Prediction of Length of Hospital Stay in Preterm Infants - A Case-Based Reasoning View

The length of stay of preterm infants in a neonatology service has become an issue of a growing concern, namely considering, on the one hand, the mothers and infants health conditions and, on the other hand, the scarce healthcare facilities own resources. Thus, a pro-active strategy for problem solving has to be put in place, either to improve the quality-of-service provided or to reduce the inherent financial costs. Therefore, this work will focus on the development of a diagnosis decision support system in terms of a formal agenda built on a Logic Programming approach to knowledge representation and reasoning, complemented with a case-based problem solving methodology to computing, that caters for the handling of incomplete, unknown, or even contradictory in-formation. The proposed model has been quite accurate in predicting the length of stay (overall accuracy of 84.9%) and by reducing the computational time with values around 21.3%

The prevalence and associated factors of central obesity in Northern Iran

Background: The main objective of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of central obesity and some related factors in the north of Iran (Golestan province) in 2006. Method: This was a population -based cross-sectional study that comprised 2471 subjects (1250 males and 1221 female), using stratified cluster sampling. Interviewers recorded the data using the multidimensional questionnaire and anthropometric indexes. Waist circumference ≥102 and ≥88 cm categorized as central obesity for men and women respectively. SPSS 16.0 software was used for statistical analysis. Results: The mean and standard deviation of age was 39.2±14.28 years and waist circumference was 87.1±13.7 cm in men and 90.2±15.8 cm in women, respectively. In total, the prevalence of central obesity was 32.01% and it was significantly higher in women (57.2%) than in men (15.8%), in urban area (40.5%) than in rural areas (31.9%) and in uneducated people (52.3%) than in college educated people (19.9) (P=0.001). Logistic regression analysis revealed that central obesity was significantly associated with age, urbanization, parity and illiteracy (P<0.05). Conclusion: Central obesity was the most serious health problem in the north of Iran and it was more prevalent in women than men. Socio-demographic factors such as younger age (between 15-25 and 25-35 years), urbanization, marital status and illiteracy were associated with central obesity. Further studies are necessary to establish the association between central obesity and racial differences in this area