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.
The Dagum Regression Model, introduced to address limitations in traditional econometric models, provides enhanced flexibility for analyzing data characterized by heavy tails and asymmetry, which is common in income and wealth distributions. This paper develops and applies the Dagum model, demonstrating its advantages over other distributions such as the Log-Normal and Gamma distributions. The model's parameters are estimated using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and the Method of Moments (MoM). A simulation study evaluates both methods' performance across various sample sizes, showing that MoM tends to offer more robust and precise estimates, particularly in small samples. These findings provide valuable insights into the ana
... Show MoreIn this paper, we show that for the alternating group An, the class C of n- cycle, CC covers An for n when n = 4k + 1 > 5 and odd. This class splits into two classes of An denoted by C and C/, CC= C/C/ was found.
AThe Bridge Maintenance Management System (BMMS) is an application system that uses existing data from a Bridge Management System database for monitoring and analysis of current bridges performance, as well as for estimating the current and future maintenance and rehabilitation needs of the bridges. In a transportation context, the maintenance management is described as a cost-effective process to operate, construct, and maintain physical money. This needs analytical tools to support the allocation of resources, materials, equipment, including personnel, and supplies. Therefore, Geographic Information System (GIS) can be considered as one tool to develop the road and bridge maintenanc
Objective: To compare the efficacy and safety of isosorbide mononitrate (IMN) versus misoprostol used to induce labour for overdue pregnancy.
Setting: A prospective randomized clinical study conducted at AL-Elwiya Maternity Teaching Hospital in Baghdad from Jan. 2008 to Dec. 2008.
Method: One hundred and fifty women with over due pregnancy (past date and posterm pregnancy) referred for induction of labour with Bishop scores <_ 5 were randomly allocated to receive either forty mg isosorbide mononitrate (IMN) tablet as a single vaginal dose (n=75) or fifty mcg misoprostol vaginally (n=75) every six hrs for a maximum of three doses. Amniotomy and/or oxytocin infusion is considered when Bishop scores frankly progressed (augmentation
This paper presents a method to classify colored textural images of skin tissues. Since medical images havehighly heterogeneity, the development of reliable skin-cancer detection process is difficult, and a mono fractaldimension is not sufficient to classify images of this nature. A multifractal-based feature vectors are suggested hereas an alternative and more effective tool. At the same time multiple color channels are used to get more descriptivefeatures.Two multifractal based set of features are suggested here. The first set measures the local roughness property, whilethe second set measure the local contrast property.A combination of all the extracted features from the three colormodels gives a highest classification accuracy with 99.4
... Show MoreThe research aims to identify the educational plan for the private and public kindergartens. The researchers selected a sample consisted of (59) female teachers for the private kindergartens and (150) female teachers for the public kindergartens in the city of Baghdad. As for the research tool, the two researchers designed a questionnaire to measure the educational plan for the private and public kindergartens. The results revealed that private kindergartens have educational plans that contribute considerably to classroom interaction, the public kindergartens lack for educational plans. In light of the findings of the research, the researchers recommend the following: the need to set up a unified educational plan for the priv
... Show MoreThe aim of this paper is to propose an efficient three steps iterative method for finding the zeros of the nonlinear equation f(x)=0 . Starting with a suitably chosen , the method generates a sequence of iterates converging to the root. The convergence analysis is proved to establish its five order of convergence. Several examples are given to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed new method and its comparison with other methods.