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]

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

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

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

Minimal information for studies of extracellular vesicles (MISEV2023): From basic to advanced approaches

© 2024 The Authors. Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, published by Wiley Periodicals, LLC on behalf of the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Extracellular vesicles (EVs), through their complex cargo, can reflect the state of their cell of origin and change the functions and phenotypes of other cells. These features indicate strong biomarker and therapeutic potential and have generated broad interest, as evidenced by the steady year-on-year increase in the numbers of scientific publications about EVs. Important advances have been made in EV metrology and in understanding and applying EV biology. However, hurdles remain to realising the potential of EVs in domains ranging from basic biology to clinical applications due to challenges in EV nomenclature, separation from non-vesicular extracellular particles, characterisation and functional studies. To address the challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field, the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) updates its 'Minimal Information for Studies of Extracellular Vesicles', which was first published in 2014 and then in 2018 as MISEV2014 and MISEV2018, respectively. The goal of the current document, MISEV2023, is to provide researchers with an updated snapshot of available approaches and their advantages and limitations for production, separation and characterisation of EVs from multiple sources, including cell culture, body fluids and solid tissues. In addition to presenting the latest state of the art in basic principles of EV research, this document also covers advanced techniques and approaches that are currently expanding the boundaries of the field. MISEV2023 also includes new sections on EV release and uptake and a brief discussion of in vivo approaches to study EVs. Compiling feedback from ISEV expert task forces and more than 1000 researchers, this document conveys the current state of EV research to facilitate robust scientific discoveries and move the field forward even more rapidly.Peer reviewe

Minimal information for studies of extracellular vesicles (MISEV2023): From basic to advanced approaches

Extracellular vesicles (EVs), through their complex cargo, can reflect the state of their cell of origin and change the functions and phenotypes of other cells. These features indicate strong biomarker and therapeutic potential and have generated broad interest, as evidenced by the steady year-on-year increase in the numbers of scientific publications about EVs. Important advances have been made in EV metrology and in understanding and applying EV biology. However, hurdles remain to realising the potential of EVs in domains ranging from basic biology to clinical applications due to challenges in EV nomenclature, separation from non-vesicular extracellular particles, characterisation and functional studies. To address the challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field, the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) updates its 'Minimal Information for Studies of Extracellular Vesicles', which was first published in 2014 and then in 2018 as MISEV2014 and MISEV2018, respectively. The goal of the current document, MISEV2023, is to provide researchers with an updated snapshot of available approaches and their advantages and limitations for production, separation and characterisation of EVs from multiple sources, including cell culture, body fluids and solid tissues. In addition to presenting the latest state of the art in basic principles of EV research, this document also covers advanced techniques and approaches that are currently expanding the boundaries of the field. MISEV2023 also includes new sections on EV release and uptake and a brief discussion of in vivo approaches to study EVs. Compiling feedback from ISEV expert task forces and more than 1000 researchers, this document conveys the current state of EV research to facilitate robust scientific discoveries and move the field forward even more rapidly

Minimal information for studies of extracellular vesicles (MISEV2023): From basic to advanced approaches

Extracellular vesicles (EVs), through their complex cargo, can reflect the state of their cell of origin and change the functions and phenotypes of other cells. These features indicate strong biomarker and therapeutic potential and have generated broad interest, as evidenced by the steady year-on-year increase in the numbers of scientific publications about EVs. Important advances have been made in EV metrology and in understanding and applying EV biology. However, hurdles remain to realising the potential of EVs in domains ranging from basic biology to clinical applications due to challenges in EV nomenclature, separation from non-vesicular extracellular particles, characterisation and functional studies. To address the challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field, the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) updates its ‘Minimal Information for Studies of Extracellular Vesicles’, which was first published in 2014 and then in 2018 as MISEV2014 and MISEV2018, respectively. The goal of the current document, MISEV2023, is to provide researchers with an updated snapshot of available approaches and their advantages and limitations for production, separation and characterisation of EVs from multiple sources, including cell culture, body fluids and solid tissues. In addition to presenting the latest state of the art in basic principles of EV research, this document also covers advanced techniques and approaches that are currently expanding the boundaries of the field. MISEV2023 also includes new sections on EV release and uptake and a brief discussion of in vivo approaches to study EVs. Compiling feedback from ISEV expert task forces and more than 1000 researchers, this document conveys the current state of EV research to facilitate robust scientific discoveries and move the field forward even more rapidly