p<0.001) at 4th hour of treatment as shown by maximum percentage inhibition in edema volume (46.84%) in comparison to control. Results of our present study suggested possible use of camel milk as adjuvant therapy in treating various chronic pain and inflammatory ailments. Camel milk could further be investigated in future for recognition of biochemical constituents responsible for its antiinflammatory and pain relieving activities.

Pakistan journal of pharmaceutical sciences, 2017

This assessment aims to determine the prevalence of methicillin resistance and multidrug resistan... more This assessment aims to determine the prevalence of methicillin resistance and multidrug resistance (MDR) among the clinical isolates of Staphylococcus aureus and antimicrobial susceptibility profile of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) to the frequently prescribed antibiotics in Karachi. Isolates of MRSA, recovered from various clinical samples were included in this prospective, cross-sectional study from Jan 2015 to June 2017. Agar diffusion method was employed according to the protocols of Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute. Out of total 346 S. aureus strains, the frequency rate of MRSA was 52% (n = 180). MRSA infection was found higher among the age group 21-30 years i.e. 30% (n=54), followed by 20% (n=36) in 31-40 years. Frequency of MRSA percentage in male and female was and 70% and 30% respectively. MRSA was more frequently observed in blood 20% (n=36). MRSA showed high resistance (100%) to Oxacillin and Cefoxitin while 25% Vancomycin resistant S. aureus...

Drug Development and Industrial Pharmacy, 1998

Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences

The RNA binding protein heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein A1 (A1) regulates RNA metabolism,... more The RNA binding protein heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein A1 (A1) regulates RNA metabolism, which is crucial to maintaining cellular homeostasis. A1 dysfunction mechanistically contributes to reduced cell viability and loss, but molecular mechanisms of how A1 dysfunction affects cell viability and loss, and methodologies to attenuate its dysfunction, are lacking. Utilizing in silico molecular modeling and an in vitro optogenetic system, this study examined the consequences of RNA oligonucleotide (RNAO) treatment on attenuating A1 dysfunction and its downstream cellular effects. In silico and thermal shift experiments revealed that binding of RNAOs to the RNA Recognition Motif 1 of A1 is stabilized by sequence- and structure-specific RNAO-A1 interactions. Using optogenetics to model A1 cellular dysfunction, we show that sequence- and structure-specific RNAOs significantly attenuated abnormal cytoplasmic A1 self-association kinetics and A1 cytoplasmic clustering. Downstream of A...

Annals of PIMS-Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Medical University

Objectives: To assess current trends of antibiotic resistance against S. typhi in Pakistani popul... more Objectives: To assess current trends of antibiotic resistance against S. typhi in Pakistani population. Methodology: This was a cross-sectional, observational descriptive research conducted in various diagnostic facilities in Karachi-Pakistan from January 2019 to November 2020. A data of 1223 patients, who were reported positive for typhoid fever, was collected from various diagnostic facilities with in the area. Clinical isolates were examined for culture sensitivity by using BACTEC™ and Versa TREK™. Isolates of the Salmonella typhi and para typhi were recovered from blood of the patients. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS version 22.0. Results: Among all isolates, 92.7% (n=1134) isolates were identified as S. typhi and the remaining 7.3% (n=89) as S. paratyphi. Study population suffering from typhoid fever were 58.5% (n=716) male trailed by 41.5% (n=507) female. Similarly, among 1223 clinical isolates, 14.2% (n=174) were non-resistant, 5.4% (n=66) were multi-drug resist...

PubMed, May 1, 2017

Seeds of Vernonia anthelmintica in the form of Ethanol seed extract of Vernonia anthelmintica (EE... more Seeds of Vernonia anthelmintica in the form of Ethanol seed extract of Vernonia anthelmintica (EEVA), Hexane extract of Vernonia anthelmintica (HEVA) and water decoction of Vernonia anthelmintica (WDVA) were evaluated for their in-vivo anti-Inflammatory potential in carrageenan induced rat paw model. The results were compared to anti-inflammatory activity of standard drug (ibuprofen) and untreated groups. In-vitro evaluation of antioxidant potential of EEVA and HEVA were also conducted by "DPPH scavenging assay". The results of present study depicts that HEVA and EEVA in higher dose possess a strong anti-inflammatory potential as compared to standard anti-inflammatory drugs, whereas WDVA showed milder anti-inflammatory potential. DPPH assay has revealed strong anti-oxidant potential of EEVC with the percentage Radical Scavenging activity (%RSA) of 89.709 at concentrations of 500 ul as compared to standard drugs gallic acid (23.436±0.43) and acetyl salicylic acid (111.44±0.7) at concentrations of 95.95 μM. The other extract HEVC has shown to have insignificant %RSA at the concentration of 500μl. Hence the present study revealed that selected extracts of Vernonia anthelmintica exhibited significant in-vitro antioxidant and in-vivo anti-inflammatory potential.

arXiv (Cornell University), Jun 21, 2023

Flaky tests are problematic because they non-deterministically pass or fail for the same software... more Flaky tests are problematic because they non-deterministically pass or fail for the same software version under test, causing confusion and wasting development effort. While machine learning models have been used to predict flakiness and its root causes, there is much less work on providing support to fix the problem. To address this gap, in this paper, we focus on predicting the type of fix that is required to remove flakiness and then repair the test code on that basis. We do this for a subset of flaky test cases where the root cause of flakiness is in the test case itself and not in the production code. Our key idea is to guide the repair process with additional knowledge about the test's flakiness in the form of its predicted fix category. Thus, we first propose a framework that automatically generates labeled datasets for 13 fix categories and trains models to predict the fix category of a flaky test by analyzing the test code only. Our experimental results using code models and few-shot learning show that we can correctly predict most of the fix categories. To show the usefulness of such fix category labels for automatically repairing flakiness, in addition to informing testers, we augment a Large Language Model (LLM) like GPT with such extra knowledge to ask the LLM for repair suggestions. The results show that our suggested fix category labels significantly enhance the capability of GPT 3.5 Turbo, in generating fixes for flaky tests.

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Software testing assures that code changes do not adversely affect existing functionality. Howeve... more Software testing assures that code changes do not adversely affect existing functionality. However, a test case can be flaky, i.e., passing and failing across executions, even for the same version of the source code. Flaky tests introduce overhead to software development as they can lead to unnecessary attempts to debug production or testing code. Besides rerunning test cases multiple times, which is time-consuming and computationally expensive, flaky tests can be predicted using machine learning (ML) models. However, the state-of-the-art ML-based flaky test predictors rely on pre-defined sets of features that are either project-specific, i.e., inapplicable to other projects, or require access to production code, which is not always available to software test engineers. Moreover, given the non-deterministic behavior of flaky tests, it can be challenging to determine a complete set of features that could potentially be associated with test flakiness. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Flakify, a black-box, language model-based predictor for flaky tests. Flakify does not require to (a) rerun test cases, (b) pre-define features, or (c) access to production code. To this end, we employ CodeBERT, a pre-trained language model, and fine-tune it to predict flaky tests by relying exclusively on the source code of test cases. We evaluated Flakify on a publicly available dataset and compared our results with FlakeFlagger, the best state-of-the-art ML-based, white-box predictor for flaky tests. Flakify surpasses FlakeFlagger by 10 and 18 percentage points (pp) in terms of precision and recall, respectively, thus reducing the effort bound to be wasted on unnecessarily debugging test cases and production code by the same percentages (corresponding to a reduction rate of 25% and 64%), respectively. Our results further show that a black-box version of FlakeFlagger is not a viable option for predicting flaky tests.

Menarche has always been associated, since the ancient times, with cultural and religious element... more Menarche has always been associated, since the ancient times, with cultural and religious elements. The practices undertaken during menstruation have great role to play in the health of a woman. A cross-sectional study was designed to gain knowledge on the age at menarche, practices during menstruation and medication trends among upper-middle income women in Pakistan. This study involved a door to door survey over a period of six months, from January, 2014 to June, 2014, under the surveillance of trained surveyors. The average age at menarche was found to be 12.5 (±1.21) years. Our study found a significant association between age at menarche and BMI (<0.001). Chi-square test showed strong association (<0.001) between the use of unhygienic absorbing material and incidence of UTIs among upper-middle income women. There were 32% women in the upper-middle income practicing self-medication for dysmenorrhoea in Pakistan. The study has concluded that there is a need to promote healt...

Objective: The aim of present study was to compare the dissolution profiles of ofloxacin (200mg) ... more Objective: The aim of present study was to compare the dissolution profiles of ofloxacin (200mg) tablets and examine the feasibility of biowaiver study without performing bioavailability study to achieve the defined quality of the drug. Brands are available in the market at significant price differences, although physicians may have serious concerns as to the efficacy of the different products; they sometimes prescribe economic products due to economic constraints. Methods: Six brands of ofloxacin 200 mg tablets have been evaluated using some quality control parameters, such as weight variation, hardness, assay, disintegration and dissolution test with the aim to assess its bioequivalence. Dissolution testing was performed according to FDA requirements for all brands for requesting biowaiver. Similarity factor (f2) was used to assess bioequivalent between six formulations. Results: All brands fulfilled biowaiver requirements at pH 1.2. However, significant variations in dissolution ...

Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, 2020

Pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate, is a proton pump inhibitor, was analyzed by using UV spectroph... more Pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate, is a proton pump inhibitor, was analyzed by using UV spectrophotometry. The quantification of pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate in distilled water was performed in the wavelength range of 290 nm at 20 µgmL-1. The linearity range is 5-35 µgmL-1 by using UV spectrophotometry. The developed method was applied directly and easily to the analysis of the pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate in bulk and pharmaceutical tablet preparations. The developed method was completely validated according to ICH guidelines. The accuracy of the developed method was calculated in terms of percentage recovery (99.20-101.21%) and %RSD values less than 1% were found in precision. The LOD and LOQ were 0.989 and 1.954 µgmL-1 , respectively. Because of simplicity, accuracy and cost-effectiveness, this validated method is helpful for a daily laboratory analysis of pantoprazole sodium sesquihydrate.

The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2019

Natural Products Chemistry & Research, 2017

Objective: The aim of the study was to modify the USP analytical method and validate it for the e... more Objective: The aim of the study was to modify the USP analytical method and validate it for the estimation of clotrimazole in health care cream by using reverse phase HPLC. Methods: LC-20AD liquid chromatography equipped with SPD-20A UV-VIS detector was used for analysis. The separation was done on C18 column which was attached with loop 20 µL. Mobile phase was consisting of methanol: K 2 HPO 4 (85:15) and flow rate was 1.5 mL/min. The method was validated as per the ICH guidelines. Results: The method is selective and reproducible, capable to separate all possible excipients and help to quantify accurately the amount of clotrimazole in health care product. The percentage coefficient variation (% CV) of the retention times and the peak areas were 0.504% and 1.453%, respectively. The linearity was evaluated by least square method i.e., r 2 =0.9996. The limits of detection (LOD) and limits of quantitation (LOQ) for clotrimazole were 0.25 µg/mL and 0.5 µg/mL respectively. The results of Instrumental precision were 103.5% with %CV of 0.612% and the intermediate precision was 0.35 to 1.43%. The recoveries at three concentrations levels over a range of 80-120% were found within the range of 101.2 to 103.8% as per ICH guidelines. The results of robustness show no major changes occurring over changes in flow rate from 1.4 mL/min. to 1.6 mL/min. The method was also applied for the analysis of clotrimazole in formulated health care cream and marketed pharmaceutical creams that contain clotrimazole. Conclusion: It was concluded that the method is so simple, easy and applicable. It could be easily used for the analysis of compound in its dosage form. The robustness and ruggedness of the method are significantly broader, reproducible and could be adjusted according the needs.

Fundamental & Clinical Pharmacology, 2008

A variety of biologically active compounds with pharmacological applications has been reported to... more A variety of biologically active compounds with pharmacological applications has been reported to occur in marine sponges. The present study was undertaken to provide a set of data about an extract from Aplysina caissara, a Brazilian marine sponge. The antinociceptive and anti‐inflammatory effects were investigated against different experimental models in mice. When evaluated against writhing test intraperitoneally (60 and 90 mg/kg), the extract significantly inhibited abdominal constriction by 33.7% and 41.4% respectively. In the formalin test (60 and 90 mg/kg), the extract of sponge inhibited 43.6% and 51.6% in the first phase and 98.2% and 97.2% in the second phase respectively. When evaluated against the hot plate test, both doses demonstrated activity. An increase in the hot plate latency was observed after 60 min. The anti‐inflammatory effect was evaluated by formalin‐induced mice paw edema. Extract from A. caissara (60 and 90 mg/kg) significantly reduced hind paw swelling. Mo...

Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters, 2006

A new series of complexes of the type [Cu(dien)(2a-2tzn)Y2] and [Cu(dienXX)(2a-2tzn)Y2] has been ... more A new series of complexes of the type [Cu(dien)(2a-2tzn)Y2] and [Cu(dienXX)(2a-2tzn)Y2] has been tested for anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity. The tested compounds inhibit significantly the carrageenin induced paw edema (36.4–55.8%) and present important scavenging activities. Although their interaction with the free stable radical DPPH is not high they proxide anions. Compound 7 is the most potent (55.8%) in the in

Pakistan Journal of Medical and Health Sciences, May 30, 2022

Objective: To find out the proximate composition of Nigella sativa L. and its hypolipidemic effec... more Objective: To find out the proximate composition of Nigella sativa L. and its hypolipidemic effect on blood lipid profile among hyperlipidemic women. Methodology: To determine the proximate composition of nigella sativa seed the kjeldhah method, soxhlet extraction using petroleum ether and AOAC procedure were used. To determine hypolipidemic impact a total of 64 mild to moderate hyperlipidemic women aged 25-35 years were selected for the 8 weeks of study. The sample was selected from the university of Lahore teaching hospital, Lahore. After removing physical contaminants like dirt, dust and foreign grains black seeds were air drayed. After drying seeds were ground into fine powder by using commercial blender. Each capsule was prepare containing 500 mg powder of N. Sativa, and transfer them in air tight jars. After screening the participants of experimental group were advised to use 2 capsule Nigella sativa supplement before breakfast and two capsules in the afternoon prior to their meal for 8 weeks. Participants were also be advised to follow the given 7-day diet plan for 8 weeks. The anthropometric measurements, biochemical evaluation (lipid profile) and dietary intake data were collected. Results: The mean age group of Hyperlipidemic patients enrolled in study was 32.5 ± 0.34 years. There was a significant reduction in Low density lipoprotein (LDL) Total Cholesterol levels and Triglycerides levels with p-value less than 0.05. High density lipoprotein levels were also improved from 49.5±8.38mg/dl to 51.81±10.21 mg/dl. Conclusion: The study concluded that Nigella sativa L. seed powder supplementation showed a significant improvement in lipid profile of hyperlipidemic patients. The study found an increase in high density lipoprotein among patients.

Pakistan BioMedical Journal

Hyperlipidaemia is characterized by abnormally elevated levels of body’s plasma cholesterol and t... more Hyperlipidaemia is characterized by abnormally elevated levels of body’s plasma cholesterol and triacylglycerol. Objective: To find out the proximate composition of Nigella sativa L. and its hypolipidemic effect on blood lipid profile among hyperlipidaemic women. Methods: To determine the proximate composition of Nigella sativa seed the kjeldhah method, soxhlet extraction using petroleum ether, and AOAC procedure were used. For the identification of hypolipidemic impact, a total of 64 women with mild to moderate hyperlipidaemia, aged between 25-35 years were selected for the 8 weeks of study. The sample was selected from the University of Lahore Teaching Hospital, Lahore. After removing physical contaminants like dirt, dust, and other foreign grains black seeds were air dried. After drying, seeds were grounded into fine powder by using commercial blender. Each capsule was prepared with 500mg powder of N. sativa, and was transferred in air tight jars. After screening the participants...

Pakistan Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Sep 1, 2021

Beta vulgaris L. is a vegetable most commonly consumed in salads and has been shown to possess mu... more Beta vulgaris L. is a vegetable most commonly consumed in salads and has been shown to possess multiple benefits. This research was carried out to observe the effects of Beta vulgaris powder at different doses orally in albino rabbits on liver biochemical parameters and coagulation. The study was carried out on albino rabbits which were divided into three groups designated as Group I (administered distilled water) Group II and III (administered beetroot powder at 500mg/kg and 1000mg/kg dose respectively) orally for 2 month duration. The sample was withdrawn at day 0, 30th and 60th day through cardiac puncture. The results showed that both doses of Beta vulgaris were considered safe for use as all the liver parameters were significantly decreased compared to control. Among both doses 500mg/kg dose was considered safer as it reduced the parameters significantly compared to 1000mg/kg dose. Blood coagulation factors at both the doses showed significant increase which was in reference range. Beta vulgaris is a highly beneficial dietary product with ample amount of flavonoids and anti-oxidant agents which might help in improving the liver function and also play a role in coagulation by increasing both fibrinogen levels and prothrombin time.