End Stage Renal Disease is a well-known global public health problem. Maintenance hemodialysis is considered a life-saving treatment for patients with such disease. This treatment method that requires patients to be adherent to hemodialysis attendance, dietary and fluid recommendations as well as adherence to prescribed medications to ensure success. The aim of the current study was to assess adherence, perception, and counseling among hemodialysis patients to different modalities of treatment (fluid restriction, dietary recommendations, medications, and hemodialysis schedules). A cross-sectional study carried out on hemodialysis patients who attended to the dialysis centers at al- Karama teaching hospital and Madinat Al- Imamain Al- Kadhimain teaching hospital. The Arabic version of the “ end stage renal disease-adherence questionnaire ” was used in assessing adherence, perception, and counseling. The number of recruited patients were 200 adult patients (113 men and 87 women). The average of the total adherence score lies within the moderate adherence (984.9 ±174.2). Patients adherence to the hemodialysis session was good as representing by high scores of adherence for (hemodialysis-attendance, episode of hemodialysis-shortening and duration of hemodialysis-shortening) while the lowest adherence score (126.0 out of 200) was for following the fluid restriction. In terms of adherence categories, the majority (61%) of the patients had good adherence, 33.0% had moderate adherence with 6% had poor adherence. Age had significant positive association with the total adherence score. All patients perceived their hemodialysis management as highly/very important. On the other hand, some patients perceived their adherence to the recommended diet as moderately (7%) or less important (7%). Regarding the frequency of counseling received by patients for different treatment modalities. The negative answers represented 58.5% of answers about the how important is to follow a proper diet, and 25.0% of answers about the importance of taking prescribed medications as ordered. Accordingly, the overall adherence of hemodialysis patients to different treatment modalities was less than optimum with fluid and diet adherence representing most challenging tasks in the health care of hemodialysis patients.
In this paper, thermal performance of a zig-zig solar air heater (ZZSAH) with and without using steel wire mesh on the absorber plate of the collector is experimentally investigated. The experimental work includes four inclination angles of the collector 20o, 30o, 45o, and 60o and four air mass flow rates of 0.03, 0.04, 0.06, and 0.08 kg/s under varieties of operating conditions of a geographic location of Baghdad. New correlation equations of Nusselt number are obtained from experimental results for both types of collectors where the effect of varying of the inclination angle of collector taken into consideration in the experiment. The correlations show good agreement wi
... Show MoreA polycrystalline PbxS1-x alloys with various Pb content ( 0.54 and 0.55) has been prepared successfully. The structure and composition of alloys are determined by X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) respectively. The X-ray diffraction results shows that the structure is polycrystalline with cubic structure, and there are strong peaks at the direction (200) and (111), the grain size varies between 20 and 82 nm. From AAS and XRF result, the concentrations of Pb content for these alloys were determined. The results show high accuracy and very close to the theoretical values. A photoconductive detector as a bulk has been fabricated by taking pieces of prepared alloys and polished chemic
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The current research aims at identifying any of the dimensions of organizational learning abilities that are more influential in the knowledge capital of the university and the extent to which they can be applied effectively at Wasit University. The current research dealt with organizational learning abilities as an explanatory variable in four dimensions (Experimentation and openness, sharing and transfer of knowledge, dialogue, interaction with the external environment ), and knowledge capital as a transient variable, with four dimensions (human capital, structural capital, client capital, operational capital). The problem of research is the following questio
... Show MoreA novel design and implementation of a cognitive methodology for the on-line auto-tuning robust PID controller in a real heating system is presented in this paper. The aim of the proposed work is to construct a cognitive control methodology that gives optimal control signal to the heating system, which achieve the following objectives: fast and precise search efficiency in finding the on- line optimal PID controller parameters in order to find the optimal output temperature response for the heating system. The cognitive methodology (CM) consists of three engines: breeding engine based Routh-Hurwitz criterion stability, search engine based particle
swarm optimization (PSO) and aggregation knowledge engine based cultural algorithm (CA)
Directional Compact Geographic Forwarding (DCGF) routing protocol promises a minimal overhead generation by utilizing a smart antenna and Quality of Service (QoS) aware aggregation. However, DCGF was tested only in the attack-free scenario without involving the security elements. Therefore, an investigation was conducted to examine the routing protocol algorithm whether it is secure against attack-based networks in the presence of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. This analysis on DoS attack was carried out using a single optimal attacker, A1, to investigate the impact of DoS attack on DCGF in a communication link. The study showed that DCGF does not perform efficiently in terms of packet delivery ratio and energy consumption even on a sin
... Show MoreThis paper was aimed to evaluate the polyurethane (PU) and polyurethane/polyvinyl chloride (90 wt. % / 10 wt. %) as organic coating of carbon steel substrate against marine environment (3.5 wt.% NaCl aqueous solution) as a severe corrosion environment . The electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and fitting impedance data by ZsimpWin 3.22 software were used to estimate the physical barrier of the samples for different exposure times. Different equivalent electrical circuits were proposed for the physical barrier at different immersion times to get appropriate fitting .Both PU and PU/PVC coatings showed excellent corrosion protection ability for steel .The PU/PVC coating showed better protection and stability than PU coating against
... Show MoreTeachers' self-efficacy plays a very important role in the process of teaching English language, and teachers have primary role in determining what is needed or what would work best with their students. The sample consists of eighty-seven English language teachers in secondary schools in Baghdad/Kaarkh2. Self-efficacy questionnaire of fifteen items was constructed. Face, content validity and reliability were verified. Then, pupils' marks for the first semester were taken as their achievement.The main finding of the study indicates that:
English language teachers' self-efficacy has effect on their pupils' achievement.
In the light of the findings of the present study, several conclusions, recommendations and suggestions for further
Abstract
This paper presents an intelligent model reference adaptive control (MRAC) utilizing a self-recurrent wavelet neural network (SRWNN) to control nonlinear systems. The proposed SRWNN is an improved version of a previously reported wavelet neural network (WNN). In particular, this improvement was achieved by adopting two modifications to the original WNN structure. These modifications include, firstly, the utilization of a specific initialization phase to improve the convergence to the optimal weight values, and secondly, the inclusion of self-feedback weights to the wavelons of the wavelet layer. Furthermore, an on-line training procedure was proposed to enhance the control per
... Show MoreThe research aims to reveal the impact of developmental leadership in its dimensions (ideal model, interest in employees, inspiration and motivation) as an independent variable in achieving adaptive performance in its dimensions (Creative problem solving, learning and motivation, Training efforts, adaptability, work stress management, dealing with crises and emergencies) as a dependent variable, and the research aims to enhance the quality of developmental leadership in the research sample through this leadership style, which is a modern style and is still under research and study with a focus on the benefit of adaptive performance From a psychological and organizational research sample consisting of (106) respondents from the middle adm
... Show MoreA Laced Reinforced Concrete (LRC) structural element comprises continuously inclined shear reinforcement in the form of lacing that connects the longitudinal reinforcements on both faces of the structural element. This study conducted a theoretical investigation of LRC deep beams to predict their behavior after exposure to fire and high temperatures. Four simply supported reinforced concrete beams of 1500 mm, 200 mm, and 240 mm length, width, and depth, respectively, were considered. The specimens were identical in terms of compressive strength ( 40 MPa) and steel reinforcement details. The same laced steel reinforcement ratio of 0.0035 was used. Three specimens were burned at variable durations and steady-state temperatures (one
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