Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most prevalent cancer worldwide with 1.80 million new
cases and 862,000 deaths in 2018. Depending on the stage, upfront surgery is the main form of treatment,
followed by adjuvant chemotherapy. Many drugs were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
for the treatment of CRC, one of which is Capecitabine. During cancer treatment, patient-reported symptoms
and quality of life parameters can provide additional information to evaluate and compare the efficacy and
toxicity of the treatments. Despite the importance of this issue, there is no published data that evaluates this
vital parameter in Iraqi patients receiving anti-cancer drugs, in general, or those on Capecitabine, in particular.
Objective: To evaluate the relationship between quality of life in capecitabine-treated colorectal cancer
patients and their sociodemographic characteristics as well as drug-related adverse effects.
Methods: A cross-sectional, open-label study was conducted at Al-Amal and Oncology Teaching Hospitals
in Baghdad during the period from November 2021 to June 2022. A convenient sampling method was adopted
to enrol patients in the current study. Quality of life assessment was performed using the European
Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer quality of life questionnaire (QLQ-C30). Microsoft Excel
2019 and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS, Version 25) were used for data entry and
analysis. The descriptive analysis focused on frequencies and percentages. Continuous variables were
presented as (mean ± Standard Deviation). Categorical data were presented as proportions and the Chi-squared
test was used to study the associations between variables. The level of significance was considered at P≤0.05.
Results: A total of 102 patients were enrolled in the current study. Generalized fatigue was the most common
adverse event (63.7%) of participants. Only 6.9% of participants had abnormal renal function tests. Some
capecitabine-treated patients had good quality of life, others did not.
Conclusion: The quality of life of capecitabine-treated colorectal cancer patients seems to be sensitive to their
sociodemographic characteristics and adverse effects of the drug
This study offers numerical simulation results using the ABAQUS/CAE version 2019 finite element computer application to examine the performance, and residual strength of eight recycle aggregate RC one-way slabs. Six strengthened by NSM CFRP plates were presented to study the impact of several parameters on their structural behavior. The experimental results of four selected slabs under monotonic load, plus one slab under repeated load, were validated numerically. Then the numerical analysis was extended to different parameters investigation, such as the impact of added CFRP length on ultimate load capacity and load-deflection response and the impact of concrete compressive strength value on the structural performance of
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Shear and compressional wave velocities, coupled with other petrophysical data, are vital in determining the dynamic modules magnitude in geomechanical studies and hydrocarbon reservoir characterization. But, due to field practices and high running cost, shear wave velocity may not available in all wells. In this paper, a statistical multivariate regression method is presented to predict the shear wave velocity for Khasib formation - Amara oil fields located in South- East of Iraq using well log compressional wave velocity, neutron porosity and density. The accuracy of the proposed correlation have been compared to other correlations. The results show that, the presented model provides accurate
... Show MoreWe aimed to obtain magnesium/iron (Mg/Fe)-layered double hydroxides (LDHs) nanoparticles-immobilized on waste foundry sand-a byproduct of the metal casting industry. XRD and FT-IR tests were applied to characterize the prepared sorbent. The results revealed that a new peak reflected LDHs nanoparticles. In addition, SEM-EDS mapping confirmed that the coating process was appropriate. Sorption tests for the interaction of this sorbent with an aqueous solution contaminated with Congo red dye revealed the efficacy of this material where the maximum adsorption capacity reached approximately 9127.08 mg/g. The pseudo-first-order and pseudo-second-order kinetic models helped to describe the sorption measure
The current issues in spam email detection systems are directly related to spam email classification's low accuracy and feature selection's high dimensionality. However, in machine learning (ML), feature selection (FS) as a global optimization strategy reduces data redundancy and produces a collection of precise and acceptable outcomes. A black hole algorithm-based FS algorithm is suggested in this paper for reducing the dimensionality of features and improving the accuracy of spam email classification. Each star's features are represented in binary form, with the features being transformed to binary using a sigmoid function. The proposed Binary Black Hole Algorithm (BBH) searches the feature space for the best feature subsets,
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