Prevalence, Types and Determinants of Complementary and Alternative Medications among Health Clinic Clients

Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) covers a wide range of over 100 healing approaches, philosophies and therapeutic modalities that are not provided by conventional medicine. Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) covers a wide range of healing approaches not provided by conventional medicine. Objectives: The study was aimed at identifying the prevalence , types and determinants of CAM use,  sources of information about CAM that patients usually depend upon and  reasons of using CAM, Methods: : A cross-sectional survey was used to collect data from random consecutive patients attending  two PHC centres out of ten which was selected randomly in Abha city. All the patients more than 18 years attended to the clinic during two months (March & April) /2014 was included in the study. Results: The present study included 504 patients attending the PHC centres. The mean age of the participants was  47.6 ± 10.2 years. 232(46.0%)  were Males and 272(54.0%) were females. The majority of participants were Saudi ((88.7%)) and Muslims (96.4%). Most of the participants were Illiterate or school level (82.1%) and less than half of them (42.9%) had  enough family income > 10,000 SR. About three fourths of the participants were born in city, most of them were non smokers (81.9%) and about one third of them had self-perceived stress level more than 5. About one third  (36.9%) of participants reported using CAM during the 12 months preceded the study. About half of the participants used CAM due to the personal and family beliefs and because of friends advice ( 63.4% & 46.8% ) respectively. More than half of CAM users used it regularly. 58.6% of CAM users Feeling physically & psychologically better after using it and most of them did not reported any side effects after using CAM.  Conclusions: Use of CAM is prevalent among patients attending  health clinics in Abha City. CAM is commonly used by all age groups. The significant factors found to increase the likelihood of CAM use were Saudi nationality, Illiterate and the place of birth, there were a statistical significant increase  of using CAM among participants born in village. However, factors like age, gender, income, religion, smoking and perceived stress level did not prove to be statistically significant and thus did not affect CAM prevalence significantly. Most families has strong personal belief on CAM Because of the Belief that CAM builds up the body’s own defenses and promotes self-healing and has less side effects. Key words: Prevalence, Determinants, Complementary,  Alternative Medications, Client

Exact theory and approximations for optical resonators in a changing external medium

Finding reliably and efficiently the spectrum of the resonant states of an optical system under varying parameters of the medium surrounding it is a technologically important task, primarily due to various sensing applications. Computationally, it presents, however, a fundamental challenge owing to the nature of the eigenstates of an open system lacking completeness outside it. We solve this challenge by making a linear transformation of Maxwell's equations which maps perturbations of the surrounding medium onto effective perturbations within the system where the resonant states are complete. By treating such perturbations with a rigorous resonant-state expansion, we find the modified modes of the system for arbitrary homogeneous perturbations of the medium with any required accuracy. A numerically efficient single-mode approximation is shown to be highly accurate, as illustrated for various plasmonic nanoparticles, including gold nanospheres and silver bowtie antennas

Identification of potential risk factors for lower limb injuries in female team-sport athletes: a prospective cohort study

Supplementary material: Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24733938.2023.2181386#supplemental-material-section .Objectives: The purpose of this prospective cohort study was to assess the associations between lower limb injuries in female team-sport athletes and a number of factors. The potential risk factors explored included (1) lower limb strength, (2) history of life-event stress, (3) family history of ACL injuries, (4) menstrual history, and (5) history of oral contraception use. Methods: One hundred and thirty-five female athletes aged between 14 and 31 years (mean: 18.8 ± 3.6 years) from rugby union (n = 47), soccer (n = 72), and netball (n = 16) volunteered to participate in this study. Demographics, history of life-event stress, injury history and baseline data were obtained prior to the competitive season. The following strength measures were collected: isometric hip adductor and abductor strength, eccentric knee flexor strength and single leg jumping kinetics. Athletes were then followed for 12 months, and all lower limb injuries sustained were recorded. Results: One hundred and nine athletes provided one-year follow-up injury data, of whom, 44 suffered at least one lower limb injury. All athletes who reported high scores for negative life-event stress sustained lower limb injuries. Non-contact lower limb injury was positively associated with weak hip adductor strength (OR: 0.88; 95%CI: 0.78–0.98; p = 0.017), and between-limb adductor (OR: 5.65; 95%CI: 1.61–19.7.; p = 0.007) and abductor (OR: 1.95; 95%CI: 1.03–3.71; p = 0.039) strength asymmetries. Conclusion: History of life event stress, hip adductor strength, and between-limb adductor and abductor strength asymmetries offer potential novel avenues for investigating injury risk factors in female athletes.The work was supported by the University of South Wales [Scholarship]

Acceptance and Attitude towards Digital Rectal Examination for the Evaluation of Anorectal Conditions in Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia

Objectives:Digital Rectal Examination (DRE) is crucial for diagnosing various medical conditions, including prostate and colorectal cancer. Our study aims to assess the knowledge and acceptance of DRE among the Saudi population.Methodology:This cross-sectional study used a bilingual online survey distributed among Saudi residents in the Eastern Province. The survey included 22 questions on demographics, DRE awareness, and acceptance. Data was analyzed using SPSS.Results:Out of 443 participants, 65.2% were male, and 53.7% were aged 18-25 years. Awareness of DRE was high (65.7%), but only 21.7% had undergone the procedure. 56.0% would agree to a DRE if recommended by a doctor, but 57.0% cited shame and disgust as barriers. Pain (61.4%), mass sensation (57.1%), and bleeding (53.7%) were key symptoms prompting acceptance. Cultural and traditional factors were significant barriers for 57.6% of participants, and 49.0% would consider traditional medicine for anal and rectal diseases. Knowledge about hemorrhoids was varied, with 46.2% correctly identifying them as dilated anal blood vessels, and preventive measures included dietary and behavioral adjustments.Conclusions:There is a need for educational efforts to improve DRE acceptance in Saudi Arabia. Addressing cultural barriers and misconceptions can enhance preventive healthcare practices and early disease detection

An automated approach to identify scientific publications reporting pharmacokinetic parameters [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]

Pharmacokinetic (PK) predictions of new chemical entities are aided by prior knowledge from other compounds. The development of robust algorithms that improve preclinical and clinical phases of drug development remains constrained by the need to search, curate and standardise PK information across the constantly-growing scientific literature. The lack of centralised, up-to-date and comprehensive repositories of PK data represents a significant limitation in the drug development pipeline.In this work, we propose a machine learning approach to automatically identify and characterise scientific publications reporting PK parameters from in vivo data, providing a centralised repository of PK literature. A dataset of 4,792 PubMed publications was labelled by field experts depending on whether in vivo PK parameters were estimated in the study. Different classification pipelines were compared using a bootstrap approach and the best-performing architecture was used to develop a comprehensive and automatically-updated repository of PK publications. The best-performing architecture encoded documents using unigram features and mean pooling of BioBERT embeddings obtaining an F1 score of 83.8% on the test set. The pipeline retrieved over 121K PubMed publications in which in vivo PK parameters were estimated and it was scheduled to perform weekly updates on newly published articles. All the relevant documents were released through a publicly available web interface (https://app.pkpdai.com) and characterised by the drugs, species and conditions mentioned in the abstract, to facilitate the subsequent search of relevant PK data. This automated, open-access repository can be used to accelerate the search and comparison of PK results, curate ADME datasets, and facilitate subsequent text mining tasks in the PK domain.</ns4:p

AnBx::Automatic Generation and Verification of Security Protocols Implementations

The AnBx compiler is a tool for automatic generation of Java implementations of security protocols specified in a simple and abstract model that can be formally verified. In our model-driven development approach, protocols are described in AnBx, an extension of the Alice &amp; Bob notation. Along with the synthesis of consistency checks, the tool analyses the security goals and produces annotations that allow the verification of the generated implementation with ProVerif

Harnessing Fe2O3 to improve HAP composites: Investigating radiation shielding, mechanical attributes, and magnetic field effects

Hydroxyapatite (HAP) bio-composites play a prominent role in addressing the reparative and replacement needs of human bone and dental tissues. Despite the suboptimal mechanical characteristics inherent in pure HAP, strength and durability enhancements have been achieved by incorporating various alloys and materials. The provided study delves into the radiation shielding and mechanical attributes of Fe2O3-reinforced HAP composites intended for use as implants, featuring Fe2O3 concentrations at 0.0, 2.5, 5.0, and 7.5 wt%. In addition, by leveraging the robust FLUKA Monte Carlo simulation code, the study explores the composites' response to the magnetic field. The findings suggest that augmenting the Fe2O3 content improves radiation shielding and mechanical properties in the chosen samples. Furthermore, in the absence of a magnetic field, the particles' spatial distribution (contour curves) exhibits symmetry along the X-axis. Nonetheless, a discernible pattern becomes apparent upon exposure to a magnetic field of Bx = 5 micro Tesla. The data extracted from this article can be used for medical and therapeutic applications and subsequent studies. © 2024 Elsevier LtdPrincess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, PNU, (PNURSP2024R111); Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, PNUThe authors express their gratitude to Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University Researchers Supporting Project (Grant No. PNURSP2024R111), Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Natural Radionuclide Levels and Radiological Hazards of Khour Abalea Mineralized Pegmatites, Southeastern Desert, Egypt

Arranged from oldest to youngest, the main granitic rock units exposed in Khour Abalea are metagabbros, cataclastic rocks, ophiolitic melange, granitic rocks, pegmatite and lamprophyre dykes. The presence of radioactivity associated with the heavy bearing minerals in construction materials—like granite—increased interest in the extraction process. As it turns out, granitic rocks play an important economic part in the examination of an area’s surroundings. The radionuclide content is measured by using an NaI (Tl)-detector. In the mineralized pegmatites, U (326 to 2667 ppm), Th (562 to 4010 ppm), RaeU (495 to 1544 ppm) and K (1.38 to 9.12%) ranged considerably with an average of 1700 ppm, 2881.86 ppm, 1171.82 ppm and 5.04%, respectively. Relationships among radioelements clarify that radioactive mineralization in the studied pegmatites is magmatic and hydrothermal. A positive equilibrium condition confirms uranium addition to the studied rocks. This study determined226Ra,232Th and40K activity concentrations in pegmatites samples and assessed the radiological risks associated with these rocks. The activity concentrations of226Ra (13,176 ± 4394 Bq kg−1 ),232Th (11,883 ± 5644 Bq kg−1 ) and40K (1573 ± 607 Bq kg−1 ) in pegmatites samples (P) are greater than the global average. The high activity of the mineralized pegmatite is mainly attributed to the presence of uranium mineral (autunite), uranophane, kasolite and carnotite, thorium minerals (thorite, thorianite and uranothorite) as well as accessories minerals—such as zircon and monazite. To assess the dangerous effects of pegmatites in the studied area, various radiological hazard factors (external, internal hazard indices, radium equivalent activity and annual effective dose) are estimated. The investigated samples almost surpassed the recommended allowable thresholds for all of the environmental factors. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).The authors express their gratitude to Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University Researchers Supporting Project number (PNURSP2022R111), Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Impact of Diabetes Mellitus on Heart Failure Patients: Insights from a Comprehensive Analysis and Machine Learning Model Using the Jordanian Heart Failure Registry [Corrigendum]

Izraiq M, Almousa E, Hammoudeh S, et al. Int J Gen Med. 2024;17:2253&#x2013;2264. The authors have advised that there are percentage errors in the DM (n=1388) and No DM (n=619) columns in Table 1 on page 2256. The correct Table 1 is as follows. Table 1 Clinical Characteristics of Diabetic and Non-Diabetic Patients with Heart Failure The authors apologize for these errors

EdTech in humanitarian contexts: whose evidence base?

This study reports on the design and development of a methodological toolbox prototype for evaluating EdTech deployed in the contexts of fragility and crisis. The project adopted a bottom-up approach: training EdTech users in participatory action research approaches was followed by a comprehensive mapping of problems in the Azraq refugee camp that might be addressed through the chosen EdTech installed in a local Makerspace. Students as researchers used a developmental evaluation approach to deepen their understanding of evaluation as a concept and as a process and proceeded to match the results of their Azraq camp problem-tree analysis with evaluation questions related to the EdTech tools available in the Makerspace. The study concludes with a proposed methodological toolbox prototype, a set of approaches and processes that include research capacity building in fragile contexts, and user-led evaluation that emphasizes the notion of evaluation as a learning process driven by those designed to benefit from EdTech in fragile contexts