The Effects of Flaxseed on Menopausal Symptoms and Quality of Life

WOS: 000353624200006PubMed ID: 25882265The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of flaxseed on menopausal symptoms and quality of life throughout the menopausal period. The empirical research was conducted in an obstetrics and gynecology outpatient department of a university hospital and involved 140 menopausal women who were divided into 4 groups. The menopausal symptoms decreased and the quality of life increased among the women who used flaxseed for 3 months

Leukocyte Classification using Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System in Microscopic Blood Images

Microscopic pathology is still a meticulous and biased task for hematologist, which leads to the misclassification of cells and vagueness prediction of abnormal cells due to variability in the morphological structure of leukocytes. Therefore, to enhance the detection precision and diminishing the time factor, an automatic classification system for leukocytes has been proposed. In routine clinical practice, expert hematologists observed that the nucleus plays a crucial role in the identification of the blood disorders. Accordingly, in this work, the localization of leukocyte nucleus is performed by using Chan–Vase level-set method for the design of a classification framework that differentiates between four classes of the leukocytes, i.e., eosinophils, polymorphs, monocytes and lymphocytes based on the nucleus. A dataset consisting of 162 leukocyte microscopic images is used. The images in the dataset are classified on the basis of texture, shape and color features. The feature selection method based on the linguistic hedge is applied on evaluated feature space of 92. The selected features are fed to an adaptive neuro-fuzzy classifier for the classification. The proposed framework obtained an accuracy of 98.7% after applying the adaptive neuro-fuzzy classification on selected 46 informative features. The correlation of best features and data extorted from the different microscopic images may yield a dramatic increase in diagnostic consistency in clinical pathology. The results obtained by utilization of selected optimal features and adaptive neuro-fuzzy classification system indicate that it can be routinely used in clinical environment for differential diagnosis between different classes of leukocytes

Child Care Health Dev

BACKGROUND: Parenting stress is influenced by many factors including maternal attachment and excessive infant crying, yet the nature of these relationships is not well understood. For example, excessive infant crying despite maternal soothing may impact maternal attachment to the child, leading to higher stress. This paper explored whether maternal perception of excessive infant crying at six months was associated with higher maternal parenting stress at 24 months, and whether maternal attachment mediated this relationship. METHODS: All families, present at 24 months in a randomized controlled trial of a five-year early intervention program targeting school readiness skills in disadvantaged area of Ireland, were included. At six months, infant crying was assessed using a maternal reported measure of duration of infant crying and maternal attachment to the infant was assessed using the Condon Maternal Attachment Scale. Parenting stress was assessed at 24 months using the childrearing stress subscale from the Parenting Stress Index. Structural Equation Modelling was used to explore the direct and indirect effects of maternal perceptions of excessive infant crying on parenting stress, controlling for infant, maternal, and environmental characteristics, focusing on the mediating role of maternal attachment. RESULTS: Reporting excessive infant crying at six months was associated with lower maternal attachment at six months, which led to higher parenting stress at 24 months. In addition, vulnerable adult attachment style, previous maternal mental health difficulties, low paternal education, paternal involvement with the child, and not being married were associated with higher parenting stress. CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that the association between maternal perceptions of excessive crying at six months and later parenting stress may be mediated through maternal attachment to the infant. Interventions based on improving maternal attachment could be investigated to determine the effectiveness of supporting mothers with low attachment