ABSTRACT Background: work-related musculoskeletal disorders represent an important occupational health issues among dentists especially neck and low back complaints. Biomarkers of tissue damage as results of occupational physical demands could be used for detection of work related musculoskeletal disorders. Aim: The aim of this study was to assess work- related musculoskeletal disorders, physical work load index, selected salivary biomarkers (Creatine kinase and C - reactive protein) and to find the relation among them. Subjects and Methods: Study participants are consisted of 112 dentists. They were selected from college of dentistry /Baghdad University, health care center in Bagdad city. They were of both gender and aged between 40-45 years .they should fit the study criteria. Self-administered standardized Nordic questionnaires were used to evaluate musculoskeletal complaints. Physical work load was evaluated by used physical work load index. Stimulated saliva were collected from subsample (87) dentists drawn randomly from the total sample, for whom biochemical analysis (measurement of creatine kinase and C - reactive protein) were done. Results: Results showed that low back and neck complaints is the most complaint experienced by the dentists with percentages of ( 69.6% and 66.1% ), followed by the shoulder complaint (49.1% ) while the hip complaint showed the lowest percentage (13.4%).According to severity scores ,both low back and neck musculoskeletal complaints were of score 3 severity (score 3 constituted the highest percentages in both area (27.7% ,23.2%respectively) as compared to other severity scors.For shoulder complaint it was of score 2 severity (score 2 constituted the highest percentage 23.2% as compared to other severity scores, The musculoskeletal complaints(proximal ,neck, shoulder and low back) had higher mean rank values in the highest quartile of Physical work load index with non – significant differences (P<0.05). Regarding salivary creatine kinase the proximal ,total and low back complaints had higher mean rank values among dentists with highest Creatine kinase quartile , while distal manifestations ,neck and shoulder complaints had higher mean rank value in the average interquartile range of Creatine kinase with non – significant differences( P<0.05). For c- reactive protein almost all the complaints(proximal , total ,neck and shoulder) had higher mean rank values in the first lowest quartile with non – significant differences( P<0.05). Conclusions: Physical work load increase the risk of musculoskeletal disorders occurrence. Salivary creatine kinase could serve as a biomarker that reflects the underlying of musculoskeletal complaints more than C - reactive protein. Further studies that used more objective tools for assessing musculoskeletal disorders is needed.
In Computer-based applications, there is a need for simple, low-cost devices for user authentication. Biometric authentication methods namely keystroke dynamics are being increasingly used to strengthen the commonly knowledge based method (example a password) effectively and cheaply for many types of applications. Due to the semi-independent nature of the typing behavior it is difficult to masquerade, making it useful as a biometric. In this paper, C4.5 approach is used to classify user as authenticated user or impostor by combining unigraph features (namely Dwell time (DT) and flight time (FT)) and digraph features (namely Up-Up Time (UUT) and Down-Down Time (DDT)). The results show that DT enhances the performance of digraph features by i
... Show MoreThe study focuses on the causes of minaret tilting as well as possible solutions. The major aims of this study are to improve knowledge of historical tall structure stability and rehabilitation operations using the finite element approach to model the soil and minaret (PLAXIS 3D 2020), a platform for computational soil investigation and modeling. The numerical analysis aims to identify stresses, settlement, and deformation of the soil and minaret in various scenarios like Earthquakes, explosions, and winds. The simulation of the problem by the PLAXIS 3D revealed that the greatest lateral displacement computed at the Top Minaret is 5.5 cm, and the greatest vertical movement is calculated to be 3 cm. Seismic settlement is the effect of ear
... Show MoreAlpha-tocopherol acetate is one of the most important vitamin E derivatives,that were used as antioxidants. Adsorbents like kaolin, magnesium carbonate, and microcrystalline cellulose were used successfully to incorporate oily alpha-tocopherol acetate into an acceptable powder dosage form. The results revealed that microcrystalline cellulose as an adsorbents gave the best results with 50% loading capacity at time, 8 minutes before and after incubation period (3 months at 30C°), while kaolin and magnesium carbonate have been shown a significant difference before and after incubation. Addition of 1% w/w magnesium carbonate to the kaolin enhanced the loading capacity by decreasing the time of adsorption from 20 to 6 minutes and 47
... Show MoreIncreasing hydrocarbon recovery from tight reservoirs is an essential goal of oil industry in the recent years. Building real dynamic simulation models and selecting and designing suitable development strategies for such reservoirs need basically to construct accurate structural static model construction. The uncertainties in building 3-D reservoir models are a real challenge for such micro to nano pore scale structure. Based on data from 24 wells distributed throughout the Sadi tight formation. An application of building a 3-D static model for a tight limestone oil reservoir in Iraq is presented in this study. The most common uncertainties confronted while building the model were illustrated. Such as accurate estimations of cut-off
... Show MoreIn high-dimensional semiparametric regression, balancing accuracy and interpretability often requires combining dimension reduction with variable selection. This study intro- duces two novel methods for dimension reduction in additive partial linear models: (i) minimum average variance estimation (MAVE) combined with the adaptive least abso- lute shrinkage and selection operator (MAVE-ALASSO) and (ii) MAVE with smoothly clipped absolute deviation (MAVE-SCAD). These methods leverage the flexibility of MAVE for sufficient dimension reduction while incorporating adaptive penalties to en- sure sparse and interpretable models. The performance of both methods is evaluated through simulations using the mean squared error and variable selection cri
... Show MoreCerium oxide (CeO2), or ceria, has gained increasing interest owing to its excellent catalytic applications. Under the framework of density functional theory (DFT), this contribution demonstrates the eect that introducing the element nickel (Ni) into the ceria lattice has on its electronic, structural, and optical characteristics. Electronic density of states (DOSs) analysis shows that Ni integration leads to a shrinkage of Ce 4f states and improvement of Ni 3d states in the bottom of the conduction band. Furthermore, the calculated optical absorption spectra of an Ni-doped CeO2 system shifts towards longer visible light and infrared regions. Results indicate that Ni-doping a CeO2 system would result in a decrease of the band gap. Finally,
... Show MoreThis study aims to encapsulate atenolol within floating alginate-ethylcellulose beads as an oral controlled-release delivery system using aqueous colloidal polymer dispersion (ACPD) method.To optimize drug entrapment efficiency and dissolution behavior of the prepared beads, different parameters of drug: polymer ratio, polymer mixture ratio, and gelling agent concentration were involved.The prepared beads were investigated with respect to their buoyancy, encapsulation efficiency, and dissolution behavior in the media: 0.1 N HCl (pH 1.2), acetate buffer (pH 4.6) and phosphate buffer (pH 6.8). The release kinetics and mechanism of the drug from the prepared beads was investigated.All prepare
... Show MoreDetection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with
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