Background. Alopecia areata (AA) is a common form of noncicatricial hair loss of unknown cause, affecting 0.1-0.2% of the general population. Most evidence supports the hypothesis that it is disease of the hair follicle of autoimmune nature mediated by T-cells, with important cytokine role. Objective of the Study. The objective of this study is to study the association and changes in serum levels of interleukin-15 (IL-15) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) in patients with AA in relation to the type, activity, and disease duration. Patients and Methods. Thirty-eight patients with AA and 22 individuals without the disease as controls were enrolled in this case-controlled study conducted in the Department of Dermatology in the Al-K

Incorporating waste byproducts into concrete is an innovative and promising way to minimize the environmental impact of waste material while maintaining and/or improving concrete’s mechanical characteristics and strength. The proper application of sawdust as a pozzolan in the building industry remains a significant challenge. Consequently, this study conducted an experimental evaluation of sawdust as a fill material. In particular, sawdust as a fine aggregate in concrete offers a realistic structural and economical possibility for the construction of lightweight structural systems. Failure under four-point loads was investigated for six concrete-filled steel tube (CFST) specimens. The results indicated that recycled lightweight co

Background: Medical-surgical nurses are responsible of providing competent care to clients with a wide-array of acute and chronic health problems. This challenging task requires arming nurses with advanced competencies of health literacy to effectively educate their clients. However, evidence about medical-surgical nurse’s health literacy-related knowledge and experience is limited.  Purposes: This study aimed to determine the level of the health literacy-related knowledge and experience among medical-surgical nurses.Design: A descriptive-cross-sectional study was conducted among a total sample of 177 nurses who were practicing in medical-surgical wards in teaching hospitals in Iraq. A convenience sampling method was used to sele

This study focused on spectral clustering (SC) and three-constraint affinity matrix spectral clustering (3CAM-SC) to determine the number of clusters and the membership of the clusters of the COST 2100 channel model (C2CM) multipath dataset simultaneously. Various multipath clustering approaches solve only the number of clusters without taking into consideration the membership of clusters. The problem of giving only the number of clusters is that there is no assurance that the membership of the multipath clusters is accurate even though the number of clusters is correct. SC and 3CAM-SC aimed to solve this problem by determining the membership of the clusters. The cluster and the cluster count were then computed through the cluster-wise J

Substantial research has been performed on Building Information Modeling (BIM) in various topics, for instance, the use and benefit of BIM in design, construction, sustainable environment building, and Facility assets over the past several years. Although there are various studies on these topics, Building Information Modeling (BIM) awareness through facilities management is still relatively poor. The researcher's interest is increased in BIM study is based heavily upon the perception that it can facilitate the exchange and reuse of information during various project phases. This property and others can be used in the Iraqi Construction industry to motivate the government to eliminate the change resistance to use innovat