Purchase of prescription and OTC medicines in Slovakia: factors influencing patients' expectations and satisfaction

ABSTRACT Slovakia is a country where the purchase of OTC (over the counter) medicines outside the pharmacy is not allowed by the government. This study aimed at evaluating patients' satisfaction and acceptance of community pharmacists. Customer's behaviour and expectations influencing the purchase of prescription and OTC medicines were analyzed. A structured questionnaire having 15 multiple-choice questions was used to analyze the descriptive parameters. Data collection lasted from January to February 2014. The sample size consisted of 357 high-school educated individuals under 40 years of age. The survey showed that the prescription and OTC medicines were bought equally. The participants reported a 96.0%, 96.3% and 90.2% satisfaction rate with willingness and approach of the community pharmacist, pharmacy services and provision of drug information respectively. As for the OTC medicines, 89.5% people considered the pharmacist an expert: 88.2% purchased medicines with pharmacist's recommendation, 97.8% needed a professional counselling and 97.2% required a pharmacist's guidance. As for the prescription drugs, only 72.1% considered the pharmacist an expert: 96.3% suggested that physician's prescription was significant and 88.3% considered pharmacist's guidance in the process of selection of prescription medicines nonessential. A comprehensible and respectable conversation was highly expected in regards to both the OTC and prescription medicines

Optimal design of water treatment processes

Predicted water shortages assign water treatment a leading role in improving water resources management. One of the main challenges associated with the processes remains early stage design of techno-economically optimised purification. This work addresses the current gap by undertaking a whole-system approach of flowsheet synthesis for the production of water at desired purity at minimum overall cost. The optimisation problem was formulated as a mixed-integer non-linear programming model. Two case studies were presented which incorporated the most common commercial technologies and the major pollution indicators, such as chemical oxygen demand, dissolved organic carbon, total suspended solids and total dissolved solids. The results were analysed and compared to existing guidelines in order to examine the applicability of the proposed approach

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Consensus parameter: research methodologies to evaluate neurodevelopmental effects of pubertal suppression in transgender youth

An international interdisciplinary team of experts achieved consensus around primary methods and domains for assessing neurodevelopmental effects (i.e., benefits and/or difficulties) of pubertal suppression treatment in transgender youth.Pathways through Adolescenc

Risk of adverse outcomes associated with cardiac sarcoidosis diagnostic schemes

BackgroundMultiple cardiac sarcoidosis (CS) diagnostic schemes have been published.ObjectivesThis study aims to evaluate the association of different CS diagnostic schemes with adverse outcomes. The diagnostic schemes evaluated were 1993, 2006, and 2017 Japanese criteria and the 2014 Heart Rhythm Society criteria.MethodsData were collected from the Cardiac Sarcoidosis Consortium, an international registry of CS patients. Outcome events were any of the following: all-cause mortality, left ventricular assist device placement, heart transplantation, and appropriate implantable cardioverter-defibrillator therapy. Logistic regression analysis evaluated the association of outcomes with each CS diagnostic scheme.ResultsA total of 587 subjects met the following criteria: 1993 Japanese (n = 310, 52.8%), 2006 Japanese (n = 312, 53.2%), 2014 Heart Rhythm Society (n = 480, 81.8%), and 2017 Japanese (n = 112, 19.1%). Patients who met the 1993 criteria were more likely to experience an event than patients who did not (n = 109 of 310, 35.2% vs n = 59 of 277, 21.3%; OR: 2.00; 95% CI: 1.38-2.90; P P P = 0.18 or OR: 1.51; 95% CI: 0.97-2.33; P = 0.067, respectively).ConclusionsCS patients who met the 1993 and the 2006 criteria had higher odds of adverse clinical outcomes. Future research is needed to prospectively evaluate existing diagnostic schemes and develop new risk models for this complex disease.Cardiolog

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector during 2011 data taking

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector at the LHC during the 2011 data taking period is described. During 2011 the LHC provided proton–proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and heavy ion collisions with a 2.76 TeV per nucleon–nucleon collision energy. The ATLAS trigger is a three level system designed to reduce the rate of events from the 40 MHz nominal maximum bunch crossing rate to the approximate 400 Hz which can be written to offline storage. The ATLAS jet trigger is the primary means for the online selection of events containing jets. Events are accepted by the trigger if they contain one or more jets above some transverse energy threshold. During 2011 data taking the jet trigger was fully efficient for jets with transverse energy above 25 GeV for triggers seeded randomly at Level 1. For triggers which require a jet to be identified at each of the three trigger levels, full efficiency is reached for offline jets with transverse energy above 60 GeV. Jets reconstructed in the final trigger level and corresponding to offline jets with transverse energy greater than 60 GeV, are reconstructed with a resolution in transverse energy with respect to offline jets, of better than 4 % in the central region and better than 2.5 % in the forward direction

Measurement of the View the tt production cross-section using eμ events with b-tagged jets in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper describes a measurement of the inclusive top quark pair production cross-section (σtt¯) with a data sample of 3.2 fb−1 of proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV, collected in 2015 by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This measurement uses events with an opposite-charge electron–muon pair in the final state. Jets containing b-quarks are tagged using an algorithm based on track impact parameters and reconstructed secondary vertices. The numbers of events with exactly one and exactly two b-tagged jets are counted and used to determine simultaneously σtt¯ and the efficiency to reconstruct and b-tag a jet from a top quark decay, thereby minimising the associated systematic uncertainties. The cross-section is measured to be: σtt¯ = 818 ± 8 (stat) ± 27 (syst) ± 19 (lumi) ± 12 (beam) pb, where the four uncertainties arise from data statistics, experimental and theoretical systematic effects, the integrated luminosity and the LHC beam energy, giving a total relative uncertainty of 4.4%. The result is consistent with theoretical QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order. A fiducial measurement corresponding to the experimental acceptance of the leptons is also presented

Search for resonances in the mass distribution of jet pairs with one or two jets identified as b-jets in proton–proton collisions at √s=13TeV with the ATLAS detector

Searches for high-mass resonances in the dijet invariant mass spectrum with one or two jets identi-fied as b-jets are performed using an integrated luminosity of 3.2fb−1of proton–proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of √s=13TeVrecorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Noevidence of anomalous phenomena is observed in the data, which are used to exclude, at 95%credibility level, excited b∗quarks with masses from 1.1TeVto 2.1TeVand leptophobic Z bosons with masses from 1.1TeVto 1.5TeV. Contributions of a Gaussian signal shape with effective cross sections ranging from approximately 0.4 to 0.001pb are also excluded in the mass range 1.5–5.0TeV