Morbidity Patterns in Oncology Patients at FMRI, Gurgaon:A Hospital Based Study at a New Tertiary Care Institute

Objective: This study aims to analyze the patterns of morbidity amongst cancer patients attending a tertiary care hospital.Materials and Methods: Data were collected from various departments dealing in cancer care. Patient’s data were categorized according to diagnosis and place of residence.Results: A total of 1490 new cancer patients were registered. Out of these 1140 were Indians from 22 different states {males= 609 (53.4%) and females= 531 (46.6%)} and remaining 350 patients were from 27 different countries {males= 223 (63.7%) and females=127 (36.3%)}. The five most common cancer site groups amongst all males (n=832) were digestive organs (18.6%) followed by lymphoid, hematopoietic and related tissue (16.8%);  respiratory intrathoracic organs (14.1%); then eye, brain and other parts of central nervous system (11.4%) and lip, oral cavity and  pharynx (9.5%)  and in all females (n=658) the most common cancer site were breast (31.5%) followed by  genital organs (17.3%); digestive organs (11.2%); lymphoid, hematopoietic and related tissue (9.3%) and eye, brain and other parts of nervous system (9.0%).Conclusions:  The present study highlights the pattern of cancer among patients in a corporate tertiary health care institute. There is therefore an inherent bias, the leading sites of malignancies amongst Indian males and females varied from that in the Western population; this could be attributed to various cultural, environmental factors, life style, genetic factors etc. in different regions of India and different nations of the world.

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Randomized study comparing 4'-epi-doxorubicin (Epirubicin) versus doxorubicin as a part of induction treatment in adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Doxorubicin or daunorubicin are routinely used to induce remission in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Efficacy of epirubicin (an analog of doxorubicin), however, has not been adequately evaluated in ALL management. This randomized study was undertaken to compare the relative efficacy of epirubicin vs. doxorubicin as part of induction chemotherapy in adult ALL. Between January 1990 and June 1998, 79 previously untreated adult ALL patients (age 11-55 years, median 20 years) were randomized to receive either doxorubicin (Group A, n = 39) or epirubicin (Group B, n = 40) as a part of induction therapy. Vincristine and prednisolone were common in each group. The induction treatment was followed by identical consolidation and maintenance therapy. The two groups were compared as regards pretherapy clinical and laboratory parameters, dose intensity of therapy, therapeutic efficacy, myelotoxicity, and survival. Epirubicin was as effective as doxorubicin in terms of complete remission rate (80% vs. 78.3%; P = 0.87) and relapse rate (57.1% vs. 51.7%; P = 0.68). Five-year overall survival (30% vs. 30%, P = 0.98) and disease-free survival (40% vs. 39%, P = 0.92) at median follow-up of 68 months was also similar in the two groups. The incidence of Grade 4 myelotoxicity was comparable in the two groups. Patients 20 years of age or less had better CR rates (90% vs. 65%; P = 0.011) and median overall survival (39 vs. 11 months; P = 0.008) compared to those who were older. From this study epirubicin appears as effective as doxorubicin as part of induction therapy for adult ALL. However, the results need to be validated on the basis of immunophenotype and cytogenetic prognostic characterization

A Study on Morbidity Patterns amongst Hospitalized Patients Attending a New Tertiary Care Institute, India

Background: The pattern of morbidity reflects the burden of disease in a particular community. This pattern showsgeographic variations between communities and countries. The knowledge of the pattern of diseases in a given country is very important in evaluating its health care delivery system. Such knowledge is important for health planning and for improving the healthcare services in that particular nation. We set out to study the morbidity pattern in our medical wards. Materials and methods: This is a retrospective study that reviewed the causes of morbidity amongst admitted cases from January 2014 to December 2014. The data were obtained from the medical record section. Data were analyzed using software Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16. Results: A total of 19,609 patients were admitted during the study period. Of these males were 10,556 (53.8%) and females were 9,053 (46.2%). Out of the total cases, 19203 patients (97.9%) were discharged or relieved as cured, 210 patients (1.1%) had expired. The sex ratio was 858 females to 1,000 males. Of the most common causes of morbidities/system involved (ICD.10) in males, chronic ischemic heart disease (4.7%) was the leading cause followed by live born infants (3.8%), hypertension (3.7%), lymphoid leukemia (2.7%) and malignant neoplasm of brain (2.1%). In females, malignant neoplasm of breast (6.2%) was the leading cause followed by delivery by caesarean section (4.9%), live born infants (3.8%), secondary malignant neoplasm of other and unspecified sites (3.1%) and hypertension (2.4%). Overall bed occupancy rate (BOR) for all patients was 66.8 percent. Conclusion: Morbidity in the medical wards reflects the emerging trend of mixed disease spectrum burden comprising communicable and non-communicable diseases. Public health education, raising the socio-economic status of our people and as well as improving the standards of our health care facilities and personnel can contribute towards bringing down morbidity and mortality rates from medical wards

High-frequency vertical profiling of meteorological parameters using AMF1 facility during RAWEX-GVAX at ARIES, Nainital

An extensive field study, RAWEX-GVAX, was carried out during a 10-month (June 2011-March 2012) campaign at ARIES, Nainital and observations on a wide range of parameters like physical and optical properties of aerosols, meteorological parameters and boundary layer evolution were made. This work presents results obtained from high-frequency (four launches per day), balloon-borne observations of meteorological parameters (pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and wind direction). These observations show wind speed as high as 84 m/s near the subtropical jet. It is shown that reanalysis wind speeds are in better agreement at 250 hPa (altitude of subtropical jet) than those above or below this value (100 hPa or 500 hPa). These observations also demonstrate that AIRS-derived temperature profiles are negatively biased in the lower altitude region, whereas they are positively biased near the tropopause. WRF simulated results are able to capture variations in temperature, humidity and wind speed profile reasonable well. WRF and AIRS-derived tropopause height, tropopause pressure and tropopause temperature also show agreement with radiosonde estimates

Not Available

Not AvailableA major challenge in crop production is to achieve the goal of increasing both yield and resource use efficiency. Irrigation water and nitrogen (N) are scarce and expensive resources constraining wheat production in arid regions. There is limited information on how irrigation and N supply can be simultaneously manipulated to achieve higher yield, water productivity (WP), and nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) of wheat in arid regions. A two-year field experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of irrigation and N rates on yield, WP and NUE of wheat in a hot, arid environment at Bikaner, India. The experimental treatments comprised of six irrigation [100% (ETm; full evapotranspiration), 90% (ETd1), 80% (ETd2), 70% (ETd3), 60% (ETd4), and 50% (ETd5) of ETc (crop evapotranspiration)] levels, and four N [0 (N0), 40 (N40), 80 (N80), and 120 (N120) kg ha−1] rates. Moderate deficit irrigation (ETd2) had greatest WP and caused a 17% reduction in water consumption with only a 5% reduction in yield compared to full irrigation (ETm). The N application improved yield and WP. The NUE declined with a reduction in water application and an increase in N rates. The yield and WP response to N rates modified with irrigation levels.The significant increase in grain yield was recorded with N120 at ETm and ETd1, with N80 at ETd2 and ETd3, and with N40 at ETd4 and ETd5 irrigation levels. The significant increase in WP was recorded with N80 at ETm, ETd1, ETd2 and ETd3, and with N40 at ETd4 and ETd5 irrigation levels. The results suggested that moderate deficit irrigation (ETd2) along with 120 kg N ha−1 could ensure satisfactory grain yield and WP of wheat in arid regions. The study also indicated that the adoption of an appropriate deficit irrigation and N rate combination can be an effective means to reduce non-beneficial water consumption, achieve higher yield, and improve WP and NUE for wheat in an arid environment.Not Availabl

Not Available

Not AvailableA major challenge in crop production is to achieve the goal of increasing both yield and resource use efficiency. Irrigation water and nitrogen (N) are scarce and expensive resources constraining wheat production in arid regions. There is limited information on how irrigation and N supply can be simultaneously manipulated to achieve higher yield, water productivity (WP), and nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) of wheat in arid regions. A two-year field experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of irrigation and N rates on yield, WP and NUE of wheat in a hot, arid environment at Bikaner, India. The experimental treatments comprised of six irrigation [100% (ETm; full evapotranspiration), 90% (ETd1), 80% (ETd2), 70% (ETd3), 60% (ETd4), and 50% (ETd5) of ETc (crop evapotranspiration)] levels, and four N [0 (N0), 40 (N40), 80 (N80), and 120 (N120) kg ha−1] rates. Moderate deficit irrigation (ETd2) had greatest WP and caused a 17% reduction in water consumption with only a 5% reduction in yield compared to full irrigation (ETm). The N application improved yield and WP. The NUE declined with a reduction in water application and an increase in N rates. The yield and WP response to N rates modified with irrigation levels. The significant increase in grain yield was recorded with N120 at ETm and ETd1, with N80 at ETd2 and ETd3, and with N40 at ETd4 and ETd5 irrigation levels. The significant increase in WP was recorded with N80 at ETm, ETd1, ETd2 and ETd3, and with N40 at ETd4 and ETd5 irrigation levels. The results suggested that moderate deficit irrigation (ETd2) along with 120 kg N ha−1 could ensure satisfactory grain yield and WP of wheat in arid regions. The study also indicated that the adoption of an appropriate deficit irrigation and N rate combination can be an effective means to reduce non-beneficial water consumption, achieve higher yield, and improve WP and NUE for wheat in an arid environment.Not Availabl