A Diabetes-Free Breathitt County: Implementation of the National Diabetes Prevention Program in Pharmacies

The National Diabetes Prevention Program (NDPP) is a primary prevention program endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The program’s purpose is to promote dietary modification and physical activity to reduce the incidence of diabetes. NDPP is currently offered by national organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Weight Watchers. However, NDPP is not commonly available in geographic areas that are in the most need of such preventive health programming such as rural communities. One such area where NDPP is not widely offered is the Diabetes Belt, an area within the Appalachian region of the United States where adults have a greater likelihood of developing diabetes. Specifically, residents of Breathitt County, Kentucky experience higher than normal diabetes rates and present with elevated risk factors such as obesity, physical inactivity, poor diet, and socioeconomic disparities that influence the development of diabetes. Generally, primary care providers are responsible for chronic disease management and prevention, but rural physicians may be burdened with complex patient cases so their ability to provide preventive care is often minimized. Breathitt County has a prevention need that alternative health care providers such as pharmacists can help fill. Pharmacists are widespread throughout the county and have clinical knowledge, expertise, and community trust necessary to effectively implement NDPP, thereby increasing access to diabetes prevention programming in Breathitt County. In the current proposal, the Breathitt County Health Department is guided by a Community Advisory Board in its implementation of NDPP in nine pharmacies over a three-year period. At each Urvi Patel 4 pharmacy we will enroll 10 participants who will receive year-long educational programming in accordance to the CDC endorsed Prevent T2 curriculum. We plan to assess diabetes management and weight loss outcomes and maintain program sustainability by implementing a strong professional and social referral system along with an adequate reimbursement model

The Use of DMAIC to Improve Quality Vaccination Recommendations in Chain Community Pharmacies

Community pharmacies provide the convenience and ease of administrating vaccinations outside traditional settings. Vaccinations are health initiatives that protect communities and improve health outcomes in all populations. Despite their accessibility and supporting clinical data, various influential factors contribute to the current suboptimal rates of vaccine administration. Given the common barriers to vaccine administration, this research narrows down to address a specific barrier and attempts to implement a method that focuses on improving vaccine rates in community pharmacies. This research is a case study that utilizes the DMAIC model of lean six sigma and aims to use this quality improvement process to identify, measure, analyze, and implement a training program to facilitate pharmacists in high-quality vaccine recommendations to promote higher rates of pneumococcal vaccinations in community settings

A Novel Approach for Finding Rare Items Based on Multiple Minimum Support Framework

AbstractPattern mining methods describe valuable and advantageous items from a large amount of records stored in the corporate datasets and repositories. While mining, literature has almost singularly focused on frequent itemset but in many applications rare ones are of higher interest. For Example medical dataset can be considered, where rare combination of prodrome plays a vital role for the physicians. As rare items contain worthwhile information, researchers are making efforts to examine effective methodologies to extract the same. In this paper, an effort is made to analyze the complete set of rare items for finding almost all possible rare association rules from the dataset. The Proposed approach makes use of Maximum constraint model for extracting the rare items. A new approach is efficient to mine rare association rules which can be defined as rules containing the rare items. Based on the study of relevant data structures of the mining space, this approach utilizes a tree structure to ascertain the rare items. Finally, it is demonstrated that this new approach is more virtuous and robust than the existing algorithms

Improving Accessibility of Cancer Research (Canadian Cancer Society - Research Information Outreach Team)

Cancer is one of the largest human health problems faced globally. Therefore, it is an important focus of research for many disciplines. Cancer research has made significant advancements as clinicians and researchers have expanded their knowledge to better understand this complex disease. Throughout this semester we completed a community engagement learning (CEL) project with the Research Information Outreach Team (RIOT) team from the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) to promote cancer research amongst adolescents and the general public. We completed blog posts for their website, along with promotional material for their Let’s Talk Cancer (LTC) event and infographics for their social media channels. Blogs were designed to engage adolescents in cancer research and related careers. Promotional material was generated to attract high school students to the event, where they can engage in cancer-related workshops and learn about the emerging fields of cancer research. Lastly, infographics were created for a general audience to summarize research on common cancers

Adolescent intermittent ethanol reduces serotonin expression in the adult raphe nucleus and upregulates innate immune expression that is prevented by exercise

Serotonergic neurons of the raphe nucleus regulate sleep, mood, endocrine function, and other processes that mature during adolescence. Alcohol abuse and binge drinking are common during human adolescence. We tested the novel hypothesis that adolescent intermittent ethanol exposure would alter the serotonergic system that would persist into adulthood. Using a Wistar rat model of adolescent intermittent ethanol (AIE; 5.0 g/kg, i.g., 2-day on/2-day off from postnatal day [P]25 to P55), we found a loss of dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) serotonin (5-HT)-immunoreactive (+IR) neurons that persisted from late adolescence (P56) into adulthood (P220). Hypothalamic and amygdalar DRN serotonergic projections were reduced following AIE. Tryptophan hydroxylase 2, the rate-limiting 5-HT synthesizing enzyme, and vesicular monoamine transporter 2, which packages 5-HT into synaptic vesicles, were also reduced in the young adult midbrain following AIE treatment. Adolescent intermittent ethanol treatment increased expression of phosphorylated (activated) NF-κB p65 as well as markers of microglial activation (i.e., Iba-1 and CD11b) in the adult DRN. Administration of lipopolysaccharide to mimic AIE-induced innate immune activation reduced 5-HT+IR and increased phosphorylated NF-κB p65+IR similar to AIE treatment. Voluntary exercise during adolescence through young adulthood blunted microglial marker and phosphorylated NF-κB p65+IR, and prevented the AIE-induced loss of 5-HT+IR neurons in the DRN. Together, these novel data reveal that AIE reduces 5-HT+IR neurons in the adult DRN, possibly through an innate immune mechanism, which might impact adult cognition, arousal, or reward sensitivity. Further, exercise prevents the deleterious effects of AIE on the serotonergic system

A Novel Approach to Autonomous Farming Robot

Now-a-days everyone has lost interest from farming as it has become a very difficult and tedious job. Although hi-tech vehicles and equipment have overcome older version of vehicles and equipment and also they made farming quite easy. But it still requires a plenty of human effort. Today automation has been introduced in almost every form of industry and a prominent reason to reducing human effort. Our Objective is to reduce human efforts in farming as we planned to develop an autonomous guidance system for farm vehicles. Our system will be based on Global Positioning System (GPS) [1]. To develop complete autonomous system, other than GPS, systems like machine vision, laser-based sensors, inertial sensors would be needed to be employed for avoiding obstacles in the path and overcoming other challenges. However making such systems would require more time and monetary resources then available, hence developing such complete autonomous system is out of scope of the current task at hand. Our aim is to develop a Mixture of such complete autonomous system which will fulfill one of the Basic needs of a complete autonomous guidance system. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.160412

The National Status of Pharmacists’ Ability to Prescribe Hormonal Contraceptives

The scope of practice for pharmacists first expanded in California and Oregon with the ability to prescribe hormonal contraceptives to patients in their communities. Since 2016, over 33 states now allow for pharmacist prescribing of birth control in their pharmacy practice laws. 90% of Americans live within 5 miles of a retail pharmacy, making community pharmacies an accessible resource who may otherwise be unable to access contraceptives. The gap in care experienced by certain patient populations is now being filled by pharmacists with their ability to prescribe birth control

DBGC:Dimension-Based Generic Convolution Block for Object Recognition

The object recognition concept is being widely used a result of increasing CCTV surveillance and the need for automatic object or activity detection from images or video. Increases in the use of various sensor networks have also raised the need of lightweight process frameworks. Much research has been carried out in this area, but the research scope is colossal as it deals with open-ended problems such as being able to achieve high accuracy in little time using lightweight process frameworks. Convolution Neural Networks and their variants are widely used in various computer vision activities, but most of the architectures of CNN are application-specific. There is always a need for generic architectures with better performance. This paper introduces the Dimension-Based Generic Convolution Block (DBGC), which can be used with any CNN to make the architecture generic and provide a dimension-wise selection of various height, width, and depth kernels. This single unit which uses the separable convolution concept provides multiple combinations using various dimension-based kernels. This single unit can be used for height-based, width-based, or depth-based dimensions; the same unit can even be used for height and width, width and depth, and depth and height dimensions. It can also be used for combinations involving all three dimensions of height, width, and depth. The main novelty of DBGC lies in the dimension selector block included in the proposed architecture. Proposed unoptimized kernel dimensions reduce FLOPs by around one third and also reduce the accuracy by around one half; semi-optimized kernel dimensions yield almost the same or higher accuracy with half the FLOPs of the original architecture, while optimized kernel dimensions provide 5 to 6% higher accuracy with around a 10 M reduction in FLOPs

Systematic screening to integrate reproductive health services in India

This study, conducted in large public clinics and small health posts in the city of Vadodara, India, tested the effectiveness of a systematic screening technique in integrating reproductive health services at the provider level. The objective was to determine if women screened during clinic visits received more services, appointments, and referrals per visit than women who were not screened. Results show that in experimental group clinics the number of services per visit increased while control clinics experienced a slight decrease; the effect of systematic screening was smaller in health posts than in clinics. In experimental posts, services per visit increased by nine percent compared to a decrease of 16 percent among controls. The municipality of Vadodara will begin systematic screening in all clinics. Gujarat state, where Vadodara is located, also plans to adopt the intervention