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 novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory syndrome with similar traits to common pneumonia. This major pandemic has affected nations both socially and economically, disturbing everyday life and urging the scientific community to develop solutions for the diagnosis and prevention of COVID-19. Reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT–PCR) is the conventional approach used for detecting COVID-19. Nevertheless, the initial stage of the infection is less predictable in PCR tests, making early prediction challenging. A robust and alternative diagnostic method based on digital computerised technologies to support conventional methods would greatly help society. Therefore, this paper reviews recent research bas
... Show MoreOptimization is the task of minimizing or maximizing an objective function f(x) parameterized by x. A series of effective numerical optimization methods have become popular for improving the performance and efficiency of other methods characterized by high-quality solutions and high convergence speed. In recent years, there are a lot of interest in hybrid metaheuristics, where more than one method is ideally combined into one new method that has the ability to solve many problems rapidly and efficiently. The basic concept of the proposed method is based on the addition of the acceleration part of the Gravity Search Algorithm (GSA) model in the Firefly Algorithm (FA) model and creating new individuals. Some stan
... Show MoreBackground: Asthma is one of the most common chronic respiratory diseases in the world, standing for the most frequent cause for hospitalization and emergency cases. Respiratory viruses are the most triggering cause. Aim: To assess the role of viral infections, especially COVID-19, in the pathogenesis of asthma initiation and exacerbations. Method: Electronic search was done for the manuscripts focusing on asthma as a risk factor for complications after COVID-19 infection. The outcomes were titles, materials, methods and classified studies related or not related to the review study. Three hundred publications were identified and only ten studies were selected for analysis. Seven studies were review, one retrospective, one longitudin
... Show MoreBackground:-Anorectal malformation is a congenital anomaly of different varieties and its correction needs good experience , knowledge about this varieties and specific surgical tools,
otherwise the child may lose his the only chance to live normally without disastrous complication like incontinence.
Objective:-assessment of the advantage of this procedure in management of anorectal malformations and the percentage for anal continence.
Patients and methods:-. This study was carried out in the child's central teaching hospital in Baghdad total number (70) cases were included in the study, 37 males and 33 females: aged 7 days to 6 years. They attended the hospital between October 1998-october 2004.
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Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) are automatic inverse Turing tests, which are intended to differentiate between people and malicious computer programs. The mission of making good HIP system is a challenging issue, since the resultant HIP must be secure against attacks and in the same time it must be practical for humans. Text-based HIPs is one of the most popular HIPs types. It exploits the capability of humans to recite text images more than Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but the current text-based HIPs are not well-matched with rapid development of computer vision techniques, since they are either vey simply passed or very hard to resolve, thus this motivate that
... Show Moremodel is derived, and the methodology is given in detail. The model is constructed depending on some measurement criteria, Akaike and Bayesian information criterion. For the new time series model, a new algorithm has been generated. The forecasting process, one and two steps ahead, is discussed in detail. Some exploratory data analysis is given in the beginning. The best model is selected based on some criteria; it is compared with some naïve models. The modified model is applied to a monthly chemical sales dataset (January 1992 to Dec 2019), where the dataset in this work has been downloaded from the United States of America census (www.census.gov). Ultimately, the forecasted sales
A multivariate multisite hydrological data forecasting model was derived and checked using a case study. The philosophy is to use simultaneously the cross-variable correlations, cross-site correlations and the time lag correlations. The case study is of two variables, three sites, the variables are the monthly rainfall and evaporation; the sites are Sulaimania, Dokan, and Darbandikhan.. The model form is similar to the first order auto regressive model, but in matrices form. A matrix for the different relative correlations mentioned above and another for their relative residuals were derived and used as the model parameters. A mathematical filter was used for both matrices to obtain the elements. The application of this model indicates i
... Show MoreExtractive multi-document text summarization – a summarization with the aim of removing redundant information in a document collection while preserving its salient sentences – has recently enjoyed a large interest in proposing automatic models. This paper proposes an extractive multi-document text summarization model based on genetic algorithm (GA). First, the problem is modeled as a discrete optimization problem and a specific fitness function is designed to effectively cope with the proposed model. Then, a binary-encoded representation together with a heuristic mutation and a local repair operators are proposed to characterize the adopted GA. Experiments are applied to ten topics from Document Understanding Conference DUC2002 datas
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