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 study evaluated the recovery performance of any home herbs group as first aid in some emergency cases. The study involved 10 items of herbs (chamomile, black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and anise) which used in acute cases such as cold, colic, inflammation of the intestine and tonsillitis, and (hibiscus, catnip, dried lime, cress seed, and ginger) were used for chronic cases such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis. The results showed the herbs had healing power and efficiency in the primary remedy for the above-mentioned diseases. The side effects, the contradictions, and the overdoses of these substances were discussed. It was concluded that home herbs could be used for treatment in emergency cases until moder
... Show MoreThe primary objective of this paper is to improve a biometric authentication and classification model using the ear as a distinct part of the face since it is unchanged with time and unaffected by facial expressions. The proposed model is a new scenario for enhancing ear recognition accuracy via modifying the AdaBoost algorithm to optimize adaptive learning. To overcome the limitation of image illumination, occlusion, and problems of image registration, the Scale-invariant feature transform technique was used to extract features. Various consecutive phases were used to improve classification accuracy. These phases are image acquisition, preprocessing, filtering, smoothing, and feature extraction. To assess the proposed
... Show MoreRobots have become an essential part of modern industries in welding departments to increase the accuracy and rate of production. The intelligent detection of welding line edges to start the weld in a proper position is very important. This work introduces a new approach using image processing to detect welding lines by tracking the edges of plates according to the required speed by three degrees of a freedom robotic arm. The two different algorithms achieved in the developed approach are the edge detection and top-hat transformation. An adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system ANFIS was used to choose the best forward and inverse kinematics of the robot. MIG welding at the end-effector was applied as a tool in this system, and the wel
... Show MoreMarriage is considered one of the strongest ties that links between two human beings , but after the evolutions that happened in our Arab communities and specifically in the Iraqi community , marriage through the internet websites appeared . this kind of marriage is considered one of the new phenomena that appeared in the present time in many societies. That was through internet websites like yahoo , Facebook and other websites that have chat features.
The Islamic sharia looks negatively at marriage through the internet announcing that this way is harmful for both the man and the woman
Recent years have seen an explosion in graph data from a variety of scientific, social and technological fields. From these fields, emotion recognition is an interesting research area because it finds many applications in real life such as in effective social robotics to increase the interactivity of the robot with human, driver safety during driving, pain monitoring during surgery etc. A novel facial emotion recognition based on graph mining has been proposed in this paper to make a paradigm shift in the way of representing the face region, where the face region is represented as a graph of nodes and edges and the gSpan frequent sub-graphs mining algorithm is used to find the frequent sub-structures in the graph database of each emotion. T
... Show MoreObjectives: Recently, there have been important advances in the clinical application of targeted hybrid near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent-radioactive tracers. ICG-99mTc-nanocolloid, for example, is already being used by some centres for sentinel lymph node biopsy in head and neck cancer. The radioactive component allows imaging at depths which would not be possible with NIR alone and, once exposed, the NIR fluorescence reporter can be imaged at very high resolution. Gamma detection is currently carried out with a separate hand-held gamma camera or with a non-imaging probe. Visualisation of NIR fluorescence during surgery requires a dedicated NIR camera, several of which are available commercially. We describe a novel hand-held hybrid NIR-gamm
... Show MoreAddressed the problem of the research is marked (experimentation in caves fee) concept and its role in experimentation deviate Display Num formal charges caves. The search came in four sections: general framework for research and identified the research problem and the need for him. With an indication of the importance of his presence. Then specify the search for the goals of (revealed the nature and role of experimentation in determining the nature of Manifesting fee documented on the walls of caves), followed by the establishment of the three search limits (objectivity, the temporal and spatial) were then determine the terms related to the title. Then provide the theoretical framework and indicators that resulted from academic theorizi
... Show MoreOne of the troublesome duties in chemical industrial units is determining the instantaneous drop size distribution, which is created between two immiscible liquids within such units. In this work a complete system for measuring instantaneous droplet size is constructed. It consists of laser detection system (1mW He-Ne laser), drop generation system (turbine mixer unit), and microphotography system. Two immiscible liquids, water and kerosene were mixed together with different low volume fractions (0.0025, 0.02) of kerosene (as a dispersed phase) in water (as a continuous phase). The experiments were carried out at different rotational speed (1180- 2090 r.p.m) of the turbine mixer. The Sauter mean diameter of the drops was determined by la
... Show MoreBackground: Thrombasthenia is an inherited genetic disorder affecting platelets, which is characterized by spontaneous muco-cutaneous bleeding and abnormally prolonged bleeding in response to injury or trauma. Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the diagnosis and treatment of thrombasthenia in Children Welfare Teaching Hospital. Type of the study: A cross-sectional study. Methods: This descriptive study was performed on 66 patients with thrombasthenia from the first of October 2013 till the first of July 2015.The diagnosis of the disease was done by a wide spectrum of characteristics including family history, clinical manifestations, laboratory tests.. Results: The common manifestations of the disease at time of diagnosis wer
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