Background: Nursing interventions tailored to the smoking triggers in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases are essential. However, these interventions are scant due to the nature of factors associated with smoking cessation and the poor understanding of the effect of nurse-led intervention in Iraq.Purpose: This study aimed to determine the dominant smoking triggers and examine the effects of a tailored nursing intervention on smoking behavior in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases.Methods: Convenience samples of 128 patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, male and female patients, who were 18-70 years old, were recruited in this quasi-experimental, randomized comparative trial in the outpatient clinic in one major teaching hospital in Baghdad City, Iraq. The intervention included simple yet specific instructions that were given both orally and in written form to the study samples to enable them to manage their craving to smoke for 6 weeks. The smoking triggers were assessed using Why Do You Smoke questionnaire. Participants were randomly allocated to receive either the nurse-led intervention or standard care. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, independent sample t-tests, logistic regression, and two-sided tests.Results: Stress reduction was the dominant smoking trigger among subjects. The percentage of participants who were either able to completely quit smoking or reduce the number of smoked cigarettes per day (n=19, 29.7%; n=28, 43.8%, respectively) was greater in the study group than those in the control group (n=5, 5.8%; n=5, 5.8%, respectively). Study findings demonstrated significant differences in the inability to improve readiness to quit smoking between the intervention group and control group (p=0.000) at the sixth-week follow-up.Conclusion: The tailored nursing intervention was effective for a successful achievement of smoking reduction and cessation among patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, and a potential to equip nurses in clinical settings to support patients to achieve this is recommended.
A 20 year-old male was admitted with a history of recurrent palpitations from 5 years. Baseline ECG revealed premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) with delta waves. Stress ECG showed short non-sustained Ventricular tachycardia (VT). Echocardiography showed moderate dilation of the left ventricle with mild reduced systolic function and Ejection fraction was estimated to be 42%. Right ventricle was mildly dilated and hypokinetic. Both atria were mildly dilated. The patient referred to CVC for EP study with possible ablation. The ablation of the focus led to complete suppression of the ectopy. Post-procedure ECG and echocardiography showed normalized rhythm and systolic function.
Transdermal drug delivery has made an important contribution to medical practice but has yet to fully achieve its potential as an alternative to oral delivery and hypodermic injections. Transdermal therapeutic systems have been designed to provide controlled continuous delivery of drugs through the skin to the systemic circulation. A transdermal patch is an adhesive patch that has a coating of drug; the patch is placed on the skin to deliver particular amount of drug into the systemic circulation over a period of time. The transdermal drug delivery systems (TDDS) review articles provide information regarding the transdermal drug delivery systems and its evaluation process as a ready reference for the research scientist who is involved
... Show MoreBlockchain technology relies on cryptographic techniques that provide various advantages, such as trustworthiness, collaboration, organization, identification, integrity, and transparency. Meanwhile, data analytics refers to the process of utilizing techniques to analyze big data and comprehend the relationships between data points to draw meaningful conclusions. The field of data analytics in Blockchain is relatively new, and few studies have been conducted to examine the challenges involved in Blockchain data analytics. This article presents a systematic analysis of how data analytics affects Blockchain performance, with the aim of investigating the current state of Blockchain-based data analytics techniques in research fields and
... 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 MoreSystems on Chips (SoCs) architecture complexity is result of integrating a large numbers of cores in a single chip. The approaches should address the systems particular challenges such as reliability, performance, and power constraints. Monitoring became a necessary part for testing, debugging and performance evaluations of SoCs at run time, as On-chip monitoring is employed to provide environmental information, such as temperature, voltage, and error data. Real-time system validation is done by exploiting the monitoring to determine the proper operation of a system within the designed parameters. The paper explains the common monitoring operations in SoCs, showing the functionality of thermal, voltage and soft error monitors. The different
... Show MoreThe Gray Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is a population-based meta-heuristic algorithm that belongs to the family of swarm intelligence algorithms inspired by the social behavior of gray wolves, in particular the social hierarchy and hunting mechanism. Because of its simplicity, flexibility, and few parameters to be tuned, it has been applied to a wide range of optimization problems. And yet it has some disadvantages, such as poor exploration skills, stagnation at local optima, and slow convergence speed. Therefore, different variants of GWO have been proposed and developed to address these disadvantages. In this article, some literature, especially from the last five years, has been reviewed and summarized by well-known publishers. Fir
... Show More