Background: Bowel preparation prior to
colonic surgery usually includes antibiotic
therapy together with mechanical bowel
preparation which may cause discomfort to the
patients, prolonged hospitalization and water
& electrolyte imbalance.
Objective: to assess whether elective colon
and rectal surgery may be safely performed
without preoperative mechanical bowel
preparation.
Method: the study includes all patients who
had elective large bowel resection at Medical
City – Baghdad Teaching Hospital between
Feb, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Emergency operations
were not included. The patients were randomly
assigned to the 2 study groups (with or without
mechanical bowel preparation.
Results: A total of 165 patients participated
in the study, 82 with mechanical bowel
preparation and 83 without. The 2 groups
were similar in age, sex and type of surgical
procedure. 134 patients (81.2 %) underwent
surgery owing to colorectal cancer & 31
patients (18.8 %) owing to benign disease.
The hospitalization period was longer in the
bowel-prepared group (mean ± SD, 8.2 ± 5.1
days) as compared with the non prepared
group (mean ± SD, 8.0 ± 2.7 days). However,
this difference was not statistically significant.
The time until the 1st bowel movement was
similar between the 2 groups : a mean ± SD of
4.2 ± 1.3 days in the non prepared group as
compared with a men ± SD 4.3 ± 1.1 days in
the prepared group ( P = NS ).
Conclusion: Our results suggest that no
advantage is gained by preoperative
mechanical bowel preparation in elective
colorectal surgery.
Shallow foundations are usually used for structures with light to moderate loads where the soil underneath can carry them. In some cases, soil strength and/or other properties are not adequate and require improvement using one of the ground improvement techniques. Stone column is one of the common improvement techniques in which a column of stone is installed vertically in clayey soils. Stone columns are usually used to increase soil strength and to accelerate soil consolidation by acting as vertical drains. Many researches have been done to estimate the behavior of the improved soil. However, none of them considered the effect of stone column geometry on the behavior of the circular footing. In this research, finite ele
... Show MoreThe present study is entitled “Problems of Translating Holy Qur’an Antonyms into German: An Analytical Study”. It discusses some of the problems of translating Holy Qur’an verses that contain words so opposite in meaning to another word. The main concern of the study stresses some of the errors in translating the oppositeness of certain words of Holy Qur’an from Arabic into other languages like German, a problem that can be traced back to the fact that such words may have two opposites in meaning, one is considered and the other is completely neglected.
The errors in translating al Qur’an Antonyms can be summarized for several reasons: literal translation, ignorance of the different view
... Show MoreIn this paper, preliminary test Shrinkage estimator have been considered for estimating the shape parameter α of pareto distribution when the scale parameter equal to the smallest loss and when a prior estimate α0 of α is available as initial value from the past experiences or from quaintance cases. The proposed estimator is shown to have a smaller mean squared error in a region around α0 when comparison with usual and existing estimators.
In this paper we define and study new concepts of fibrewise topological spaces over B namely, fibrewise near topological spaces over B. Also, we introduce the concepts of fibrewise near closed and near open topological spaces over B; Furthermore we state and prove several Propositions concerning with these concepts.

The bandwidth requirements of telecommunication network users increased rapidly during the last decades. Optical access technologies must provide the bandwidth demand for each user. The passive optical access networks (PONs) support a maximum data rate of 100 Gbps by using the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique in the optical access network. In this paper, the optical broadband access networks with many techniques from Time Division Multiplexing Passive Optical Networks (TDM PON) to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Passive Optical Networks (OFDM PON) are presented. The architectures, advantages, disadvantages, and main parameters of these optical access networks are discussed and reported which have many ad
... Show MoreIn this paper, we derive and prove the stability bounds of the momentum coefficient µ and the learning rate ? of the back propagation updating rule in Artificial Neural Networks .The theoretical upper bound of learning rate ? is derived and its practical approximation is obtained