introduction: Crystal is one the pernicious addictive drugs which has unfortunately been imported to Iran in the recent years. As Crystal is the purified form of Heroin, its adverse effects are much more serious than those of Heroin. Apart from psychological effects, addiction to Crystal may have adverse effects on organs and tissues. So, the evaluation of enzymatic changes could be helpful in identifying the origin of damages. Alkaline phosphatase is present in most tissues and the most prevalent cause of its elevation is liver and bone diseases. Since liver damages may be caused by Heroin consumption, assaying ALP levels could be useful for investigating the adverse effects of this drug.Materials and Methods: This study is a case control study which was carried out on 50 control persons and 108 Crystal addicts who referred to Salehabad Center of Drug Addiction Treatment (Torbat jam) for the first time during 2008-2010. The activity level of Alkaline phosphatase in the serum was measured with Calorimetry-Spectrophotometry Using computer software SPSS-16, t-test was used to analyze the data.Results: The results of this study indicate that there is a significant relationship between Crystal consumption and the serum level of ALP in both groups (P= 0.001). Besides, the relationships between the duration of Crystal consumption with Alkaline phosphatase level and cigarette smoking were significant.Conclusion: Our results revealed that Crystal consumption is an important factor for elevating the ALP serum level in Crystal addicts.

A target of best dissolution improvement of poorly soluble drugs is a necessity for the success of formulation in industry. The present work describes the preparation, optimization, and evaluation of a new spherical agglomeration technique for glimepiride as a model of poorly soluble drugs. It involved the emulsification of a drug solution containing a dispersed carrier that tailors the Crystal habit of the drug to a perfect spherical geometry, in a poor solvent containing a hydrophilic polymer which imparts sphericity and strength to the formed agglomerates. The FTIR peaks of optimized product did not show any sign of chemical interaction between the drug and adsorbed carrier. The DSC and X ray diffractogram showed a peak characteristic of spherical agglomerates with much less intensity than that of glimepiride. The dissolution t1/2 of the drug slightly decreased from 381 min to 334 min in plain agglomerates. Introducing polymers in the aqueous phase of emulsion led to an improvement in the dissolution, reflected in t1/2 ranging from 118 to 231 min. Agglomerates prepared with Starlac/PVP demonstrated the most optimum physicochemical characteristics being spherical, with the best flowability and packability parameters. The t1/2 was as short as 19 min. The new carrier/polymer system offered a synergistic combination that highly contributed in dissolution enhancement of glimepiride. The spheronization and amorphisation offered by the new technique could account for such improvement.

Recently, photonic Crystals doped with liquid Crystal (LC) material havegained much research interest. In this article new ternary one-dimensional photonicCrystal introduced and studied. The liquid Crystal layer of 5CB and 5PCH is sandwichedby two dielectric layers. For the first time, we use four structures SiO2/UCF35/CaF2, SiO2/5CB/CaF2, NFK51/UCF35/NPSK53 and NFK51/5CB/NPSK53. The effect oftemperature on transfer band gap of these photonic Crystals is investigated withtransferred matrix method. The results show that in all four structures PBG forextraordinary ray (ne) is very large than ordinary ray (no) and with increasing oftemperature, PBG shifts to red wavelength. PBG width is very vast and variation of thefigure with respect temperature is very sharp for SiO2/UCF35/CaF2 structure. Also, thesuggested design takes high tunability due to the infiltration of the LC material. One canuse the proposed structure as temperature sensing device, narrow band optical filter andin many optical systems.