COVID-19 knowledge and perception among healthcare professionals in two Arabian Gulf countries

Introduction: The WHO announced on 30 January 2020 the respiratory tract infection outbreak caused by Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) that was first recognized in China to be a global public health emergency. Objective: To investigate healthcare professional's knowledge and awareness about COVID-19. Methods: The study was conducted across four hospitals in Saudi Arabia and two hospitals in Kuwait. The questionnaire was completed between 18th May and the end of June 2020. Results: A total of 460 healthcare professionals completed the questionnaire, 37.8%(n=174) were males. The age of the participants ranged from 18 to 64 and 80.4% (n=370) of the participants were aged 34 or below. Official government websites 54.8% (n=252) and social media 43.3% (n=199) were the major reliable information sources related to COVID-19. only 37% (n=170) mentioned that the coronavirus disease could transmit through contact. In addition, only 42% (n=191) of the study participants had the correct knowledge about the incubation period of the disease. Moreover, 43.5% (n=200) of the participants were able to identify the symptoms of COVID-19. Conclusion: The study recommended the need to focus more on educational and awareness programs targeting all healthcare professionals to ensure the best practice and provide the optimal care

Applying the 'You're Welcome' youth-friendly service criteria to community pharmacy in the UK

OBJECTIVES: The Department of Health in England developed the 'You're Welcome' framework, comprising criteria for all health services seeing 11- to 19-year olds, to improve their quality and coverage and reduce access inequities. To date, however, the 'You're Welcome' criteria have not been considered within community pharmacy service development policy. The aim of this article was to assess the relevance of the 'You're Welcome' criteria to community pharmacy, and examine ways in which they are currently met, or not met, to guide future service development. METHODS: The project employed three methods. Checklist-guided observations and face-to-face semistructured interviews with staff members were undertaken in eight community pharmacies across England and Scotland, purposively selected because of their known focus on provision of young people's services. This was complemented by a cross-sectional online survey for completion by pharmacy staff across a wider range of pharmacies recruited through targeted Local Pharmaceutical Committees (LPC). Study instruments were designed to gather information relevant to each of the 'You're Welcome' criteria. KEY FINDINGS: Eight pharmacies took part in observations and interviews. Six LPCs posted the online survey link on their website, which was returned by 56 respondents. The results demonstrate applicability of the 'You're Welcome' criteria to community pharmacy services, highlighting particular strengths of community pharmacy services for young people (e.g. accessibility) as well as opportunities and priorities for service development to meet their specific needs (e.g. staff training, engagement and integration with local service provision). CONCLUSIONS: The 'You're Welcome' criteria can be applied to community pharmacy services without adaptation providing an appropriate framework to guide service development to promote young people friendly pharmacy services. JPHS

Quranic Verses Semantic Relatedness Using AraBERT

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has gained popularity in recent years producing state-of-the-art performances across Natural Language Processing tasks. In this paper, we used AraBERT language model to classify pairs of verses provided by the QurSim dataset to either be semantically related or not. We have pre-processed The QurSim dataset and formed three datasets for comparisons. Also, we have used both versions of AraBERT, which are AraBERTv02 and AraBERTv2, to recognise which version performs the best with the given datasets. The best results was AraBERTv02 with 92% accuracy score using a dataset comprised of label ‘2’ and label '-1’, the latter was generated outside of QurSim dataset

Influence of remaining axial walls on of root filled teeth restored with a single crown and adhesively bonded fibre post: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives To synthesise evidence on structural failures and prevalence of post-treatment endodontic disease (PTD) in anterior and posterior root filled teeth with a single crown and adhesively bonded fibre post with regards to the number of axial walls. Data An electronic search was performed, no language constraints or restriction on the year of publication were applied. Sources PubMed, Medline, Cochrane and Scopus on 13th of July 2021. Study selection Clinical studies that reported the remaining number of axial walls for permanent anterior and posterior root filled teeth (RFT) restored with single crowns and adhesively bonded fibre posts with a minimum of 1 year follow-up were included. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines [1] were used. The number of axial walls and the success/failures were analysed as follows: fibre post and/or core decementation, post and/or core fracture and post treatment endodontic disease, and root fracture. Conclusions A total of 811 studies were identified with 5 meeting the inclusion criteria. The two randomized controlled trials included had ‘some concerns’ as determined by the Cochrane risk-of-bias 2 tool while the Newcastle-Ottawa scale found low risk of bias for the remaining three studies. The random effects model for subgroup meta-analysis revealed failures for posterior RFT increased with decreasing numbers of remaining walls. Failures for 0 remaining walls were 23% (95% CI = 10% - 36%) and for one remaining wall 15% (CI: 3% -26%), irrespective of follow-up times. Fibre post debonding and PTD increased with decreasing numbers of walls. Relative & catastrophic failure of posterior teeth restored with a fibre post and single crown after root canal treatment increased with decreasing numbers of remaining axial walls. Clinical significance This synthesis is unique as it minimizes the presence of confounding factors by reviewing evidence of failures and post-treatment endodontic disease associated with teeth restored with single crowns. Therefore, it provides valuable predictive evidence of potential coronal restoration catastrophes and post-treatment endodontic disease associated with root filled teeth

LKAU23 at Qur’an QA 2023: Using Transformer Models for Retrieving Passages and Finding Answers to Questions from the Qur’an

The Qur’an QA 2023 shared task has two sub tasks: Passage Retrieval (PR) task and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task. Our participation in the PR task was to further train several Arabic pre-trained models using a Sentence-Transformers architecture and to ensemble the best performing models. The results of the test set did not reflect the results of the development set. CL-AraBERT achieved the best results, with a 0.124 MAP. We also participate in the MRC task by further fine-tuning the base and large variants of AraBERT using Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic datasets. Base AraBERT achieved the best result with the development set with a partial average precision (pAP) of 0.49, while it achieved 0.5 with the test set. In addition, we applied the ensemble approach of best performing models and post-processing steps to the final results. Our experiments with the development set showed that our proposed model achieved a 0.537 pAP. On the test set, our system obtained a pAP score of 0.49

Validation of the Arabic version of the Social Communication Questionnaire

Validated screening and diagnostic tools for autism spectrum disorder for use in Arabic-speaking individuals are scarce. This study validated the Arabic version of the Social Communication Questionnaire. The total study sample included 206 children with autism spectrum disorder and 206 typically developing children (73.8% male; mean age: 8.5 (standard deviation = 2.6) years). The mean Social Communication Questionnaire total score was significantly higher in autism spectrum disorder children than in typically developing children (p < 0.0001). Scores on the three Social Communication Questionnaire subscales also differed significantly between the groups (p < 0.001). Of the 39 items, 37 were endorsed significantly more often in the autism spectrum disorder group. The total Social Communication Questionnaire score did not vary by age or gender. Internal consistency was excellent (alpha = 0.92). In the receiver operating characteristic analysis, the area under the curve for the total score showed excellent discrimination between autism spectrum disorder and typically developing children (area under the curve = 0.95; 95% confidence interval: 0.93–0.97). The areas under the curve for the scale subscores were 0.923 (95% confidence interval: 0.898–0.949) for the social interaction score, 0.872 (95% confidence interval: 0.838–0.905) for the communication score, and 0.856 (95% confidence interval: 0.819–0.893) for the repetitive behaviors score. The findings support the use of the Arabic Social Communication Questionnaire to successfully differentiate children with clinically diagnosed autism spectrum disorder using the established cutoff value for the English version.The authors would like to thank all the staff of the autism centers and schools who contributed in distributing and collecting the SCQ forms. They also would like to thank Western Psychological Services (WPS) staff for their help during the process of translating and reviewing the Arabic SCQ. They acknowledge Jennifer Holmes, ELS, for medical editing. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The study was funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (NPRP 6-093-3-024)

The Reading Perception Of Medical Staff About The Use Of Prehospital Ultrasound

This study was a focus on the use of pre-hospital ultrasound in Saudi Arabia. Generally, ultrasound is used in a high frequency by health care providers in different countries within hospitals or pre-hospital. The main point of using the ultrasound was to reduce the time of diagnosis at the hospital and decrease the rate of mortality and morbidity. The study was a cross-sectional study and was used to assess the perception of medical staff about the use of pre-hospital ultrasound. This survey study had 130 participants, and 80 of them were agreed to involve in this study. It was conducted in King Abdulaziz Hospital of National Guards, Al Ahsa and College of Applied Medical Sciences, King Saud Bin Abdul Aziz University for Health Sciences, Al Ahsa Campus, Saudi Arabia. ATLAST ti 8 was used for systematic literature review and SPSS v23 obviously for data analysis. This was a new and novel study as the Pre-hospital ultrasound was not used before in the pre-hospital. On the other hand, the findings showed that the participants displayed a high level of interest in improving their knowledge and skills of using ultrasound during its application in the pre-hospital setting. It was also recommended to have more research in future on the subject

miR-346 controls release of TNF-alpha protein and stability of its mRNA in rheumatoid arthritis via tristetraprolin stabilization

TNF-alpha is a major cytokine implicated in rheumatoid arthritis. Its expression is regulated both at the transcriptional and posttranscriptional levels and recent data demonstrated that miRNAs are implicated in TNF-alpha response in macrophages. LPS-activated FLS isolated from RA patients express TNF-alpha mRNA but not the mature protein. This prompted us to look for miRNAs which could be implicated in this anti-inflammatory effect. Using a microarray, we found two miRNAs, miR-125b and miR-939 predicted to target the 3'-UTR of TNF-alpha mRNA, to be up-regulated in RA FLS in response to LPS, but their repression did not restore mature TNF-alpha expression in FLS. We showed previously that miR-346, which is upregulated in LPS-activated FLS, inhibited Btk expression that stabilized TNF-alpha mRNA. Blocking miR-346 reestablished TNF-alpha expression in activated FLS. Interestingly, transfection of miR-346 in LPS-activated THP-1 cells inhibited TNF-alpha secretion. We also demonstrated that TTP, a RNA binding protein which inhibited TNF-alpha synthesis, is overexpressed in activated FLS and that inhibition of miR-346 decreases its expression. Conversely, transfection of miR-346 in LPS-activated THP-1 cells increased TTP mRNA expression and inhibited TNF-alpha release. These results indicate that miR-346 controls TNF-alpha synthesis by regulating TTP expression

Bidirectional lipid droplet velocities are controlled by differential binding strengths of HCV Core DII protein

Host cell lipid droplets (LD) are essential in the hepatitis C virus (HCV) life cycle and are targeted by the viral capsid core protein. Core-coated LDs accumulate in the perinuclear region and facilitate viral particle assembly, but it is unclear how mobility of these LDs is directed by core. Herein we used two-photon fluorescence, differential interference contrast imaging, and coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopies, to reveal novel core-mediated changes to LD dynamics. Expression of core protein’s lipid binding domain II (DII-core) induced slower LD speeds, but did not affect directionality of movement on microtubules. Modulating the LD binding strength of DII-core further impacted LD mobility, revealing the temporal effects of LD-bound DII-core. These results for DII-core coated LDs support a model for core-mediated LD localization that involves core slowing down the rate of movement of LDs until localization at the perinuclear region is accomplished where LD movement ceases. The guided localization of LDs by HCV core protein not only is essential to the viral life cycle but also poses an interesting target for the development of antiviral strategies against HCV

Investigation and performance analysis of solar still with energy storage materials: An energy- exergy efficiency analysis

Researchers have attempted different Energy storage materials (ESM) in solar stills (SS) to improve distillate yield. In this experimental work, an attempt was made to increase the distillate yield & efficiency of SS, using good absorbing and heat transfer capacity of ESM. A comparison was made between a conventional solar still (CSS) and a solar still with energy storage materials (SSWESM) in this experiment. Different energy storage materials like black color glass ball (BCGB), black granite (BG) and white marble stone (WMS) were used in equal quantity during experimental work. CSS and SSWESM had daily distillate yield of 1.4 kg/m2 and 2.5 kg/m2, respectively. The ESM boosts water evaporation during the day and releases heat at night, resulting in a higher distillate yield than CSS. Meanwhile, the exergy efficiency (?exe) of CSS and SSWESM were 4.99% and 12.55% respectively. Also the SSWESM gives 72.6% more daily efficiency (?) than CSS.The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University for funding this work through Research Group no. RG-21-12-03.Scopu