Academia Open Vol 8 No 2 (2023): December DOI: 10.21070/acopen.8.2023.8087 . Article type: (Medicine)Impact of COVID-19 on Dental Students' Psychological Health Maryam Hameed Alwan, [email protected], (1) Department of Oral Diagnosis, College of Dentistry, Baghdad University, Iraq, Iraq (1) Corresponding author Abstract This study investigates the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on dental students at Baghdad University College of Dentistry. Conducted between December 2021 and January 2022, this cross-sectional survey aligns with ethical guidelines and the Helsinki Declaration. The study utilized Cochran's equation to determine a sample size of at least 400, ensuring a 95% confidence level with a 5% margin of error. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Covid Student Stress Questionnaire (CSSQ) were employed as primary tools, assessing general and COVID-19-related stress, respectively. A total of 411 students participated, with 67.50% experiencing moderate to severe stress (PSS <14) and 58.8% reporting average levels of COVID-related stress (CSSQ <7). Notably, there was a significant positive correlation between the PSS and CSSQ scores (P = 0.008). The analysis, conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics software V26, included descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha for reliability, and Pearson Correlation for assessing correlations. The findings indicate that a substantial proportion of dental students experienced heightened stress levels, potentially leading to mental health disorders like cognitive impairment. These results emphasize the need for universities to enhance psychological support and for government bodies to implement comprehensive health education and awareness programs. This study not only sheds light on the immediate psychological effects of the pandemic on dental students but also serves as a foundational reference for future interventions aimed at reducing stress levels in this demographic
A laboratory experiment studied the effects of the green tea (Camellia sinensis L.) aqueous extract at concentrations of 10, 20, and 30 ppm on the germination and growth traits of the mung bean (Vigna radiata L.), carried out in 2021 at the Department of Biology, College of Education for Pure Sciences, Ibn Al-Haitham, University of Baghdad, Iraq. The results showed that Camellia sinensis green tea extracts played a vital role by significantly boosting all the examined characteristics compared with the control treatment. The aqueous extract of Green tea at concentrations of 10 and 20 ppm gave the best performance in increasing germination rates, germination speed, plant promoter indicator, and seedling strength compared with the control trea
... Show MoreThree-dimensional nonlinear thermal numerical simulations are conducted for the friction stir welding (FSW) of AA 7020-T53. Three welding cases with tool (rotational and travel) speeds of 900rpm-40mm/min, 1400rpm-16mm/min and 1400rpm-40mm/in are analyzed. The objective is to study the variation of transient temperature in a friction stir welded plate of 5mm workpiece thickness. Based on the experimental records of transient temperature at several specific locations during the friction stir welding process for the AA 7020-T53, thermal numerical simulation is developed. The numerical results show that the temperature field in the FSW process is symmetrically distributed with respect to the welding line, increasing travel speed decreasing tran
... Show MoreThe emergence of mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) or nanocomposite membranes embedded with inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) has opened up a possibility for developing different polymeric membranes with improved physicochemical properties, mechanical properties and performance for resolving environmental and energy-effective water purification. This paper presents an overview of the effects of different hydrophilic nanomaterials, including mineral nanomaterials (e.g., silicon dioxide (SiO2) and zeolite), metals oxide (e.g., copper oxide (CuO), zirconium dioxide (ZrO2), zinc oxide (ZnO), antimony tin oxide (ATO), iron (III) oxide (Fe2O3) and tungsten oxide (WOX)), two-dimensional transition (e.g., MXene), metal–organic framework (MOFs), c
... Show MoreThe fast evolution of cyberattacks in the Internet of Things (IoT) area, presents new security challenges concerning Zero Day (ZD) attacks, due to the growth of both numbers and the diversity of new cyberattacks. Furthermore, Intrusion Detection System (IDSs) relying on a dataset of historical or signature‐based datasets often perform poorly in ZD detection. A new technique for detecting zero‐day (ZD) attacks in IoT‐based Conventional Spiking Neural Networks (CSNN), termed ZD‐CSNN, is proposed. The model comprises three key levels: (1) Data Pre‐processing, in this level a thorough cleaning process is applied to the CIC IoT Dataset 2023, which contains both malicious and t
Aluminum oxide thin films were prepared by dc reactive sputtering technique using different mixing ratios of argon and oxygen gases (90:10, 70:30, 50:50, 30:70, and 10:90). These films were characterized to introduce their crystalline structures, surface morphology, and elemental composition. A progressive transition occurs from a predominantly amorphous to a highly crystalline Al2O3 film as the oxygen content in the Ar:O2 gas mixture is increased. Increasing the oxygen content leads to a progressive decrease in surface roughness, resulting in smoother and more uniform films with finer granular features. The oxygen-rich environments yield the smoothest surfaces, while argon-rich environments result in significantly rougher surfaces. These f
... Show MoreBackground/objectives: Inflammatory mediators such as prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and nitric oxide (NO) are key indicators of pulp response to mechanical trauma. However, the influence of cavity depth on their release dynamics remains unclear. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of different cavity depths—moderate (without pulp exposure) and deep (with pulp exposure)—on the release of PGE2 and NO in the pulp tissue of rat mandibular incisors at two time intervals (3 and 9 h).Methods: In total, 40 male Wistar rats were divided into two main groups (n = 20) based on cavity depth. A split-mouth design was used, with cavities of different depths prepared on the left mandibular incisors, leaving the right incisors without cavities as
... Show MorePositron annihilation lifetime has been utilized for the first time to investigate the free - volume hole properties in thermolumenscent dosimeter ( TLD ) as a function of gamma-dosc . The hole volume, free volume fraction determined form orthopsitronium lifetime are found to be ?lamatically increase to large values , and then to minimum values as a function ofgamma-dose . The free - volume holes size is found to be 0.163nm’ and to have maximum of 0.166nm^ at the gamma-dose of 0.1 and 0.8 Gy, respectively-
An accurate assessment of the pipes’ conditions is required for effective management of the trunk sewers. In this paper the semi-Markov model was developed and tested using the sewer dataset from the Zublin trunk sewer in Baghdad, Iraq, in order to evaluate the future performance of the sewer. For the development of this model the cumulative waiting time distribution of sewers was used in each condition that was derived directly from the sewer condition class and age data. Results showed that the semi-Markov model was inconsistent with the data by adopting ( 2 test) and also, showed that the error in prediction is due to lack of data on the sewer waiting times at each condition state which can be solved by using successive conditi
... Show MoreThis paper presents a parametric audio compression scheme intended for scalable audio coding applications, and is particularly well suited for operation at low rates, in the vicinity of 5 to 32 Kbps. The model consists of two complementary components: Sines plus Noise (SN). The principal component of the system is an. overlap-add analysis-by-synthesis sinusoidal model based on conjugate matching pursuits. Perceptual information about human hearing is explicitly included into the model by psychoacoustically weighting the pursuit metric. Once analyzed, SN parameters are efficiently quantized and coded. Our informal listening tests demonstrated that our coder gave competitive performance to the-state-of-the- art HelixTM Producer Plus 9 from
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