Introduction: Although it is discouraged, community pharmacy customers can obtain oral corticosteroids (OCSs) without prescriptions from some community pharmacies in Iraq. Medication abuse is defined as the use of medication for non-medical reasons. Objectives: The study aimed to determine demographics, beliefs, and perceptions associated with the abuse of oral corticosteroids for non-illness reasons among community pharmacy customers. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in fall 2018 in four provinces in Iraq. Customers of 19 community pharmacies asking for OCSs for themselves without a prescription were administered a paper survey. This study used the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) to measure the relationship between the motivational factors and the abuse of OCSs. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to evaluate the relationships between the use of OCSs for non-illness and six TRA factors: Normative belief, behavioral belief, evaluation of the behavior, motivation to comply, subjective norms and attitude toward behavior. Results: The study enrolled 141 participants (98 women and 43 men) taking asking for OCSs without prescription. Dexamethasone was the most commonly used OCSs (59.6%). Friends were the primary recommenders for corticosteroids abuse (28.4%). The main reasons for using OCSs were to increase appetite and gain weight (53.9 %). Approximately one-third (36.2 %) of the participants gained weight after using OCSs. The regression analysis of the TRA variables showed two factors were significantly related to the abuse of OCSs. Age had a significant inverse relationship with the abuse of OCSs and the "good appearance" belief had a significant positive association with OCS abuse. Conclusion: Some Iraqi community pharmacy customers use non-prescribed oral corticosteroids to increase appetite and gain weight. Improve body appearance represents the dominant incentive that urges people to use OCSs without prescription. Health officials and healthcare practitioners need to promote people's awareness about the risks of misusing OCSs through education programs and advertisements in public health settings, media, and social media. Article Type: Original Research
The sport of polo, the game of kings and sultans, is one of the traditional sports that has defied time throughout its long history. It has preserved its historical roots and been able to adapt to contemporary requirements, societal transformations, and temporal and spatial variables. It has moved from an aristocratic sport practiced as a form of entertainment to a professional competitive sport. It attracts many players and millions of viewers, so it is a living model of how sports develop and transform from a local tradition into global sports with organized rules managed by international institutions and with many championships worldwide. Through this, the research objectives were formulated, including exploring sports' origins. Polo in
... Show MoreThe aim of the research to apply TD-ABC technology to determine the idle capacity of the central oil companies (oil field east of Baghdad), as a modern cost management technology based on time-oriented activities (TD-ABC) is used by industrial companies in general and oil companies on In particular to build a sustainable Calvinist pillar and make future decisions by identifying idle energy to gain it a competitive advantage, the descriptive analytical approach has been adopted in calculating and analyzing the company’s data for 2018, and the most prominent conclusions of this research are managing idle energy and the task of applying cost technology on the basis of time-oriented activities and providing Convenient spatial infor
... Show MoreSupport vector machines (SVMs) are supervised learning models that analyze data for classification or regression. For classification, SVM is widely used by selecting an optimal hyperplane that separates two classes. SVM has very good accuracy and extremally robust comparing with some other classification methods such as logistics linear regression, random forest, k-nearest neighbor and naïve model. However, working with large datasets can cause many problems such as time-consuming and inefficient results. In this paper, the SVM has been modified by using a stochastic Gradient descent process. The modified method, stochastic gradient descent SVM (SGD-SVM), checked by using two simulation datasets. Since the classification of different ca
... Show MoreBootstrap is one of an important re-sampling technique which has given the attention of researches recently. The presence of outliers in the original data set may cause serious problem to the classical bootstrap when the percentage of outliers are higher than the original one. Many methods are proposed to overcome this problem such Dynamic Robust Bootstrap for LTS (DRBLTS) and Weighted Bootstrap with Probability (WBP). This paper try to show the accuracy of parameters estimation by comparison the results of both methods. The bias , MSE and RMSE are considered. The criterion of the accuracy is based on the RMSE value since the method that provide us RMSE value smaller than other is con
... Show MoreIn this research constructed N2 laser system by use developed method of electric discharge. In this method used four step of electric discharge by using four capacitors, three spark gaps, high tension power supply varying in range from 12kV to 24 kV and three resistors, this method called three stage blumlein circuit. The breakdown time delay of these parallel spark gaps cement strong ultraviolet preionization in the laser channel, thus the result of these amendments the laser output is many doubled and is more increasing than that obtained using the one and two stage blumlein circuits. This system has been designed and operated to give pulse laser with wavelength at 337.1 nm. This laser system can operate without mirrors and optical res
... Show MoreThe proposal of nonlinear models is one of the most important methods in time series analysis, which has a wide potential for predicting various phenomena, including physical, engineering and economic, by studying the characteristics of random disturbances in order to arrive at accurate predictions.
In this, the autoregressive model with exogenous variable was built using a threshold as the first method, using two proposed approaches that were used to determine the best cutting point of [the predictability forward (forecasting) and the predictability in the time series (prediction), through the threshold point indicator]. B-J seasonal models are used as a second method based on the principle of the two proposed approaches in dete
... Show MoreThis research discusses one of the largest and most important issues of a doctrinal and philosophical dimension at the same time, which is the issue of man’s freedom to choose his actions, and thus his responsibility for those actions, by looking at the nature of these acts, their being and the origin of their creation. He showed that they were created in man by force, and that he was their original creator, and that they were among the creatures of the God Almighty God like others, but they are attributed to man through acquisition. So to the first saying went Jahmiyya or Jabariyya, and to the second saying went to fatalism in the past, and the existentialists shared with them in the modern era, and to the third saying went to the Sun
... Show MoreBackground: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is one of the most common GI disorders in people under 50 years of age.
Objective: To Formulate an overview about demographics of IBS and patterns of presentation, to determine IBS patients severity ranking, and to recognize the main regimens with their patient satisfaction.
Methods: This is a cross sectional clinical study that is conducted in Outpatient Consultant Internal Medicine Clinic in Al-Kindy Teaching Hospital from 11/12/2017 to 24/12/2017. The patients suffering from IBS are diagnosed by a consultant according to the symptom-based Rome criteria for functional GI disorders, by implementing a questionnaire collecting thorough information. 77 cases of IBS patients were collected (2
The goal of this research is to better understand the physical features of starburst galaxies. Radio and X-ray observations are good for exploring the stuff within the central regions of galaxies. A galaxy that is undergoing a strong star formation, usually in its central area, is known as a starburst galaxy. This paper provides the results of a statistical analysis of a sample of starburst galaxies. The data used in this research have been collected from NASA Extragalactic Database (NED), and HYPERLEDA. Those data have been used to examine possible luminosity correlations of X-ray to a radio of a sample of starburst galaxies. In this research, statistical software, known as statistic-win-program, has been used to inves
... Show MoreThe applications of mobile robots in rescue scenarios, surviving to search, and exploration for outdoor navigation have received increasing attention due to their promising prospects. In this paper, a simulation of a differential wheeled mobile robot was presented, implementing a Global Positioning System (GPS) data points to specified starting points, final destination, and total error.
In this work, a simple kinematic controller for polar coordinate trajectory tracking is developed. The tracking between two points, pose to pose, was specified by using the GPS data points. After that, the geodesy (GEO) formulation was used to convert the geodesy coordinate to Euclidean or polar coordinate. The Haversine equation
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