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.
The rotation effect upon Morse potential had been studied and the values of the effective potential in potential curves had been calculated for electronic states (X2?+g , B ?u ) K2 molecule. The calculation had been computed for rotational quantum number (J = 5). Also, drawing potential curves for these systems had been done using Herzberg and Gaydon equations. It was found that the values of the dissociation energy which resulting from using Herzberg equation greater than that of Gaydon equation. Besides, it was found that the rotation effect for (X and B) electronic states in Morse potential is very small and in this case may negligible.
The thirties and the early forties and the at end of the World War II of the last century
witnessed several attempts carried out by the Public Health Directorate and by the Iraqi
Ministry of Foreign Affairs to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation to fund Iraq with its
health program which is carried out in several regions in the world to promote the health and
social situations since Iraq during that period in history was badly in need to such plans and
programs because of this lack of financial and technical possibilities necessary for the
advancement of health and social dire situation.
The details of these attempts are deposited in the documents of the diplomatic mail
records of the United States of America , an
Researchers are increasingly using multimodal biometrics to strengthen the security of biometric applications. In this study, a strong multimodal human identification model was developed to address the growing problem of spoofing attacks in biometric security systems. Through the use of metaheuristic optimization methods, such as the Genetic Algorithm(GA), Ant Colony Optimization(ACO), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for feature selection, this unique model incorporates three biometric modalities: face, iris, and fingerprint. Image pre-processing, feature extraction, critical image feature selection, and multibiometric recognition are the four main steps in the workflow of the system. To determine its performance, the model wa
... Show MoreIn this study, the feasibility of Forward–Reverse osmosis processes was investigated for treating the oily wastewater. The first stage was applied forward osmosis process to recover pure water from oily wastewater. Sodium chloride (NaCl) and magnesium chloride (MgCl2) salts were used as draw solutions and the membrane that was used in forward osmosis (FO) process was cellulose triacetate (CTA) membrane. The operating parameters studied were: draw solution concentrations (0.25 – 0.75 M), oil concentration in feed solution (FS) (100-1000 ppm), the temperature of FS and draw solution (DS) (30 - 45 °C), pH of FS (4-10) and the flow rate of both DS and FS (20 - 60 l/h). It was found that the water flux and oil concentration in FS increas
... Show MoreThe present calculation covers the building shield during irradiation process and under water storage of three milion curries Cobalt-60 radiation source the calculation results in design requirement of 8m depth of water in the source stoeage pool
This paper proposes a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called the fine-tuning meta-heuristic algorithm (FTMA) for solving global optimization problems. In this algorithm, the solutions are fine-tuned using the fundamental steps in meta-heuristic optimization, namely, exploration, exploitation, and randomization, in such a way that if one step improves the solution, then it is unnecessary to execute the remaining steps. The performance of the proposed FTMA has been compared with that of five other optimization algorithms over ten benchmark test functions. Nine of them are well-known and already exist in the literature, while the tenth one is proposed by the authors and introduced in this article. One test trial was shown t
... Show MoreThe estimation of quantity of liquid that is collected from gas/oil separation system is a very complex task because it requires the application of the flash calculations which needs to solve the cubic equation of state and to use some numerical techniques. These difficulties can be overcome by a computer model which requires a lot of experimental data, long time, and experience.
This paper adopts a new technique to simplify this problem. It suggests new correlations for optimum separator pressure for separation station of heavy oils. The correlations have been achieved for two- and three- stage separation systems.
The co
Background: Acute cholecystitis is common surgical
problem, which was treated previously by conservative
treatment .Later early open has been introduced as an
alternative to interval for treatment of acute cholecystitis.
Early open was found to be a safe, successful with
comparable postoperative complication rate. With the
advent of laparoscopy laparoscopic have been used for
chronic cholecystitis and became the first line of
treatment. New reports have shown that laparoscopic can
be used as an alternative to open for surgical treatment of
acute cholecystitis.
Objectives: to compare the success, safety of early
laparoscopic versus early open as a primary treatment of
acute cholecystitis.
Methods: