Dermatology life quality index (DLQI) as a psoriasis referral triage tool

Most primary care psoriasis referrals in the UK are triaged as ‘routine’, in part because of the prioritisation of skin cancer. As a result, patients with severe psoriasis may wait several months to be seen, enduring quality of life (QoL) impairment that could have been reduced. Furthermore some patients may spontaneously improve by the time they are seen by a specialist, making the appointment unnecessary at that time. Therefore, following approval from the local ethics committee, we conducted a prospective study to evaluate the usefulness of Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) scores in triaging patients with psoriasis referred to our dermatology secondary health care services

Oral fumaric acid esters for psoriasis: abridged Cochrane systematic review including GRADE assessments

Fumaric acid esters (FAE) are licensed for the treatment of moderate to severe psoriasis in Germany but are also used off-label in many other countries. We conducted this systematic review to synthesize the highest quality evidence for the benefits and risks of FAE for psoriasis. Our primary outcomes were change in PASI score and drop-out rates due to adverse effects. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of FAE or dimethyl fumarate were included, with no restriction on age or psoriasis subtype. We searched The Cochrane Skin Group Specialised Register, CENTRAL in the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, EMBASE, LILACS, five trials registers and handsearched six conference proceedings. Six RCTs with 544 participants were included, four of which were published only as abstracts or brief reports, limiting study reporting. Five RCTs compared FAE with placebo and all demonstrated benefit in favour of FAE but meta-analysis was only possible for PASI 50 after 12-16 weeks, which was achieved by 64% of participants on FAE compared to 14% on placebo (risk ratio (RR) 4.55; 95% CI 2.80 to 7.40; 2 studies; 247 participants; low quality evidence). There was no difference in drop-out rates due to adverse effects (RR 5.36, 95% CI 0.28 to 102.12; 1 study; 27 participants; very low-quality evidence and wide confidence interval). More participants experienced nuisance adverse effects with FAE (76%) compared to placebo (16%) (RR 4.72, 95% CI 2.45 to 9.08; 1 study; 99 participants; moderate-quality evidence), mainly abdominal pain, diarrhoea and flushing. One head-to-head study of very low quality evidence comparing FAE with methotrexate reported comparable efficacy and drop-out rates, although FAE caused more flushing. The evidence in this review was limited and must be interpreted with caution; better designed and reported studies are needed

The Use of Stemming in the Arabic Text and Its Impact on the Accuracy of Classification

The ongoing growth in the vast amount of digital documents and other data in the Arabic language available online has increased the need for classification methods that can deal with the complex nature of such data. The classification of Arabic plays a large and important role in many modern applications and interferes with other sciences, which start from search engines and do not end with the Internet of Things. However, addressing the Arab classification errors with high performance is largely insufficient to deal with the huge quantities to reveal the classification of Arab documents; while some work was tackled out on the classification of the Arabic text, most of the research has focused on English text. The methods proposed for English are not suitable for Arabic as the morphology of the two languages differs substantially. Moreover, morphologically, the preprocessing of Arabic text is a particularly challenging task. In this study, three commonly used classification algorithms, namely, the K-nearest neighbor, Naïve Bayes, and decision tree, were implemented for Arabic text in order to assess their effectiveness with and without the use of a light stemmer in the preprocessing phase. In the experiment, a dataset from Agency France Persse (AFP) Arabic Newswire 2001 consisting of four categories and 800 files was classified using the three classifiers. The result showed that the decision tree with light stemmer had the best accuracy rate for classification algorithm with 93%

Alarming update on incidence of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in Iraq in 2023

Objectives: In 2021, large outbreak of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) was reported in Iraq and cases have increased without any significant control measures. To raise awareness about the increasing cases in different regions of Iraq, hence remind the necessity to tackle contributing factors and potential outbreak interventions. Methods: The study included 511 polymerase chain reaction-confirmed CCHF infection cases out of 1827 suspected cases from 18 Provinces from January to August 2023. Approval from the Ministry of Health for data analyzed. Results: Out of 1827 suspected cases, 511 were confirmed positive by polymerase chain reaction. The total case fatality rate (CFR) was 12.7 with varying severity levels among provinces. Erbil had the highest CFR, 38.5, while Sulaimaniya and Anbar report no deaths. Independent t-test showed a significant difference in CFR between provinces west and south of Baghdad compared to north (P <0.05). Trend showed significant surges after Iftar and Adha holidays. Conclusion: Differences in CFR among provinces around the religious ceremonies, highlight the need for one public health intervention strategy. Increased temperatures affected vector behavior. Uncontrolled animal movement with neighboring countries is an important factor. Virus or host determinants can shape the clinical case outcomes, which need clinical and extensive laboratory studies to unravel the reasons leading to death

Privacy Implications of Privacy Settings and Tagging in Facebook

Social networks are becoming increasingly popular nowadays. Users share personal information about themselves and other users in order to build and maintain their social network. However, the large amount of personal information available on social networks poses risks of data misuse. Although social networks offer users the possibility to specify privacy settings to regulate access to their information, these settings are often complicated and unintuitive, especially when dealing with new modalities of social communication like tagging. In this paper we investigate the privacy consequences of information sharing in social networks. In particular, we formally analyze the impact of the privacy settings and the use of tagging in Facebook on the visibility of information. To increase users’ awareness of the risks of information sharing and empower users to control their information, we present a tool for determining the visibility of users’ information based on their privacy settings and tagging