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
Acinetobacter baumannii ability to form biofilm makes it to be opportunistic pathogen causing of nosocomial infections and to be good survivor in adverse environmental conditions including medical devices and hospital environments. Six isolates of A. baumannii were isolated from drinking water and tested to investigate biofilm formation capacity on three different type of abiotic surface, also several factors were examined such as hydrophobicity, PH and temperature. All A. baumannii isolates displayed a positive biofilm on congored aga test CRA (pigmented colonies with black color) and Christensen's test (adhesive layer of stained material to the inside surface of the tube).The obtained data of microbial adhesion to hydrocarbons assay (MATH
... Show MoreNew two experiments of the three factors, in this study were constructed to investigate the effects, of the fixed variations to the box plot on subjects' judgments of the box lengths. These two experiments were constructed as an extension to the group B experiments, the ratio experiments the experiments with two variables carried out previously by Hussin, M.M. (1989, 2006, 2007). The first experiment box notch experiment, and the second experiment outlier values experiment. Subjects were asked to judge what percentage the shorter represented of the longer length in pairs of box lengths and give an estimate of percentage, one being a standard plot and the other being of a different box lengths and
... Show MoreThe objective of this in vivo study is to investigate the effects of 337.1 nm pulsed N2 laser on cellular immune response represented by lymphocyte transformation capacity and phagocytosis activity in laboratory animals. The samples include 60 adult male BALB/c mice, were divided into control group and experimental groups. The experimental groups were divided into two main groups according to the time period after N2 laser irradiation. Each group was divided into 9 subgroups which exposed to N2 laser radiation at different values of pulse repetition rates and exposure times. The results of immunological tests demonstrated that the exposure to 180 J/cm2 of N2 laser radiation induce adverse effect to cellular immune response. The results o
... Show MoreOptical Mark Recognition (OMR) is the technology of electronically extracting intended data from marked fields, such as squareand bubbles fields, on printed forms. OMR technology is particularly useful for applications in which large numbers of hand-filled forms need to be processed quickly and with a great degree of accuracy. The technique is particularly popular with schools and universities for the reading in of multiple choice exam papers. This paper proposed OMRbased on Modify Multi-Connect Architecture (MMCA) associative memory, its work in two phases: training phase and recognition phase. The proposed method was also able to detect more than one or no selected choice. Among 800 test samples with 8 types of grid answer sheets and tota
... Show MoreThis paper presents a hybrid energy resources (HER) system consisting of solar PV, storage, and utility grid. It is a challenge in real time to extract maximum power point (MPP) from the PV solar under variations of the irradiance strength. This work addresses challenges in identifying global MPP, dynamic algorithm behavior, tracking speed, adaptability to changing conditions, and accuracy. Shallow Neural Networks using the deep learning NARMA-L2 controller have been proposed. It is modeled to predict the reference voltage under different irradiance. The dynamic PV solar and nonlinearity have been trained to track the maximum power drawn from the PV solar systems in real time.
Moreover, the proposed controller i
... Show MoreIn this paper, a compact multiband printed dipole antenna is presented as a candidate for use in wireless communication applications. The proposed fractal antenna design is based on the second level tent transformation. The space-filling property of this fractal geometry permits producing longer lengths in a more compact size. Theoretical performance of this antenna has been calculated using the commercially available software IE3D from Zeland Software Inc. This electromagnetic simulator is based on the method of moments (MoM). The proposed dipole antenna has been found to possess a considerable size reduction compared with the conventional printed or wire dipole antenna designed at the same design frequency and using the same substrate
... Show MoreHeart disease is a significant and impactful health condition that ranks as the leading cause of death in many countries. In order to aid physicians in diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, clinical datasets are available for reference. However, with the rise of big data and medical datasets, it has become increasingly challenging for medical practitioners to accurately predict heart disease due to the abundance of unrelated and redundant features that hinder computational complexity and accuracy. As such, this study aims to identify the most discriminative features within high-dimensional datasets while minimizing complexity and improving accuracy through an Extra Tree feature selection based technique. The work study assesses the efficac
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