Medication compliance in schizophrenic out patients with psychoactive substance use co-morbidity: a cross-sectional study

Background: Medication adherence is an important issue in the treatment and management of persons with psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia. Apart from side effects and inefficient outcomes of psychiatric medications, substance abuse also complicates the adherence pattern to the prescribed medications. Present study was designed to estimate the magnitude of medication non-adherence and its correlates in patients with schizophrenia having co-morbid psychoactive substance use.Method: The 60 schizophrenic patients with active substance use were taken from OPD of institute of mental health and hospital, Agra. Positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS), alcohol, smoking and substance involvement screening test (ASSIST), medication adherence rating scale (MARS) and Morisky 8-item medication adherence questionnaire (MMAQ-8) were used to gather relevant clinical data along with a proforma for recording socio-demographic characteristics.Results: The results revealed an alarming level of medication adherence. The 91.7% sample (55 patients) met the criteria for medication non-adherence. Majority of the patients were using alcohol (58.3%) and cannabis (51.7%). Conclusions: Given the high rate of medication non-compliance it is suggested that specific intervention aimed at compliance to prescribed medication is needed in this population

Efficacy of short term versus long term antibiotic therapy in preventing deep wound infections in elective orthopaedic surgeries

Background: Comparison of the efficacy of short term (up to 48 hours) versus long term (five days) antibiotic therapy in preventing deep wound infections in elective orthopaedic surgeries.Methods: Two hundred patients of all ages and both sexes were divided into two groups of 100 patients. One group received long term antibiotic treatment consisting of 2 days intra-venous cefoperazone sulbactam 1.5 gm twice daily and intra-venous amikacin 500 mg twice daily followed by 3 days of oral amoxicillin clavulunate 625 mg thrice daily. Other group received short term antibiotic of 2 days intra-venous cefoperazone sulbactam 1.5 gm twice daily and intra-venous amikacin 500 mg twice daily. Comparison of SSI was done with age, sex, BMI, pre-operative haemoglobin, TLC, duration of surgery in both the groups.Results: In group I and group II respectively, average duration of surgery in procedures involving implants was 65.02±27.41 and 59.47±20.27 minutes and non implant related procedures was 53.66±23.97 and 53.74±22.40 minutes. Overall incidence of SSI in Group I and Group II was 14% and 10% respectively. Mean infection in the present study was 12%.Conclusions: It was concluded that in clean orthopaedic elective surgeries short term antibiotics regimen is as effective as long term antibiotics regimen. Continuing antibiotics for more than two days is associated with drug related complications like allergic reactions and gastrointestinal upset, adverse interactions in other drugs, development of resistant organisms and it adds to overall cost of treatment

Ethnobotanical notes on some potential wild edible fruits used by the Bhotia community of Niti Valley, Uttarakhand, India

135-144The present study deals with the diversity, distribution and ethnobotany of wild edible fruits consumed by the Bhotia tribe of Niti valley, Chamoli, Uttarakhand, India. Most of these valuable resources fulfil the nutritional, health and economic requirements of Bhotia community up to a large extent. Though the wild edible fruits have great socio-economic significance in sustenance of many tribal/rural communities but due to the increasing trends of modernized agriculture, climate change and various natural and anthropogenic hazards, a large number of genetic resources of wild edible fruits are under severe threat, hence warrants immediate attention for their conservation, domestication and utilization through improvement/selection. Keeping this in view, ethnobotanical knowledge and diversity distribution patterns of 27 potential wild edible fruits consumed by Bhotia tribe in Niti Valley have been recorded with their botanical names, family, local names, uses and indigenous processing methods

The appeal of social accelerators: what do social entrepreneurs value?

Are the most-publicized benefits of social accelerators also the ones most valued by social entrepreneurs? Does the social entrepreneur human capital – such as education, professional background and experience – shape the attractiveness of value propositions of different social accelerator benefits? These important questions are examined in this study by drawing upon a large and unique database of more than 4,000 social entrepreneurs worldwide who have applied to social accelerator programmes. Study findings are of value not only to social entrepreneurship scholars but also to social entrepreneurs, social accelerators, funders of accelerators and other entities in the social entrepreneurship ecosystem

Improved Handwritten Digit Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

Traditional systems of handwriting recognition have relied on handcrafted features and a large amount of prior knowledge. Training an Optical character recognition (OCR) system based on these prerequisites is a challenging task. Research in the handwriting recognition field is focused around deep learning techniques and has achieved breakthrough performance in the last few years. Still, the rapid growth in the amount of handwritten data and the availability of massive processing power demands improvement in recognition accuracy and deserves further investigation. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are very effective in perceiving the structure of handwritten characters/words in ways that help in automatic extraction of distinct features and make CNN the most suitable approach for solving handwriting recognition problems. Our aim in the proposed work is to explore the various design options like number of layers, stride size, receptive field, kernel size, padding and dilution for CNN-based handwritten digit recognition. In addition, we aim to evaluate various SGD optimization algorithms in improving the performance of handwritten digit recognition. A network’s recognition accuracy increases by incorporating ensemble architecture. Here, our objective is to achieve comparable accuracy by using a pure CNN architecture without ensemble architecture, as ensemble architectures introduce increased computational cost and high testing complexity. Thus, a CNN architecture is proposed in order to achieve accuracy even better than that of ensemble architectures, along with reduced operational complexity and cost. Moreover, we also present an appropriate combination of learning parameters in designing a CNN that leads us to reach a new absolute record in classifying MNIST handwritten digits. We carried out extensive experiments and achieved a recognition accuracy of 99.87% for a MNIST dataset

Ethnobotanical notes on some potential wild edible fruits used by the Bhotia communityof Niti Valley, Uttarakhand, India

The present study deals with the diversity, distribution and ethnobotany of wild edible fruits consumed by the Bhotia tribe of Niti valley, Chamoli, Uttarakhand, India. Most of these valuable resources fulfil the nutritional, health and economic requirements of Bhotia community up to a large extent. Though the wild edible fruits have great socio-economic significance in sustenance of many tribal/rural communities but due to the increasing trends of modernized agriculture, climate change and various natural and anthropogenic hazards, a large number of genetic resources of wild edible fruits are under severe threat, hence warrants immediate attention for their conservation, domestication and utilization through improvement/selection. Keeping this in view, ethnobotanical knowledge and diversity distribution patterns of 27 potential wild edible fruits consumed by Bhotia tribe in Niti Valley have been recorded with their botanical names, family, local names, uses and indigenous processing methods

Investigating linguistic and genetic shifts in East Indian tribal groups

South Asia is home to almost a quarter of the world's total population and is home to significant ethnolinguistic diversity. Previous studies of linguistic and genetic affiliations of Indian populations suggest that the formation of these distinct groups was a protracted and complex phenomenon involving multiple waves of migration, cultural assimilation, and genetic admixture. The evolutionary processes of migration, mixing and merging of populations thus impact the culture and linguistic diversity of different groups, some of which may retain their linguistic affinities despite genetic admixture with other groups, or vice versa. Our study examines the relationship of genetic and linguistic affinities between Austroasiatic and Indo-European speakers in adjacent geographical regions of Eastern India. We analyzed 224 mitogenomes and 0.65 million SNP genotypes from 40 unrelated individuals belonging to the Bathudi, Bhumij, Ho, and Mahali ethnic groups from the Eastern Indian state of Odisha. These four groups are speakers of Austroasiatic languages who have adopted elements from Indo-European languages spoken in neighbouring regions. Our results suggest that these groups have the greatest maternal genetic affinity with other Austroasiatic-speaking groups in India. Allele frequency-based analyses, genome-wide SNPs, haplotype-based methods and IBD sharing further support the genetic similarity of these East Indian groups to Austroasiatic speakers of South Asia rather than regional populations speaking Indo-European and Dravidian languages. Our study shows that these populations experienced linguistic mixing, likely due to industrialization and modernization that brought them into close cultural contact with neighbouring Indo-European-speaking groups. However, linguistic change in these groups is not reflected in genetic mixing in these populations, as they appear to maintain strict genetic boundaries while simultaneously experiencing cultural mixing

Impression of COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Systems, Natural Environmental Resources and Agriculture in India: A Review

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting food and nutrition security through economic and social systems shocks, food system disruptions and gaps in coverage of essential health and nutrition services. Food systems in low- and middle-income groups must adapt and strengthen food and nutrition security in the wake of COVID-19. Smallholder farmers are a crucial part of the food value chain in India, as well as a critical element of the global food system. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new risks that threaten livelihoods as well as food security. Post the rabi harvest in April, farmers prepare for the next (kharif) season in May. However, the COVID-19 induced disruptions have reduced production capacity for farm inputs and have led to an increase in price, making these resources inaccessible to smallholder and marginal farmers in the country. The corona-virus pandemic has caused a global reduction in economic activity and although this is major cause for concern, the ramping down of human activity appears to have had a positive impact on the environment. The COVID-19 lockdown has several social and economic effects. Additionally, COVID-19 has caused several impacts on global migration. Carbon emissions have dropped, and the COVID-19 lockdown has led to an improvement in air quality and a reduction in water pollution in many cities around the globe. We found that the COVID-19 lockdown in India has primarily impacted farmers’ ability to sell their crops and livestock products and decreased daily wages and dietary diversity. In this context, we aim to synthesize the early evidence of the COVID-19 impact on the Indian agricultural system viz., production, marketing and consumption followed by a set of potential strategies to recover and prosper post-pandemic. Findings indicate that the pandemic has affected production and marketing through labour and logistical constraints, while the negative income shock restricted access to markets and increased prices of food commodities affecting the consumption pattern