Browsing by Author "Phyu, Hnin Pwint"

Since ancient times, honey has been used as food as well as for therapeutic purposes. Honey possesses different physiological effects such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer and antimicrobial effects. In particular, honey has shown potential therapeutic properties in traditional medicine. This study investigated the evidence of the neuroprotective potential of Malaysian Tualang honey in chronic cerebral hypoperfusion induced by permanent bilateral common carotid arteries ligation (2 vessels occlusion- 2VO) in the rat and also studied the cognition enhancing potential of Tualang honey in honey treated rats as compared with controls. Previous studies showed that rats subjected to 2VO experienced cognitive deficits. oxidative stress and neuronal injury in the hippocampus of the brain. We studied the effect of Tualang honey on learning and memory using the Morris water maze (MWM) followed by assessment of neuronal damage in the CA I region of the dorsal hippocampus in rats. Rats were randomly divided into four groups (n=10); Sham control, untreated 2V0 (2VO), honey treated 2V0 (2VO+H) and honey treated group (H). Each group was again divided into two subgroups (n=5): one for long term memory assessment and another for short term memory and relearning tasks. After 10 weeks of treatment, all rat groups were tested for cognitive assessment by MWM then sacrificed for histological study. 2VO+H rats had better spatial learning and memory performance than untreated 2V0 rats in MWM tasks (p<0.05). However, there was no significant difference between Sham rats and H group rats (p>0.05). Consistent with MWM data, histological study also revealed the reduced loss of neurons in 2VO+H rats as compared with 2V0 rats (p<0.001). This study shows that Malaysian Tualang honey might have therapeutic potential for the treatment of chronic cerebral hypoperfusion related neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer`s disease (AD).

Blogs have become an undeniably important source of information in socio-political occurrences in Myanmar, especially concerning the conditions of its minorities including the Rohingyas. However, Myanmar bloggers are non-native speakers of English and their mother tongues belong to different language families of unique historical backgrounds. These differences may have significant effects on the English language production of the bloggers. This study specifically explores variations of adjective phrases used by Burmese and Rohingya bloggers. Adjectival modifiers are very important in the content of blogs as they are linguistically instrumental in the narrations, descriptions and analyses of incidents and issues. Adjective phrases collected from forty blog articles have been thoroughly analysed. The findings of this have theoretical and pedagogical implications. Among others, it can be concluded that adjective phrases with adverb modifiers is the form most frequently used by both Rohingya and Burmese bloggers. However, Burmese bloggers use more varieties of adverb modifiers than Rohingya bloggers. The latter, on the other hand, have been found to considerably use more complements with different prepositional phrases. In terms of functions, both Rohingya and Burmese bloggers used adjective phrases for functions to describe qualification and human propensity. However, while Rohingya bloggers used various adjective phrases to describe these functions, it has been found that Burmese bloggers used only complements for these purposes which could be the result of native language influence, as these functions are usually performed by verbs in the Burmese language.