BACKGROUND: Montelukast (Singulair) is a cysteinyl leukotriene receptor antagonist, used for the maintenance treatment of asthma and to relieve symptoms of seasonal allergic rhinitis and asthma, also used for exercise-induced bronchospasm. AIM: This study was performed to determine the prevalence of Montelukast use as an add-on therapy among Iraqi asthmatic patients on treatment. Comparing the effectiveness of regimens with and without montelukast. METHODS: This descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out on 73 Iraqi asthmatic patients on treatment of both sexes with age range (18-60) years old, attending Al-Kindy Teaching Hospital and Al-Zahraa Centre of Asthma and Allergy, Baghdad, for the period between February and March 2017. A questionnaire was specifically prepared to meet the objectives and was used to collect the data of the study. RESULTS: There was a significant statistical reduction of frequency in asthmatic attacks after Montelukast treatment (p-value < 0.05). Out of 73 patients, 39 were males, and 34 were females, 46 were jobless, 37 were married, 63 were urban residents, 63 were educated. Prevalence of exacerbation factors was as following: infection was found in 60.3% of the patients, exercise in 57.5%, dust in 72.6%, smoking in 60.6%, food in 24.7%, others (stress, perfumes) in 20.5%. The prevalence of Montelukast use in this study was 46% (34 patients). Out of 34 patients using Montelukast, 28 were using inhaled salbutamol, 5 were using oral salbutamol, 15 were using inhaled corticosteroids, 9 were using systematic corticosteroids, 2 were using xanthines, and 6 were using ketotifen. CONCLUSION: Montelukast was used as add-on therapy with the inhaled corticosteroids to reduce the required dose of inhaled corticosteroids also the use of Montelukast lead to reduced number of exacerbations which will be reflected on the use of inhaled salbutamol and systematic corticosteroids. Also, Montelukast was superior to xanthines and ketotifen as an add-on therapy.
Automatic recognition of individuals is very important in modern eras. Biometric techniques have emerged as an answer to the matter of automatic individual recognition. This paper tends to give a technique to detect pupil which is a mixture of easy morphological operations and Hough Transform (HT) is presented in this paper. The circular area of the eye and pupil is divided by the morphological filter as well as the Hough Transform (HT) where the local Iris area has been converted into a rectangular block for the purpose of calculating inconsistencies in the image. This method is implemented and tested on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA V4) iris image database 249 person and the IIT Delhi (IITD) iris
... Show More<p>In this paper, a simple color image compression system has been proposed using image signal decomposition. Where, the RGB image color band is converted to the less correlated YUV color model and the pixel value (magnitude) in each band is decomposed into 2-values; most and least significant. According to the importance of the most significant value (MSV) that influenced by any simply modification happened, an adaptive lossless image compression system is proposed using bit plane (BP) slicing, delta pulse code modulation (Delta PCM), adaptive quadtree (QT) partitioning followed by an adaptive shift encoder. On the other hand, a lossy compression system is introduced to handle the least significant value (LSV), it is based on
... Show MoreThis work is concerned with the design and performance evaluation of a shell and double concentric tubes heat exchanger using Solid Works and ANSY (Computational Fluid Dynamics).
Computational fluid dynamics technique which is a computer-based analysis is used to simulate the heat exchanger involving fluid flow, heat transfer. CFD resolve the entire heat exchanger in discrete elements to find: (1) the temperature gradients, (2) pressure distribution, and (3) velocity vectors. The RNG k-ε model of turbulence is used to determining the accurate results from CFD.
The heat exchanger design for this work consisted of a shell and eight double concentric tubes. The number of inlets are three and that of o
... Show MoreNew data on jumping spiders (Salticidae) and tangle-web spiders (Theridiidae) of Armenia are provided on the basis of recently collected specimens in various regions of Armenia. One species, Ballus rufipes (Simon, 1868) is recorded as new to the Caucasus Region, in addition to the following species: Neon reticulatus (Blackwall, 1853), Pellenes brevis (Simon, 1868), Salticus scenicus (Clerck, 1757) and Synageles dalmaticus (Keyserling, 1863) that belong to a family Salticidae, are recorded in Armenia for the first time.
A further 7 species of Theridiidae are recorded in Armenia for the first time Kochiura aulica (C. L. Koch, 1838), Steatoda albomaculata (De Geer, 1778), Steatoda bipunctata (Linnaeus, 1758), Steatoda castanea Clerk, 175
Global warming has had considerable effects on vital ecosystems, which has also been caused by increased temperatures and CO2 that follow changes in different abiotic factors, which poses threats to mangrove forests environment. This research was conducted to examine the physiological and morphological characteristics of the Rhizophora apiculata mangrove regarding higher air temperature for the variety of tree species that respond to climate change. Seedlings were cultivated for three months in regulated growth chambers with three varying temperatures of 38°C, 21°C under CO2 at 450 ppm, and ambient CO2 concentration i.e., 450 ± 20 ppm under average temperature at 28°C as the control condition
... Show MoreThis paper presents the design of a longitudinal controller for an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This paper proposed the dual loop (inner-outer loop) control based on the intelligent algorithm. The inner feedback loop controller is a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) to provide robust (adaptive) stability. In contrast, the outer loop controller is based on Fuzzy-PID (Proportional, Integral, and Derivative) algorithm to provide reference signal tracking. The proposed dual controller is to control the position (altitude) and velocity (airspeed) of an aircraft. An adaptive Unscented Kalman Filter (AUKF) is employed to track the reference signal and is decreased the Gaussian noise. The mathematical model of aircraft
... Show MorePsidium guajava, belonging to the Myrtaceae family, thrives in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide. This important tropical fruit finds widespread cultivation in countries like India, Indonesia, Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and South America. Throughout its various parts, including fruits, leaves, and barks, guava boasts a rich reservoir of bioactive compounds that have been traditionally utilized as folkloric herbal medicines, offering numerous therapeutic applications. Within guava, an extensive array of Various compounds with antioxidative properties and phytochemical constituents are present, including essential oils, polysaccharides, minerals, vitamins, enzymes, triterpenoids, alkaloids, steroids, glycosides, tannins, fl
... Show MoreRegarding to the computer system security, the intrusion detection systems are fundamental components for discriminating attacks at the early stage. They monitor and analyze network traffics, looking for abnormal behaviors or attack signatures to detect intrusions in early time. However, many challenges arise while developing flexible and efficient network intrusion detection system (NIDS) for unforeseen attacks with high detection rate. In this paper, deep neural network (DNN) approach was proposed for anomaly detection NIDS. Dropout is the regularized technique used with DNN model to reduce the overfitting. The experimental results applied on NSL_KDD dataset. SoftMax output layer has been used with cross entropy loss funct
... Show MoreThe current research aims to shed light on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which helps to report financial and non-financial information by economic units in general and listed on the Iraq Stock Exchange in particular. The research was based on a main premise that apply the criteria of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) would provide useful information to users to help them make appropriate decisions. To achieve the goal of the research, the descriptive analysis method was used, and quantitative analysis was used. At the level of the descriptive analysis method, a desk survey was conducted. As for the quantitative analysis, it relied on applied data through a questionnaire form (Questioners) as a research tool, and the
... Show MoreThe research aims to identify the effect of the training program that is based on integrating futuristic thinking skills with classroom interaction patterns on mathematics teachers in order to provide their students with creative solution skills. The research sample consisted of 31teachers (15 teachers for the experimental group and 16 for the control groups). The researcher developed a measure for the academic self-efficacy consisting of (39) items. Its validity, reliability, coefficient of difficulty and discriminatory power were estimated. To analyze the findings, the researcher adopted the Mann-Whitney (U) test and the effect size, and the findings were as follows: There is a statistically significant difference at the significance leve
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