Potentially inappropriate medication prescribing patterns in geriatric patients in a health facility in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Purpose: To assess potentially inappropriate medication (PIMs) prescribing pattern in geriatric patients attending the outpatient department (OPD) of the General Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.Methods: The study was conducted retrospectively for geriatric patients sixty years of age and above, who visited an Outpatient Department of Tirunesh Beijing General Hospital. Data were gathered for a duration of one month from prescriptions/encounters at the Outpatient Pharmacy, and analysis was carried out using SPSS (Statistical Packages for Social Sciences) version 20, while and drug prescribing indicators, and potentially inappropriate medications were calculated based on WHO prescribed indicators and Beer’s criteria.Results: Of the 400 encounters assessed, 218 (55 %) were male and 182 (45 %) were female. Four hundred prescriptions contained 1,003 drugs. Out of the mean drug per prescription of 2.51, drugs prescribed by generic names were 91.62 %, those prescribed from NLEM (national list of essential medicine) were 91.53 %; prescriptions with an antibiotic injection were 27.75 % and 16.25% respectively, and more than 5 drugs were prescribed only for 10.8 % of geriatrics patients. Cardiovascular drugs constituted about a quarter of the  prescribed medications with 271 (27.02 %); others were analgesics, anti-inflammatory, anti-infective, endocrine drugs, gastrointestinal drugs, and other drugs, accounting for 116 (11.6%), 112 (11.2%), 96 (9.6%), 94 (9.4%) and 187 (18.6%), respectively. Potentially inappropriate drugs occurred in 46.9 % of the cases.Conclusion: Potentially inappropriate medication (PIMs) prescribing in geriatric is highest in percentage. Proper interventions are needed from all concerned bodies to avoid drug-related complications

NOSE-TO-BRAIN DELIVERY, A ROUTE OF CHOICE FOR TARGETING BRAIN TUMORS

Brain tumours are the most lethal type of cancer, which is difficult to manage due to the inherent suboptimal bioavailability of the chemotherapy agent at tumour sites, consequent of high levels of protection of physiological blood-brain barrier (BBB), blood tumour barrier (BTB) and blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (CSF). Improving the permeability of these barriers would enhance the disease's clinical prognosis and promote patients' quality of life. To this end, scientists have conducted several studies to determine the most suitable route for CNS delivery. Most of which show that the nose-to-brain is proposed to be the most convenient, efficacious and clinically beneficial non-invasive means of delivering chemotherapeutic agents directly to the brain. Therefore, this study compares the therapeutic benefits of intranasal and other conventional brain delivery systems and further evaluates the clinical benefits of using different nanocarriers for brain tumour targeting. However, we surveyed the literature by conducting an in-depth search of the research keywords and their combinations in recognized scientific databases, primarily Science Direct, PubMed, Google Scholar, and Research Gate. Our findings have shown that the nose-to-brain delivery of chemotherapeutics is a breakthrough in bypassing the effects of BBB, BTB, and CSF barriers, improving the delivery of drugs to the brain for specific tumour targeting with desired clinical prognosis

Bangla character recognition system is developed by using automatic feature extraction and XOR operation

This paper presents off-line bangle character recognition system using automatic feature extraction and XOR operation. In this system, the Bangla text is accepted as an image file which is first segmented into lines and words and then each word is segmented into characters. The pixels outside the boundary of the character are eliminated. The characters are scaled to a size equal to the database image. A XOR operation is performed between the scaled image and the database image and the error (%) is calculated. Finally, depending on the minimum error, the system recognizes the character to use in the output. The average recognition accuracy rate of the system was about 80%

Performance Analysis of CDMA System Using Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum and Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum Techniques

In digital communication system, selection of the most appropriate access method is a challenging task. To meet this challenge we have to be familiar with the technologies and system architectures on the CDMA digital cellular system. The demand for high speed mobile wireless communications is rapidly growing. DS-CDMA plays the best competitive role for achieving the high data capacity and spectral efficiency requirements for communication systems. This paper represents the performance analysis of CDMA using direct sequence and frequency hopping technique in a Fadin

Handwritten Character Recognition System for Bangla Text Containing Modifiers and Overlapped Characters

This paper deals with the design and development of a Bangla offline Handwritten Character Segmentation system. Special focus of this work was on skewed text containing modifier and overlapped characters. The text pages were scanned using flatbed scanner and saved as 256 gray-level image in bmp file format. This image file was used as the input to the developed system. In order to segment the skewed lines, the text was divided into a number of vertical stripes called frame. Each frame was segmented by horizontal pixel scanning method and concatenated in proper order to form the original text line. Based on vertical pixel scanning method lines were segmented into words. In character segmentation, isolated characters were segmented by vertical scanning method but connected and overlapped characters are segmented using degenerated lower chain. The system was tested for handwritten text pages of five individual writers. The average segmentation accuracy rate of the system was about 94%

Online Model Updating and Dynamic Learning Rate-Based Robust Object Tracking

Robust visual tracking is a significant and challenging issue in computer vision-related research fields and has attracted an immense amount of attention from researchers. Due to various practical applications, many studies have been done that have introduced numerous algorithms. It is considered to be a challenging problem due to the unpredictability of various real-time situations, such as illumination variations, occlusion, fast motion, deformation, and scale variation, even though we only know the initial target position. To address these matters, we used a kernelized-correlation-filter-based translation filter with the integration of multiple features such as histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and color attributes. These powerful features are useful to differentiate the target from the surrounding background and are effective for motion blur and illumination variations. To minimize the scale variation problem, we designed a correlation-filter-based scale filter. The proposed adaptive model’s updating and dynamic learning rate strategies based on a peak-to-sidelobe ratio effectively reduce model-drifting problems by avoiding noisy appearance changes. The experiment results show that our method provides the best performance compared to other methods, with a distance precision score of 79.9%, overlap success score of 59.0%, and an average running speed of 74 frames per second on the object tracking benchmark (OTB-2015)

A comparative study on semi rigid taping vs. K-taping on functional performance in ankle instable athletes

Background: A taping is often used to preventgiving-ways in the joint with ankle instability. However, it remains unknown whether the application of a taping modifies abnormal kinematics in ankle instability joints. Ankle Instability is characterized by recurrent giving way and often develops after repeated lateral ankle sprains. Basically, athletes are more prone to ankle instability in order to prevent reoccurrence of injury especially ankle instability. Aim: To evaluate the effectiveness of semi rigid taping vs. k-taping on functional performance in ankle instable athletes. Method: 40 Participants was randomly assigned to two groups. Volunteers with functional ankle instability following ankle inversion sprain were recruited from among students of the Annamalai University. Prior to participation in the study, all participants provided written informed consent. Results: The semi rigid taping group scored a CAIT rating scale means value of 21.07 ±5.37 and Kinesio taping group shows a mean value of 23.02±5.20 with a “t” value of 8.58 and a significant of “p” value 0.00001. This shows that the kinesio taping was highly effective in improving in ankle instability athletes. Conclusion: CAIT analysis clearly showed the stabilizing effect of both kinesio taping and semi rigid taping on the athletes with ankle instability.&nbsp

Soluble factors and suppressive monocytes can predict early development of sepsis in acute‐on‐chronic liver failure

Abstract Patients with acute‐on‐chronic liver failure (ACLF) have a high probability of developing systemic inflammation and sepsis due to immune dysregulation. Fifty‐nine patients with ACLF (12 without and 19 with systemic inflammation, and 28 with sepsis) were serially monitored for clinical and immunological changes at baseline, 6 hours, 24 hours, day 3, and day 7 following hospitalization. Ten healthy controls were also included. At all time points, soluble plasma factors and monocyte functions were studied. Patients with ACLF and systemic inflammation showed higher interleukin (IL)–6, vascular endothelial growth factor‐a, monocyte chemoattractant protein 1, and macrophage inflammatory protein 1β than patients with no systemic inflammation. Patients with ACLF with sepsis had raised (p < 0.001) levels of IL‐1Ra, IL‐18, and triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 1 (TREM1) compared to patients with ACLF‐systemic inflammation. Five of the 19 (26.3%) patients with systemic inflammation developed sepsis within 48–72 hours with a rapid rise in plasma levels of IL‐1Ra (1203–35,000 pg/ml), IL‐18 (48–114 pg/ml), and TREM1 (1273–4865 pg/ml). Monocytes of patients with ACLF with systemic inflammation and sepsis showed reduced human leukocyte antigen–DR but increased programmed death ligand 1 (PD‐L1) and T‐cell immunoglobulin and mucin domain‐containing protein 3 (TIM3) (p < 0.04) expression with increased ETosis by monocytes at baseline and until day 7. Conclusion: High and rising levels of plasma IL‐1Ra, IL‐18, TREM1 soluble factors, and increased suppressive monocytes (PDL1+ve, TIM3+ve) at baseline can stratify patients with ACLF at high risk of developing sepsis within 48–72 hours of hospitalization