Background: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy and the second leading cause of mortality among women in Iraq forming 23% of cancer related deaths. The low survival from the disease is a direct consequence to the advanced stages at diagnoses. Aim: To document the composite stage of breast cancer among Iraqi patients at the time of diagnosis; correlating the observed findings with other clinical and pathological parameters at presentation. Patients and Methods: A retrospective study enrolling the clinical and pathological characteristics of 603 Iraqi female patients diagnosed with breast cancer. The composite stage of breast cancer was determined according to UICC TNM Classification System of Breast Cancer and the American Joint Committee on Cancer Staging. The studied parameters comprised age of the patient, stage of the disease, marital and educational status, history of lactation and hormonal intake (for a minimum period of 6 months), family history of breast or any other cancer, the effected breast side, hormone (Estrogen and Progesterone) receptor (ER, PR) and Her2 contents of the primary cancer. Statistical analysis was performed to correlate the recorded composite stages at diagnosis with the corresponding clinical and pathological data utilizing SPSS version 16.0 statistical program. Results: Out of 603 patients, seven (1.2%) had ductal carcinoma in situ (Stage 0). Stages I, II and III and IV were documented in 9.5%, 47.1%, 33.2% and 9.1% of the patients at the time of diagnoses. Overall 70.8% of patients presented in the age group (40-59 years), 79.3% were married and 32.2% were highly educated. History of lactation, hormonal intake, family breast cancer and contralateral breast involvement was observed in 73.4%, 26.5%, 20.2% and 6.5% respectively. No correlation was elicited between the stage of breast cancer and the age of the patients, history of lactation or contralateral breast involvement. On the other hand, significant associations were demonstrated with respect to the marital and educational status, history of hormonal intake and breast cancer in the family. Immuno-histochemical evaluation revealed ER+PR+Her2+ (Triple Positive/Luminal B), ER-PR-Her2- (Triple Negative), ER+PR+Her2- (Luminal A) and ER-PR-Her2+ (Her2) subtypes in 13.4%, 11.8%, 48.2% and 9.8% of the examined breast samples respectively. When correlating the composite stage at diagnosing breast cancer with the corresponding subtypes the relationship was highly significant at p<0.01. Conclusions and Recommendations: The study reports a regression in Stage IV breast cancer at the time of initial presentation among Iraqi patients specifically in those with family history of the disease; pointing out to the fruitful outputs of initiating the National Program for Early Detection of Breast Cancer in the country. Further professional efforts, endorsed by practical policy decisions, are recommended to down stage breast cancer through promoting evidence based protocol guidelines and adopting comprehensive well designed diagnostic, screening and cancer control strategies.
Language Teaching & Leaning Problems at the Iraqi university level: Image & Reality
A prey-predator interaction model has been suggested in which the population of a predator consists of a two-stage structure. Modified Holling's disk equation is used to describe the consumption of the prey so that it involves the additional source of food for the predator. The fear function is imposed on prey. It is supposed that the prey exhibits anti-predator behavior and may kill the adult predator due to their struggle against predation. The proposed model is investigated for existence, uniqueness, and boundedness. After determining all feasible equilibrium points, the local stability analyses are performed. In addition, global stability analyses for this model using the Lyapunov method are investigated. The chance of occurrence of loc
... Show MoreThe objective of the current research is to identify the degree of awareness of the teachers of Arabic language with the requirements of sustainable development. The research sample consisted of (100) male and female teachers of the Arabic language. A 3-likert scale of (71) items grouped into practical and cognitive aspects, five trends for each aspect was designed by the researcher to explore the required data. The results showed that the level of awareness of teachers of the Arabic language was moderate of both the cognitive and practical aspects of sustainable education with means (1.69) and (1.48) respectively. The researcher presented a set of recommendations and suggestions.
The current research aims to determine the necessary linguistic competencies for Arabic language teachers of the preparatory stage (fourth grade preparatory), which were five main competencies: Arabic grammar competencies, literary competencies, cultural competencies, rhetorical competencies, and expression competencies. To achieve the objective of the research, the researcher developed a questionnaire as the main tool for collecting data based on literature, it consists of (28) items including the five main competencies. The questionnaire was administered to (60) male and female teachers at Al-Karkh's first Education Directorate in the city of Baghdad. The findings of the research indicated that Arabic language proficiency got the highe
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It considers training programs is an important process contributing to provide employees with the skills required to do their jobs efficiently and effectively, so it should be concerned with and the focus of all government our organizations, and perhaps the most important reasons that I was invited to select the subject (evaluation of training programs directed toward the diagnosis of the phenomenon of financial and administrative corruption) It is the importance of those programs working in the regulatory institutions General and the Office of Inspector General of Finance and the Ministry particularly for employees because of their role in the development of their skills and their experience and their beha
... Show MoreForecasting is one of the important topics in the analysis of time series, as the importance of forecasting in the economic field has emerged in order to achieve economic growth. Therefore, accurate forecasting of time series is one of the most important challenges that we seek to make the best decision, the aim of the research is to suggest employing hybrid models to predict daily crude oil prices. The hybrid model consists of integrating the linear component, which represents Box Jenkins models, and the non-linear component, which represents one of the methods of artificial intelligence, which is the artificial neural network (ANN), support vector regression (SVR) algorithm and it was shown that the proposed hybrid models in the predicti
... Show MoreThe importance of forecasting has emerged in the economic field in order to achieve economic growth, as forecasting is one of the important topics in the analysis of time series, and accurate forecasting of time series is one of the most important challenges in which we seek to make the best decision. The aim of the research is to suggest the use of hybrid models for forecasting the daily crude oil prices as the hybrid model consists of integrating the linear component, which represents Box Jenkins models and the non-linear component, which represents one of the methods of artificial intelligence, which is long short term memory (LSTM) and the gated recurrent unit (GRU) which represents deep learning models. It was found that the proposed h
... Show MoreBackground: The presence of cancer has a profound psychological impact on the quality of life of patients and their families, on family and social relationships, and on role functioning.
Aim of the study: Assess the impact of childhood cancer on patients and their families.
Subjects and methods: A Prospective questionnaire-based study, for 151 patients, had malignancy identified by tumor registry of Children Welfare Teaching Hospital. The information was taken from the parent(s) in the presence of the patient who sometimes answered some questions during the interview.
Result: There was an interview with 151 families of children with cancer in t
... Show MoreBackground: The main purpose of this study is to find if there is any correlation between the level of C-reactive protein (CRP) in gingival crevicular fluid with its serum level in chronic periodontitis patients and to explore the differences between them according to the probing depth. Materials and methods: Forty seven male subjects enrolled in this study. Thirty males with chronic periodontitis considered as study group whom further subdivided according to probing depth into subgroup 1 with pocket depth ≤6mm, subgroup 2 with pocket depth >6mm. The other 17 subjects considered as controls. For all subjects, clinical examination where done for periodontal parameters plaque index (PLI), gingival index (GI), bleeding on probing (BOP),
... Show MoreThis research aims to study the optical characteristics of semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) composed of CdTe and CdTe/CdSe core-shell structures. It utilizes the refluxed method to synthesize these nanoscale particles and aims to comprehend the growth process by monitoring their optical properties over varied periods of time and pH 12. Specifically, the optical evolution of these QDs is evaluated using photoluminescence (PL) and ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy. For CdTe QDs, a consistent absorbance and peak intensity increase were observed across the spectrum over time. Conversely, CdTe/CdSe QDs displayed distinctive absorbance and peak intensity variations. These disparities might stem from irregularities in forming selenium (Se) layers a
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