Complementary medicine using natural product as antitumor is on the rise. Much research has been performed on Tualang Honey and it was shown to have therapeutic potential in wound healing, and antimicrobial activity and be antiproliferative against several cancer models such as human osteosarcoma (HOS), human breast (MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231), and cervical (HeLa) cancer cell lines. To date, there was limited study on antileukemic properties of Tualang (Koompassia excelsa) Honey. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antileukemic effect of Tualang Honey on acute and chronic leukemia cell lines. Leukemia cell lines (K562 and MV4-11) and human mononuclear cell isolated from peripheral blood were grown in RPM1 1640 culture medium. The cells were incubated with increasing concentrations of Tualang Honey. After incubation, the evaluation of viability and apoptosis was performed. The morphological changes of leukemia cells were the presence of cytoplasmic blebs followed by apoptotic bodies and round shape of cells. IC₅₀against K562 and MV4-11 was determined. Tualang Honey gave 53.9% and 50.6% apoptosis activity on K562 and MV4-11, respectively, while on human mononuclear cell it was 37.4%. Tualang Honey has the apoptosis-inducing ability for acute and chronic myeloid leukemia (K562 and MV4-11) cell lines.

Thalassemia is identified as a prevalent disease in Malaysia, known to be one of the developing countries. Fourteen patients with confirmed cases of thalassemia were recruited from the Hematology Laboratory. The molecular genotypes of these patients were tested using the multiplex-ARMS and GAP-PCR methods. The samples were repeatedly investigated using the Devyser Thalassemia kit (Devyser, Sweden), a targeted NGS panel targeting the coding regions of hemoglobin genes, namely the HBA1, HBA2, and HBB genes, which were used in this study. There were many different genetic variants found in 14 unrelated cases. Out of all fourteen cases, NGS was able to determine an additional -50 G>A (HBB:c.-100G>A) that were not identified by the multiplex-ARMS method, including HBA2 mutations, namely CD 79 (HBA2:c.239C>G). Other than that, CD 142 (HBA2:c.427T>C) and another non-deletional alpha thalassemia and alpha triplication were also not picked up by the GAP-PCR methods. We illustrated a broad, targeted NGS-based test that proposes benefits rather than using traditional screening or basic molecular methods. The results of this study should be heeded, as this is the first report on the practicality of targeted NGS concerning the biological and phenotypic features of thalassemia, especially in a developing population. Discovering rare pathogenic thalassemia variants and additional secondary modifiers may facilitate precise diagnosis and better disease prevention.

Febrile seizures in children are an alarming experience for parents. This study aimed to assess the psychological functioning of parents of children when they were being admitted for treatment of febrile seizures in the hospital, the importance of which is clear, since parents are the primary custodian of their children. This is a cross-sectional study conducted on 110 participants whose child had been admitted for a febrile seizure to Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia from September 2020 until June 2021. The depression, anxiety, and stress levels were determined based on a validated Bahasa Melayu questionnaire of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21). In addition, multiple logistic regression was used to determine the associated factors related to the participants’ psychological functioning. The mean age of children with febrile seizures were 21 months old, and most children showed features of simple febrile seizures (71.8%). The prevalence of anxiety, stress, and depression were 58.2%, 29%, and 23.6%, respectively. Using multiple logistic regression, child age, family history of febrile seizures, family history of epilepsy, and length of stay in the ward were found to be significantly associated with anxiety when adjusted for other variables. Otherwise, for depression and stress, no significant associated variables were found when adjusted for other variables. Anxiety was highly reported by participants when their children were admitted for febrile seizures. Several factors impacted their anxiety, including the lower the child’s age was, participants with no family history of febrile seizures before, and the longer duration of hospital stay. Therefore, further study and intervention on reducing the parent’s anxiety could be emphasized in the future.

We read with interest the paper by Farag et al. (2007) reporting an unexpectedly low prevalence of Helicobacter pylori infection among pregnant women on Pemba Island, Zanzibar and the accompanying commentary by Graham et al. (2007) in the September 2007 issue of the Transactions. This finding is remarkable, considering that the prevalence rates in most developing countries are considerably higher. As alluded to by Farag et al., we had previously reported an even lower prevalence of H. pylori among the Malay community, who constitute the majority ethnic group of northeastern peninsular Malaysia (Uyub et al., 1994). The extraordinarily low prevalence rates of 4–7% among Malays were observed not only in the general population but even among patients with gastroduodenal erosive lesions demonstrated on endoscopy (Uyub et al., 1994). Interestingly, these exceptionally low prevalence rates are of the...