Violence And Postpartum Drug Abstinence Among Substance-Using Mothers

Background: Substance use during pregnancy can have numerous detrimental effects on maternal and infant health. This knowledge contributes to high rates of abstinence during pregnancy, but pregnant women with substance use disorders are at high risk for relapse postpartum. Experiences of violence can have a substantial impact on the behavioral and mental health of women; its compounded consequences with those of substance use can lead to a population vulnerable to drug relapse and other negative health effects. The objective of this study was to examine the association between experiences of violence and drug abstinence at delivery and postpartum. Methods: Data were collected as part of a longitudinal randomized control trial observing the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy on maternal outcomes among pregnant women with substance use disorder. Pregnant women (n=152) were recruited from Yale New Haven Hospital and Bridgeport hospital between 2006 and 2012 and completed surveys at intake and 3 months postpartum. Logistic regression was used to examine associations between experiences of violence, sociodemographic characteristics, and rates of abstinence at delivery and at 3 months postpartum. Results: Of the 152 total participants, approximately 84% achieved abstinence at delivery and 24% achieved abstinence at 3 months postpartum. Black participants had significantly lower odds than white participants of achieving abstinence at delivery (OR: 0.33, CI: 0.09, 1.21) and 3 months postpartum (OR: 0.34, CI: 0.09, 1.27). Having ever experienced violence was not associated with drug abstinence at either time point assessed. Conclusion: Drug abstinence during pregnancy and postpartum is a crucial indicator of maternal, fetal, and infant health. Further research is warranted to identify key factors that can contribute to prolonged drug abstinence among pregnant women and new mothers in order to tailor effective intervention efforts toward continuous abstinence for this population

Analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity of hydroalcoholic extract of Piper betle leaves in experimental animals

Background: Piper betle leaf, commonly known as ‘paan’ has long been known for its various medicinal properties in traditional medicine but certain properties have remained less explored. We tried to assess the analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities of Piper betle leaves.Methods: Hydroalcoholic extract of Piper betle leaves (HEPBL) was extracted using soxhlet apparatus and its phytochemical analysis was performed. Wistar rats and Albino mice were used for all the experiments. Acute toxicity study was also done according to OECD guideline no.425 and the test doses were decided accordingly. The experimental models of tail-flick method and acetic acid induced writhing were used to study the analgesic activity whereas carrageenan induced paw edema and cotton pellet granuloma models were used for anti-inflammatory action. Statistical analysis was performed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Dunnett's test.Results: HEPBL showed significant analgesic activity at the doses of 100 mg/kg and 200 mg/kg, and showed significant anti-inflammatory activity at the doses of 50 mg/kg, 100 mg/kg and 200 mg/kg. The sub-therapeutic dose of HEPBL at 50 mg/kg also potentiated the analgesic effect of sub-therapeutic doses of standard analgesics. The analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity of P.betle may be attributed to the presence of various phyto constituents’ viz. flavonoids, tannins, phenols and glycosides.Conclusions: HEPBL has significant analgesic and anti-inflammatory activity in experimental animals in our study

Single incision laparoscopic cystectomy for a huge fimbrial cyst: a rare case report

A case of huge fimbrial cyst is presented, occurring in a 26 year old female. She presented in outpatient department with an incidental diagnosis of a huge cystic mass diagnosed during her routine medical check-up. She was asymptomatic. Ultrasound and CT scan showed an abdominopelvic cystic mass in left adnexa and a right dermoid cyst. Single incision laparoscopic surgery was performed and a huge right fimbrial cyst of 35 cm was noted along with left dermoid cyst. We did bilateral cystectomy through single port laparoscopy.  Although there are a few case reports on huge fimbrial cysts which were managed traditionally by laparotomy and recently multiport laparoscopic surgeries, the technique of single incision laparoscopic surgery for proved benign cysts has been described here

A survey of early career psychiatrists’ of India towards homosexuality

Background: Attitude of today’s early career psychiatrists (ECPs), those who have qualified as psychiatrists in the past 7 years, will have a bearing on how homosexuality will be perceived in the coming decades. Hence a study was planned to assess these attitudes of ECPs towards homosexuality.Methods: It was an online survey based cross-sectional study. After obtaining an informed consent, the ECPs were enquired about their age, religion, gender, place of work (urban/rural), profile of work (teaching institute/clinic/hospital/community), their frequency and comfort in attending the homosexual patients and their comfort in referring their patient to a homosexual colleague. Further all the consenting ECPs were asked to fill in the heterosexual attitude towards homosexuality (HATH) scale.Results: The mean age of the study group of ECPs (n=57) was 34.07±3.12 and their male female ratio was 2.35. Most of the respondents attend 1-10 homosexual patients per year (n=49), 54 (94.73%) were comfortable handling homosexual patients and 45 (78.94%) were comfortable referring their patient to a homosexual colleague. The mean HATH score of all the ECPs was 58.51±6.67 and it did not vary across gender, place of practice (rural/urban) and profile of practice (teaching institute/clinic/hospital/community).Conclusions: The attitude of ECPs towards homosexuality is neutral and doesn’t vary across gender, place of practice or profile of practice. Most of the ECPs are comfortable handling homosexual patients and also feel comfortable referring their patients to homosexual colleagues.

Fungal infections involving maxillary sinus: a difficult diagnostic task

Fungal infections of the paranasal sinus are increasingly recognized entity both in normal and immunocompromised individuals. Aspergillosis and Mucormycoses being the commonest of all the fungal infections involving maxillary sinus manifests as two distinct entities, a non-invasive and invasive infection. It is important to distinguish the invasive disease from the non-invasive as the treatment and prognosis are different in each. These infections present a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge to the physicians. Early diagnosis is essential in order to avoid high morbidity and mortality associated with the destructive disease and to instigate treatment before irreversible condition arise. The purpose of this paper is to add a few more cases of fungal infections involving maxillary sinus to the literature in both immunocompetent and immunocompromised patients with an emphasis on the fact that early diagnosis is vital in these infections, because delay in initiation of treatment can be life threatening due to propensity of fungi to invade adjacent blood vessels and embolize to distant organs

Efficacy and tolerability of milnacipran and escitalopram: a comparative study among patients of depression

Background: The present prospective, open labelled study was designed to evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of escitalopram, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) in comparison with milnacipran, dual serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) in the treatment of major depressive disorder.Methods: Outpatients (N=120) with an ongoing/newly diagnosed ICD-10 major depressive episode and having a minimum score of 8 on the 21-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS) were assigned to escitalopram, 10–20 mg/day (54 patients) and milnacipran 50-100mg (66 patients), for an 8 week treatment period with follow up at 2nd, 4th and 8th week. The parameters for efficacy were improvement (decrease in HDRS scores at 8 weeks from baseline values), response (decrease of ≥50% in the HDRS scores) and remission (HDRS score of ≤7). Tolerability was assessed by comparing the frequency of adverse effects and drop out rate due to the same at the end of 2nd, 4th and 8th week in both the groups.Results: Improvement, Response rate and Remission rates at the end of eight weeks were 71.11%, 83.33% and58.33% for escitalopram and 59.35%, 34.14% and75.6% for milnacipran respectively. Adverse experiences were reported by 14% of patients in escitalopram group and 79.2% patients in milnacipran group at 8 weeks. Additionally, there were significantly lesser dropouts due to adverse events in escitalopram (3.70%) than in milnacipran group (30%).Conclusions: Escitalopram, the Senantiomer of citalopram, is a safe and effective antidepressant with potentially superior tolerability and comparable efficacy to the dual reuptake inhibitor, Milnacipran

Antibiotic susceptibility pattern of bacteria isolated from patients of respiratory tract infection in a tertiary care hospital of Central India

Background: Respiratory tract infections are one of the commonest types of infections affecting the Indian population and are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. To deal with multidrug resistance one should be armed with region specific data about the susceptibility patterns of antimicrobials. This study was planned to identify the common pathogens responsible for the respiratory tract infection and their antibiotic susceptibility patterns.Methods: Smears were prepared from the specimens and gram stains of all clinical samples were done. The organisms were grown on various media and identified according to the standard procedures. The susceptibility patterns of the bacterial pathogens were determined following the panel of antimicrobial agents. Descriptive statistics were used for data analysis.Results: Out of 513 samples 471 samples were further processed. Klebsiella (30.42%) was found to be commonest pathogen followed by Pseudomonas (28.36%). Ampicillin and piperacillin /tazobactam combination were found to be highly efficient against Pseudomonas (83% and 58.8% respectively), E. coli (68% and 50.7% respectively), and Klebsiella (43% and 30.3% respectively). Conclusions: In our study, we found penicillins as the most efficacious antimicrobials to treat respiratory pathogens. The study reveals that the antibiotic susceptibility pattern varies across regions. The prescription of a right antibiotic, for a right patient will help to minimize the menace of emergence of antimicrobial resistance

A review on IoT based precision irrigation planning and scheduling

Global warming and climate change are warnings showcasing water crisis. At the same time ever growing population is ultimatum to the food security. In span of such times, world has to be made a sustainable habitat. It is only possible when each ounce of resources is being measured and used judiciously. Maximum responsibility is on farmers and researchers of the world. In times of advanced technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) has surfaced as a saviour. IoT based systems have been stated as success in monitoring and control mechanisms. Thus, this paper was intended to review the control strategies and monitoring systems based on IoT. The literature incorporates basic information as well as recent trends in the field of irrigation management based on IoT

Encrypted Data Sharing in Cloud data storage using Cloud Computing

To ensure confidentiality, data owners outsource encrypted data instead of plaintexts. To share the encrypted files with other users, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-based Encryption (CP-ABE) can be utilized to conduct fine-grained and owner-centric access control. But this does not sufficiently become secure against other attacks. Many previous schemes did not grant the cloud provider the capability to verify whether a downloader can decrypt. Therefore, these files should be available to everyone accessible to the cloud storage. which will largely consume the cloud resource. The payer of the cloud service bears the expense. Besides, the cloud provider serves both as the accountant and the payee of resource consumption fee, lacking the transparency to data owners. These concerns should be resolved in real-world public cloud storage. In this paper, we propose a solution to secure encrypted cloud storages and provide resource consumption accountability. It uses CP-ABE schemes in a black-box manner and complies with arbitrary access policy of CP-ABE. We present two protocols for different settings, followed by performance and security analysis

Prescription of antihypertensive agents in the treatment of hypertension in diabetic nephropathy patients on hemodialysis

Background: All the patients with diabetic nephropathy have inherent hypertension and uncontrolled hypertension leads to deterioration in the kidney disease speedily. Aims and objectives were to analyze the prescription of antihypertensive agents in the treatment of hypertension in diabetic nephropathy patients on hemodialysis.Methods: The study was conducted on diabetic nephropathy patients on maintenance hemodialysis, in Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences, Indore (M.P.). We had included 73 diabetic nephropathy patients on maintenance hemodialysis, who provided their consent for participation in the study. Pearson coefficient of correlation was used for finding the correlation. Unpaired ‘t’ test was applied for intergroup mean comparison. A p value of0.05). An inverse and statistically not significant correlation was seen between duration of dialysis; age and use of multiple antihypertensive medications (p>0.05).Conclusions: A strong association has been reported by many between hypertension and diabetic nephropathy. It is imperative that hypertension is well controlled in all the patients of diabetic nephropathy. This will slow down the progression of kidney disease and improve the quality of life in patients with diabetic nephropathy