Factors affecting utilization of antenatal care among reproductive age group women (15-49 years) in an urban squatter settlement of Karachi

Objectives: To describe the socio-demographic characteristics and utilization pattern of antenatal care of reproductive age group women (15-49 years) in an urban squatter settlement of Karachi and to assess and compare the knowledge on antenatal care between women who received and those who did not receive antenatal care.Methods: A community-based cross sectional survey was conducted and a sample of 323 women was taken through systematic sampling. Two hundred ninety five (295) women were interviewed and 28 were excluded, as they never experienced a pregnancy. Socio-demographic characteristics and knowledge about antenatal care were compared on the basis of having received and not having received antenatal care, utilizing bivariate and multivariate analysis.Results: Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that higher income women were twice likely to use antenatal care services (AOR = 2.11 95% CI 1.14-3.89) than those of lower income. Women receiving antenatal care were more knowledgeable about the importance of dietary protein (AOR = 1.97 95% CI 1.16-3.33), intake of green leafy vegetables for the prevention of anemia (AOR = 2.34 95% CI 1.33-4.11), and reporting danger signs (AOR = 2.25 95% CI 1.07-4.74).CONCLUSION: Women of reproductive age need to recognize the importance of receiving antenatal care in the community. Uplifting the socio-economic status and literacy rate of women is required to provide community based education. There is a potential need to increase nutrition education, highlighting the importance of iron supplementation, appropriate food during pregnancy and recognition of signs and symptoms and danger signs in pregnancy

Womens\u27 perceptions regarding obstetric complications and care in a poor fishing community in Karachi

Objective: To assess the knowledge of women about obstetric complications and care.Methods: The study was conducted in a remote coastal community in Karachi in 1999, where the Department of Community Health Sciences of Aga Khan University is operating its primary health care project since 1996. The information was collected using a structured questionnaire, interviewing a representative sample of 329 married-women of reproductive age, selected systematically from the community.Results: The mean age of the respondents was 29 years. On average they were married for 11 years and had four living children. Almost half of them had no antenatal care in their last pregnancy and 75% delivered at home. The findings indicate a poor knowledge of common and serious pregnancy related complications based on their perception related to danger signs. Five percent of the women perceived absent/decreased fetal movement as a danger sign of pregnancy. Other reported danger signs included premature uterine contraction by 3%, premature rupture of membranes by 3%, convulsions by 13%, obstructed labor by 23% and bleeding by 39%. Moreover, the women\u27s perception regarding obstetric care suggests that unsafe practices prevail: 86% of women thought that a case of ante-partum hemorrhage should be examined internally and 50% thought that no precaution is required to sterilize the instrument for cutting the cord.CONCLUSION: There is a clear need to create awareness regarding obstetric complications through a targeted community based health educational intervention aiming to promote early recognition of the obstetric emergency at the household level and also to create a demand of safe obstetric practices

Exploration and Optimization Of Friends’ Connections In Social Networks

One paragraph only. Over the past few years, the rapid growth and the exponential use of social digital media has led to an increase in popularity of social networks and the emergence of social computing. In general, social networks are structures made of social entities (e.g., individuals) that are linked by some specific types of interdependency such as friendship. Most users of social media (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube) have many linkages in terms of friends, connections, and/or followers. Among all these linkages, some of them are more important than others. This paper discusses related work on social networks and method use in crawling online social network graph

Investigation for Bioactive Compounds of Berberis Lyceum Royle and Justicia Adhatoda L.

In order to explore the medicinal values of plant species like Berberis lyceum and Justicia adhatoda, a study was conducted to analyze roots, leaves and fruits of both plant species for identification of various organic compounds. Chemical analysis as well as identification of organic compounds by chromatographic techniques were carried out. Results indicates that both plant species contained Proteins, Sugars, Lipids, Vitamin C, Sodium, Calcium, Sulphur, Iron, and Zinc.Whereas the alkaloids like Palmatine, Berberine, Vasicine and Vasicinone were also found in leaves and roots of these plant species. However, it was observed that roots of both plant species contained higher concentrations of these chemical compounds as compared to fruits and leaves except sugar and vitamin C those were high in fruits. Furthermore presence of such bioactive compounds in Berberis lyceum and Justicia adhatoda indicated their importance in the form of local medicines. This experiment will help to increase the importance of new raw material found in these plant species and their demand in the market will be increased in the future. The extract of roots and fruits of these plant species are being used against various infections and diseases in rural population of subcontinent since many centuries

Ayurvedic measures to minimize need of Hysterectomy

Menopause is not just cessation of menstruation; it is depletion of ovarian follicles leading to decrease in ovarian hormones. A woman who has undergone hysterectomy but retains her ovaries will experience cessation of menstruation and not oestrogen deficiency syndrome just after it. In such cases the depletion of oocytes would occur earlier and thus women will perceive menopausal changes earlier than natural menopause. It shows that hysterectomy with or without oophorectomy leads to surgical menopause. Many times hysterectomy is done for such conditions which can be treated by medicines. In modern science, as there is no certain treatment for some diseases and the recurrences occur, hysterectomy becomes the solution. Ayurveda has mentioned such therapies which act locally as well as systemically and arrest the disease to get advanced or relapsed

Search for the rare decay D^{0}→γγ at Belle

We search for the rare radiative decay D 0 → γγ using a data sample with an integrated luminosity of 832 fb−1 recorded by the Belle detector at the KEKB e +e − asymmetric-energy collider. We find no statistically significant signal and set an upper limit on the branching fraction of B(D 0 → γγ) \u3c 8.5 × 10−7 at 90% confidence level. This is the most restrictive limit on the decay channel to date

VANT-GAN: adversarial learning for discrepancy-based visual attribution in medical imaging

Visual attribution (VA) in relation to medical images is an essential aspect of modern automation-assisted diagnosis. Since it is generally not straightforward to obtain pixel-level ground-truth labelling of medical images, classification-based interpretation approaches have become the de facto standard for automated diagnosis, in which the ability of classifiers to make categorical predictions based on class-salient regions is harnessed within the learning algorithm. Such regions, however, typically constitute only a small subset of the full range of features of potential medical interest. They may hence not be useful for VA of medical images where capturing all of the disease evidence is a critical requirement. This hence motivates the proposal of a novel strategy for visual attribution that is not reliant on image classification. We instead obtain normal counterparts of abnormal images and find discrepancy maps between the two. To perform the abnormal-to-normal mapping in unsupervised way, we employ a Cycle-Consistency Generative Adversarial Network, thereby formulating visual attribution in terms of a discrepancy map that, when subtracted from the abnormal image, makes it indistinguishable from the counterpart normal image. Experiments are performed on three datasets including a synthetic, Alzheimer’s disease Neuro imaging Initiative and, BraTS dataset. We outperform baseline and related methods in both experiments