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.
Recently times, industrial development has increased, including plastic industries, and since plastic has a very long analytical life, it will cause environmental pollution. Therefore studies have resorted to reusing recycled plastic waste (sustainable plastic) to produce environmentally friendly concrete (green concrete). In this research, some studies were reviewed and then summarized into several things, including the percentage of plastic replacement from the aggregate and the effect of this percentage on the fresh properties of concrete, such as the workability and the effect of plastic waste on the hardening properties of concrete such as dry density, compressive, tensile and flexural strength.
Contemporary life is racing against time in its temptations and variables, and it has become shaped and changed in an amazing way in its various aspects and fields. This was facilitated by intellectual and scientific communication between civilizations, and the rapid progression in successive inventions and discoveries in the fields of science and arts of knowledge. This contributed to a great economic and commercial renaissance. Then, these economic developments entered the world into a very strong competition, which forced producers to calculate all production costs, to reach the highest profits by reducing the price of the produced commodity on the one hand, and achieving quality in appearance (especially) on the other hand. Since the ma
... Show MoreThe occurrences of invasive candidiasis has increased over the previous few decades. Although Candida albicans considers as one of the most common species of organisms, that cause acquired fungal infections. Candida albicans is an opportunistic fungal pathogen and inherent in as a lifelong, the yeast is present in healthy individuals as a commensal, and can reside harmlessly in human body. However, in immuno-compromised individuals, the fungus can invade tissues, producing superficial infections and, in severe cases, life-threatening systemic infections. This review wills emphasis on virulence factor of C. albicans including (adhesion, invasion, candida proteinase, and phenotypic switching and biofilm formation. I
... Show MoreThe analysis of the hyperlink structure of the web has led to significant improvements in web information retrieval. This survey study evaluates and analyzes relevant research publications on link analysis in web information retrieval utilizing diverse methods. These factors include the research year, the aims of the research article, the algorithms utilized to complete their study, and the findings received after using the algorithms. The findings revealed that Page Rank, Weighted Page Rank, and Weighted Page Content Rank are extensively employed by academics to properly analyze hyperlinks in web information retrieval. Finally, this paper analyzes the previous studies.
Speech is the essential way to interact between humans or between human and machine. However, it is always contaminated with different types of environment noise. Therefore, speech enhancement algorithms (SEA) have appeared as a significant approach in speech processing filed to suppress background noise and return back the original speech signal. In this paper, a new efficient two-stage SEA with low distortion is proposed based on minimum mean square error sense. The estimation of clean signal is performed by taking the advantages of Laplacian speech and noise modeling based on orthogonal transform (Discrete Krawtchouk-Tchebichef transform) coefficients distribution. The Discrete Kra