Abstract Asthma is a complex disease defined by chronic airway inflammation and airflow limitation causing variable respiratory symptoms which include shortness of breath (SOB), wheezing, chest tightness and cough. Asthma guidelines advocate adding a second long acting bronchodilator to medium doses of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) rather using high doses of ICS alone to control moderate to severe persistent asthma. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical outcomes of three medication regimens indicated for Iraqi patients suffering from persistent asthma. This study was interventional randomized clinical study conducted on a sample of adult Iraqi asthmatic patients in Baghdad City. The study composed of three visits distributed over eight weeks; baseline visit followed by first follow up and second follow up visits after four and eight weeks respectively. The study enrolled 78 adult patients with moderate to severe persistent asthma as diagnosed by specialist physician according to patient history and baseline pulmonary function test (PFT) and allocated them randomly to three groups (each group included 26 patients) to receive equivalent medium doses of budesonide inhaler in addition to either formoterol inhaler, oral modified release aminophylline tablets or tiotropium inhaler (first, second and third group respectively). Sixty four patients completed this study. The mean ages of patients were above 35 years with slightly more male predominance. The study groups developed significant increase of peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) and forced vital capacity (FVC) values at the first follow up visit compared to baseline values (p<0.001). Thereafter, the first and third groups achieved significant higher values at the second follow up visit compared to first follow up visit (p<0.001), while second group produced no change. All the groups developed significant improvement of Mini asthma quality of life questionnaire (MiniAQLQ) scores and percentage of symptom free days (SFD) at first follow up visit and continued further significant improvement at the second follow up visit (p<0.001). Generally, between groups comparison according to extent of change of study parameters revealed that third group produced the greatest improvement over the entire study period followed by the first group, whereas the second group was associated with the least extent of improvement. This study concluded that all groups caused significant improvement in study parameters compared to baseline values and also concluded that the third group of inhaled [tiotropium/budesonide] was associated with the highest extent of improvement followed by first group, while the second group was the least.
Data generated from modern applications and the internet in healthcare is extensive and rapidly expanding. Therefore, one of the significant success factors for any application is understanding and extracting meaningful information using digital analytics tools. These tools will positively impact the application's performance and handle the challenges that can be faced to create highly consistent, logical, and information-rich summaries. This paper contains three main objectives: First, it provides several analytics methodologies that help to analyze datasets and extract useful information from them as preprocessing steps in any classification model to determine the dataset characteristics. Also, this paper provides a comparative st
... Show MoreThe wide use of lead compounds as an engine anti-knock reflects conversely on all components of the ecosystem. This study aimed to detect the concentration of lead in various types of gasoline and gas oil that are highly consumed by vehicles. Eight fuel samples were collected from different feul stations distributed in different districts of Baghdad city. These included two gas oil (diesel) stations and three stations for each type of gasoline (leaded and unleaded). Lead was extracted by the modified chemical method, and then flame atomic absorption technique was applied to assay its concentrations. The results indicated that lead levels were within permitted limits (150 mg Lead L-1) recommended by the
... Show MoreFree Space Optical (FSO) technology offers highly directional, high bandwidth communication channels. This technology can provide fiber-like data rate over short distances. In order to improve security associated with data transmission in FSO networks, a secure communication method based on chaotic technique is presented. In this paper, we have turned our focus on a specific class of piece wise linear one-dimensional chaotic maps. Simulation results indicate that this approach has the advantage of possessing excellent correlation property. In this paper we examine the security vulnerabilities of single FSO links and propose a solution to this problem by implementing the chaotic signal generator “reconfigurable tent map”. As synchronizat
... Show MoreIn the present work is the deposition of copper oxide using the pulsed laser deposition technique using Reactive Pulsed Laser as a Deposition technique (RPLD), 1.064μm, 7 nsec Q-switch Nd-YAG laser with 400 mJ/cm2 laser energy’s has been used to ablated high purity cupper target and deposited on the porous silicon substrates recorded and study the effect of rapid thermal annealing on the structural characteristics, morphological, electrical characteristics and properties of the solar cell. Results of AFM likelihood of improved absorption, thereby reducing the reflection compared with crystalline silicon surface. The results showed the characteristics of the solar cell and a clear improvement in the efficiency of the solar cell in the
... Show MoreThe field experiment was conducted with the aim of developing and testing an automatic sprayer for agricultural spray experiments and studying the effect of spray pressure, spray speed and spray height on the spraying process. The effects of the major spraying factors (pressure, speed, and height) on the spraying performance of the automatic sprayer were studied. This study included several traits: First - the drop sizes - Second - the penetration of the spray into the vegetation cover - Third, the spray wasted. The results showed: - First: - Increase in coverage percentage when using the first speed, 2 km / h, which amounted to 26.85%. An increment in the spraying penetration of the vegetation cover was observed at the second speed
... Show MoreBackground: The stethoscope is a tool that doctors use daily in the examination of patients and it can take part in the transmission of health care-associated infections. In a single day it may come in direct contact with multiple patients and the intra hospital environment may be contaminated by various type of bacteria and possibly transmit to others.
Objective:- The study was to know the attitude and knowledge about the stethoscope hygiene behavior among physicians and to determine the types of bacterial agents that can contaminate stethoscopes.
Type of the study: The study was a cross-sectional study
Metho
... Show MoreThe shell model calculations with Cohen-Kurath (C-K) interaction were carried out to investigate form factors of elastic transverse electron scattering, and magnetic dipole-moments of odd 7,9,11Be isotopes. The effect of the exact value of center of mass correction was adopted to generate the magnetic form factors in Born approximation picture. The contribution of the higher 2p-shell configuration was included to reproduce the experimental data. A significant improvement was obtained in the present results with core-polarization (CP) effect through the effective g-factors. The occupancies percentage with respect to the valence nucleons was also calculated.
Due to the great evolution in digital commercial cameras, several studies have addressed the using of such cameras in different civil and close-range applications such as 3D models generation. However, previous studies have not discussed a precise relationship between a camera resolution and the accuracy of the models generated based on images of this camera. Therefore the current study aims to evaluate the accuracy of the derived 3D buildings models captured by different resolution cameras. The digital photogrammetric methods were devoted to derive 3D models using the data of various resolution cameras and analyze their accuracies. This investigation involves selecting three different resolution cameras (low, medium and
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