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.
This study had succeeded in producing a new graphical representation of James abacus called nested chain abacus. Nested chain abacus provides a unique mathematical expression to encode each tile (image) using a partition theory where each form or shape of tile will be associated with exactly one partition.Furthermore, an algorithm of nested chain abacus movement will be constructed, which can be applied in tiling theory.
Imagination as a Path to Reality
Multi-agent systems are subfield of Artificial Intelligence that has experienced rapid growth because of its flexibility and intelligence in order to solve distributed problems. Multi-agent systems (MAS) have got interest from various researchers in different disciplines for solving sophisticated problems by dividing them into smaller tasks. These tasks can be assigned to agents as autonomous entities with their private database, which act on their environment, perceive, process, retain and recall by using multiple inputs. MAS can be defined as a network of individual agents that share knowledge and communicate with each other in order to solve a problem that is beyond the scope of a single agent. It is imperative to understand the chara
... Show MoreEndoscopy is a rapidly growing field of Neurosurgery, it is defined as the applying of endoscope to treat different conditions of brain pathology within cerebral ventricular system and beyond it, endoscopic procedures performed by using different equipment and recording system to make a better visualization enhancing the surgeon's view by increasing illumination and magnification to look around corner and to capture image on video or digital format for later studies.
This research is a theoretical study that deals with the presentation of the literature of statistical analysis from the perspective of gender or what is called Engendering Statistics. The researcher relied on a number of UN reports as well as some foreign sources to conduct the current study. Gender statistics are defined as statistics that reflect the differences and inequality of the status of women and men overall domains of life, and their importance stems from the fact that it is an important tool in promoting equality as a necessity for the process of sustainable development and the formulation of national and effective development policies and programs. The empowerment of women and the achievement of equality between men and wome
... Show More. In recent years, Bitcoin has become the most widely used blockchain platform in business and finance. The goal of this work is to find a viable prediction model that incorporates and perhaps improves on a combination of available models. Among the techniques utilized in this paper are exponential smoothing, ARIMA, artificial neural networks (ANNs) models, and prediction combination models. The study's most obvious discovery is that artificial intelligence models improve the results of compound prediction models. The second key discovery was that a strong combination forecasting model that responds to the multiple fluctuations that occur in the bitcoin time series and Error improvement should be used. Based on the results, the prediction a
... Show MoreThe No Mobile Phone Phobia or Nomophobia notion is referred to the psychological condition once humans have a fear of being disconnected from mobile phone connectivity. Hence, it is considered as a recent age phobia that emerged nowadays as a consequence of high engagement between people, mobile data, and communication inventions, especially the smart phones. This review is based on earlier observations and current debate such as commonly used techniques that modeling and analyzing this phenomenon like statistical studies. All that in order to possess preferable comprehension concerning human reactions to the speedy technological ubiquitous. Accordingly, humans ought to restrict their utilization of mobile phones instead of prohibit
... Show MoreTesting is a vital phase in software development, and having the right amount of test data is an important aspect in speeding up the process. As a result of the integrationist optimization challenge, extensive testing may not always be practicable. There is also a shortage of resources, expenses, and schedules that impede the testing process. One way to explain combinational testing (CT) is as a basic strategy for creating new test cases. CT has been discussed by several scholars while establishing alternative tactics depending on the interactions between parameters. Thus, an investigation into current CT methods was started in order to better understand their capabilities and limitations. In this study, 97 publications were evalua
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