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.
rop simulation models play a pivotal role in evaluating irrigation management strategies to improve water use in agriculture. The aim of this study is to verify the validity of the Aquacrop model of maize under the surface and sprinkler irrigation systems, and a cultivation system, borders and furrows, and for two varieties of Maze (Fajr and Drakma) At two different sites in Iraq, Babylon and Al-Qadisiyah governorates. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of the Aquacrop model in simulating canopy cover (CC), biomass (B), dry yield, harvest index (HI), and water productivity (WP). The results of RMSE, R2, MAE, d, NSE, CC, Pe indicated good results and high compatibility between measured and simulated values. The highest a
... Show MoreA pseudo-slug flow is a type of intermittent flow characterized by short, frothy, chaotic slugs that have a structure velocity lower than the mixture velocity and are not fully formed. It is essential to accurately estimate the transition from conventional slug (SL) flow to pseudo-slug (PSL) flow, and from SL to churn (CH), by precisely predicting the pressure losses. Recent research has showed that PSL and CH flows comprise a significant portion of the conventional flow pattern maps. This is particularly true in wellbores and pipelines with highly deviated large-diameter gas-condensate wellbores and pipelines. Several theoretical and experimental works studied the behavior of PSL and CH flows; however, few models have been suggested to pre
... Show MoreThe disposal of textile effluents to the surface water bodies represents the critical issue especially these effluents can have negative impacts on such bodies due to the presence of dyes in their composition. Biological remediation methods like constructed wetlands are more cost-effective and environmental friendly technique in comparison with traditional methods. The ability of vertical subsurface flow constructed wetlands units for treating of simulated wastewater polluted with Congo red dye has been studied in this work. The units were packed with waterworks sludge bed that either be unplanted or planted with Phragmites australis and Typha domingensis. The efficacy of present units was evaluated by monitoring of DO, Temperature, COD
... Show MoreIn many oil-recovery systems, relative permeabilities (kr) are essential flow factors that affect fluid dispersion and output from petroleum resources. Traditionally, taking rock samples from the reservoir and performing suitable laboratory studies is required to get these crucial reservoir properties. Despite the fact that kr is a function of fluid saturation, it is now well established that pore shape and distribution, absolute permeability, wettability, interfacial tension (IFT), and saturation history all influence kr values. These rock/fluid characteristics vary greatly from one reservoir region to the next, and it would be impossible to make kr measurements in all of them. The unsteady-state approach was used to calculate the relat
... Show MoreRadiotherapy is the branch of clinical medicine concerned with the application of ionizing radiation in the treatment of disease. And it is used to killing of cancer cells in a tissue using ionizing radiation while keeping the sparing of healthy cells at acceptable level. X-ray beams are used to deposit absorbed dose at depth within a patient at the site of the tumor. The aim of this work is studying the relationship between the depth dose and the field size in water phantom and homogenous actual planning. In our work, the dose distribution at different depths (zero-18 cm) deep at1cm interval treated with field size (10×10 and 20×20) cm2 were studied.
Results show that high similarity between water phantom and actual planning for th
Liquid membrane electrodes for the determination iron(III) were constructed based on chloramphenicol sodium succinate and iron(III) CPSS-Fe(III) as ion pair complex, with four plasticizers Di-butyl phosphate (DBP); Di-butyl phthalate (DBPH); Di-octyl phthalate (DOP); Tri-butyl phosphate (TBP); in PVC matrix . These electrodes give Nernstian and sub-Nernstian slopes (19.79, 24.60, 16.01 and 13.82mV/decade) and linear ranges from (1x10-5-1x10-2 M, 1x10-5-1x10-2 M, 1x10-6-1x10-2 M and 1x10-5-1x10-2 M) respectively. The best electrode was based on DBP plasticizer which gave a slope 19.79 mV/decade, correlation coefficient 0.9999, detection limit of 9×10-6 M, lifetime 37 day displayed good stability and reproducibility and used to determine
... Show MoreRadiotherapy is the branch of clinical medicine concerned with the application of ionizing radiation in the treatment of disease. And it is used to killing of cancer cells in a tissue using ionizing radiation while keeping the sparing of healthy cells at acceptable level. X-ray beams are used to deposit absorbed dose at depth within a patient at the site of the tumor. The aim of this work is studying the relationship between the depth dose and the field size in water phantom and homogenous actual planning. In our work, the dose distribution at different depths (zero-18 cm) deep at1cm interval treated with field size (10×10 and 20×20) cm2 were studied. Results show that high similarity between water phantom and actual planning for
... Show MoreThe effect of the magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF) method on the temperature rise (TR), and material removal rate (MRR) has been investigated in this paper. Sixteen runs were to determine the optimum temperature in the contact area (between the abrasive powder and surface of workpiece) and the MRR according to Taguchi orthogonal array (OA). Four variable technological parameters (cutting speed, finishing time, working gap, and the current in the inductor) with four levels for each parameter were used, the matrix is known as a L16 (44) OA. The signal to noise ratio (S/N) ratio and analysis of the variance (ANOVA) were utilized to analyze the results using (MINITAB17) to find the optimum condition and identify the significant p
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