Comparing the Effects of Active and Passive Intradialytic Pedaling Exercises on Dialysis Efficacy, Electrolytes, Hemoglobin, Hematocrit, Blood Pressure and Health-Related Quality of Life

Background: The effect of exercise during hemodialysis has been a controversial issue, however, there are just few studies about the effect of active exercise during hemodialysis. Objectives: This study aimed to compare the effects of passive and active intradialytic pedaling exercises on dialysis efficacy, electrolytes, hemoglobin, hematocrit, blood pressure and health-related quality of life in hemodialysis patients. Patients and Methods: This quasi-experimental study was conducted on 16 hemodialysis patients in Akhavan hemodialysis center in Kashan from April to November 2013. Active or passive intradialytic pedaling exercise was performed using a Mini-Bike for 30 minutes during the first two hours of the dialysis sessions. The quality of life (QOL) was assessed before and after the intervention. Blood pressure was examined at the beginning and then hourly during the dialysis sessions. Dialysis efficacy, levels of phosphorus, calcium, sodium, potassium and Blood urea nitrogen (BUN) were measured at the end of the intervention. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, paired t test, Wilcoxon signed rank and Friedman tests and repeated measure analysis of variancewere used to analyze the data. Results: No significant changes were observed in serum potassium, phosphorus and calcium levels at the end of the passive exercise program compared to the baseline. However, phosphorus levels were significantly decreased in the active exercise program (P < 0.05). Moreover, the mean diastolic blood pressure was significantly decreased after the passive exercise (P = 0.039). Passive exercise did not significantly change the dialysis efficacy, urea reduction rate, hemoglobin and calcium levels. The mean overall QOL was 63.78 ± 21.15 at the beginning of the study, which was increased to 77.07 ± 21.14 at the end of eight weeks of the intradialytic exercise (P = 0.007). Conclusions: The passive intradialytic exercise had a positive effect on blood pressure. The active exercise could decrease the serum phosphorus and potassium levels. Moreover, both exercise programs could significantly improve the QOL. Both active and passive intradialytic exercises can have some beneficial effects

Health promoting Behaviors Among Adolescents: A Cross-sectional Study

Background: Health maintenance and promotion are the fundamental prerequisites to community development. The best time for establishing healthy lifestyle habits is during adolescence. Objectives: Due to importance of health promotion behaviors in adolescents, this study was conducted to investigate health-promoting behaviors and its associated factors among high school students in Rasht, Iran. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted on 424 students during the first semester of the year 2012. We employed the multistage sampling design to recruit from private and public high schools in Rasht, Iran. The data collection instrument was a self-report questionnaire consisting of two parts. The first part of instrument was consisted of demographic questionnaire and the second part was adolescent health promotion scale (AHPS) questionnaire. AHPS questionnaire was consisted of six dimensions (nutrition, social support, health responsibility, life appreciation, physical activity, and stress management) to measure health promoting lifestyles. Statistical analysis was performed by SPSS 16 software employing ANOVA (analysis of variance) test, t-test, Mann-Whitney, and the Kruskal-Wallis. Results: The score of total Adolescent Health Promotion Scale were 3.58 ± 0.52 (possible range was 1-5). The highest score was in life appreciation dimension (3.99 ± 0.068) and the lowest score was in health responsibility dimension. Moreover, Significant associations were found between the adolescent health promotion Scale with age (P < 0.001), gender (P < 0.003), school grade (P < 0.011), father’s educational level (P < 0.045), mother’s educational level (P < 0.021), and mother’s occupation (P < 0.008). Conclusions: Female and older students are at higher risk of developing unhealthy lifestyle. Consequently, healthcare providers, health instructors, schoolteachers, and families must pay more attention to these students. Moreover, as most of lifelong healthy and unhealthy lifestyle habits are established during adolescence, developing effective health promotion and disease prevention strategies for adolescents seems crucial

Effective Capacity in Broadcast Channels with Arbitrary Inputs

We consider a broadcast scenario where one transmitter communicates with two receivers under quality-of-service constraints. The transmitter initially employs superposition coding strategies with arbitrarily distributed signals and sends data to both receivers. Regarding the channel state conditions, the receivers perform successive interference cancellation to decode their own data. We express the effective capacity region that provides the maximum allowable sustainable data arrival rate region at the transmitter buffer or buffers. Given an average transmission power limit, we provide a two-step approach to obtain the optimal power allocation policies that maximize the effective capacity region. Then, we characterize the optimal decoding regions at the receivers in the space spanned by the channel fading power values. We finally substantiate our results with numerical presentations.Comment: This paper will appear in 14th International Conference on Wired&Wireless Internet Communications (WWIC

Impact of antenna correlation on the performance of partial relay selection

Antenna correlation is generally viewed as an obstacle to realize the desired performance of a wireless system. In this article, we investigate the performance of partial relay selection in the presence of antenna correlation. We consider both channel state information (csi)-assisted and fixed gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relay schemes. The source and the destination are equipped with multiple antennas communicating via the best first hop signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) relay. We derived the closed form expression for outage probability, average symbol error rate (SER) for both schemes. Further, an exact expression is derived for the ergodic capacity in the csi-assisted relay case and an approximated expression is considered for the fixed gain case. Moreover, we provide simple asymptotic results and show that the diversity order of the system remains unchanged with the effect of antenna correlation for both types of relay schemes

Rate splitting in the presence of untrusted users:outage and secrecy outage performances

Abstract In this contribution, a thorough investigation of the performance of rate splitting is conducted in terms of outage and secrecy outage for the simultaneous service to a near user and far user, where the latter attempts to overhear the message of the former. The source transmits a linear combination of the users’ common stream and private streams. Once the common stream is retrieved, two decoding strategies can be adopted by each user. In the first strategy, the nodes (near or far) treat the far user’s private stream as noise to retrieve the private stream of the near user, then the far user decodes its own stream. In the second strategy, the nodes decode the far user’s private stream by treating the one of the near user as noise, then the near user retrieves its private stream while the far user decodes the stream of the near user in its attempt to overhear it. Considering the four decoding combinations, we obtain exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability, and provide tight approximations for the secrecy outage probability. Comparative results are also provided. In particular, it is shown that to achieve better outage probability, with no concern about secrecy, once the decoding of the common stream is completed, each user should first retrieve the private stream with lower target data rate by treating the other private stream as noise. To improve the secrecy outage probability, once the common stream is decoded, the near user must first decode the far user’s private stream, and the far user should first retrieve the private stream with lower target data rate

STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL ORGANIZATION OF NON-TRANSLATED REGIONS IN GENOME OF PICORNAVIRUSES

The work covers the picornaviruses. The aim of the work is to determine the space arrangements in the segments of 5' and 3-non-translated regions of RNA picornaviruses involved in the replication and translation processes and to reveal the functional-significant translated cis-elements. The models for structural organization of the translated and replicative cis-elements of RNA picornaviruses have been developed; the new translated cis-elements - starting window and tandem of pyrimidine/AUG have been discovered and characterizedAvailable from VNTIC / VNTIC - Scientific & Technical Information Centre of RussiaSIGLERURussian Federatio