The rapid increase in the number of older people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other forms of dementia represents one of the major challenges to the health and social care systems. Early detection of AD makes it possible for patients to access appropriate services and to benefit from new treatments and therapies, as and when they become available. The onset of AD starts many years before the clinical symptoms become clear. A biomarker that can measure the brain changes in this period would be useful for early diagnosis of AD. Potentially, the electroencephalogram (EEG) can play a valuable role in early detection of AD. Damage in the brain due to AD leads to changes in the information processing activity of the brain and the EEG which can be quantified as a biomarker. The objective of the study reported in this paper is to develop robust EEG-based biomarkers for detecting AD in its early stages. We present a new approach to quantify the slowing of the EEG, one of the most consistent features at different stages of dementia, based on changes in the EEG amplitudes (ΔEEG A ). The new approach has sensitivity and specificity values of 100% and 88.88%, respectively, and outperformed the Lempel-Ziv Complexity (LZC) approach in discriminating between AD and normal subjects.
Debate is a teaching strategy in nursing education that enhances students' critical thinking. Although debate can be an effective teaching strategy, it is not without limitations. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of debate as a teaching strategy in nursing. Also, evaluating debates and choosing topics are highlighted.
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common respiratory disease with episodes of exacerbation. Variable factors including infectious pathogen can predispose for this exacerbation. The aim of this study is to evaluate the role of intestinal protozoa in COPD exacerbation. A total of 56 patients with COPD were included in this study. Patients were categorized into two groups based on the frequency of exacerbation during the last 6 months: those with ≤1 exacerbation (32 patients) and those with ≥2 exacerbations (24 patients). Stool specimens from each patient were collected two times (one week interval) examined for intestinal parasite. In univariate analysis, rural residence and parasitic infection were more common among patie
... Show MoreBackground: A role for vitamin D deficiency in Parkinson disease (PD) has recently been suggested.
Objective:: To estimate the state of vitamin D in PD with an age-matched healthy control.
Type of the study: A case control study.
Method: The study randomly comparison of plasma 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH] D) concentrations of collected samples in a clinical neurology department ward / Baghdad teaching hospital / Medical City and Parkinson disease movement disorder clinic. Participants were registered into the study from October 2015 to October 2016. We was study serum vitamin D level in 40 consecutive patients with
... Show MoreIraq suffers from serious pollution with harmful particles that have important direct and indirect effects on human activities and human health. In this research, a system for detecting pollutants in the air was designed and manufactured using infrared laser technology. This system was used to detect the presence of pollutants in the dust storms that swept the city of Baghdad which could have a negative impact on human health and living organisms.
The designed detection system based on the use of infrared laser (IR) with a wavelength of 1064 nm was used for the purposes of detecting pollutants based on the scattering of the laser beam from these pollutants. The system was aligned to obtain the best signal for the scattered rays, w
... Show MoreThe university press is an essential pillar in building an academic community to achieve its objectives in the service of society. Since the university press is a means of university media, which is issued by the departments or units of media in Iraqi universities as academic governmental-institutions, so it highlights the activities of the university and link them to its internal society in the first place as the university press is a mirror of the university and its voice is sincerely expressed. This research comes to know the extent of interest of the university press in various student issues.
In order to identify the problem of the research, the method of content analysis was adopted within the survey method
... Show MoreThe research entitled "The political changes and economic developments in contemporary Turkish Backgrounds, manifestations and future possibilities" consists of the introduction, four sections and conclusions. The background details, its developments, and the transformation in the economic sector in Turkey were reviewed. The first section concentrated on the brief introduction about the political developments which happened since the independence of Turkey at 1923 with the highlight on the years after the receipt of the Freedom and Justice Party (Ak PARTi) the Turkish Government rule. The second section demonstrated the reality of Turkish economy before 2002, while the
... Show MoreCoronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in United State (U.S.). Controlling of modifiable risk factors such as smoking, hypertension (HT), diabetes mellitus (D.M.), dyslipidemia, physical inactivity & obesity will prevent other serious cardiovascular complications
Abstract Background: The hip joint and lumbar spine are both anatomically and functionally closely related as had shown by many authors. So the abnormality in one area can affect the other e.g. hip joint osteoarthritis can cause lumbar sagittal malalignment and backache. Objectives: is to see if there is significant improvement in backache after total hip replacement? And which degree of backache improvement is associated with significant changes in lumbar lordosis? Methods and patients: a prospective open trial study was performed on 30 patients who had severe hip osteoarthritis and chronic low back pain. Total hip replacement was performed to all patients. Backache and lumbar lordosis were measured by visual analogue scale and Cobb’s a
... Show MoreWith the growth of mobile phones, short message service (SMS) became an essential text communication service. However, the low cost and ease use of SMS led to an increase in SMS Spam. In this paper, the characteristics of SMS spam has studied and a set of features has introduced to get rid of SMS spam. In addition, the problem of SMS spam detection was addressed as a clustering analysis that requires a metaheuristic algorithm to find the clustering structures. Three differential evolution variants viz DE/rand/1, jDE/rand/1, jDE/best/1, are adopted for solving the SMS spam problem. Experimental results illustrate that the jDE/best/1 produces best results over other variants in terms of accuracy, false-positive rate and false-negative
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