Validity and reliability of a questionnaire for assessment of fatigue, health and social well-being in suburban bus drivers

Background and aims: Health, fatigue, and social well-being in suburban bus drivers are the most important factors of their function and frequency of car accidents and any disorder in this regard could lead to unpleasant outcomes for passengers and other people of society. Therefore, developing an instrument capable of identifying and expressing effective factors on this occupation well seems necessary. The present study was conducted to validate a questionnaire of fatigue, health, and social well-being in bus drivers. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 285 suburban bus drivers in Soffeh and Kaveh bus terminals of Isfahan, Iran. Simple random sampling was done. After the questionnaire was translated, its validity was assessed by a panel of experts, calculation of content validity ratio (CVR), content validity index (CVI), and exploratory factor analysis. The questionnaire’s reliability was assessed by test-retest and internal consistency and for this purpose, respectively; internal consistency coefficient (ICC) and Cronbach’s alpha were used. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS software. Results: In determining face validity, occupation control was deleted. Also, organizational support was deleted from organizational factors and assessed independently as “Employer’s support”. Mean CVI of the questionnaire was obtained 0.92 and in determining CVR, for most items the values higher than 0.65 were measured. Exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation yielded three factors with Eigen value of higher than one as follows: Health, organizational factors, and fatigue. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was obtained 0.882 for the whole questionnaire and total ICC was obtained 0.87. Conclusion: This study represented suitable evidence on strength of factor construct and instrument reliability and could be considered by researchers as a tool for research, training, and practical purposes in bus drivers

Efficacy of Probiotic Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 in Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome: a Double Blind Placebo-controlled Randomized Trial

AIM: to evaluate potential improvement effect for probiotic E. coliNissle 1917 in the management of refractory IBS in an Iranian population. METHODS: a double blind placebo controlled approach has been used in the current clinical trial. 139 confirmed IBS patients were included into the study, and were given probiotic E.coli Nissle 1917 for 6 weeks. 11 items Birmingham IBS Symptom Questionnairehas been used for evaluation of changes in the symptoms every 2 weeks. CONCLUSION: probiotic therapy with E.coli Nissle 1917 was not able to induce significant improvement in the symptoms of patients with non-categorized IBS. Nevertheless, when IBS patients were recategorized to subgroups according to their main symptoms, evaluation of the efficacy of the probiotic on some individual items in the symptom list reached the significance level. Prospective clinical trials are recommended to confirm our findings. RESULTS: sixty eight subjects (49) were males. Mean±SD age of the participants was 38±13.3 years. 49(35.3) of the patients were diarrhea-predominant. The total scores showed no significant difference between the intervention vs. control group(-6.7±6.8 vs. -6.7±6.5, respectively; p=0.95); neither did any of the questionnaire items any significant alterations in the two groups. After stratification of patients based on their IBS type, diarrhea-predominant patients showed a positive response to the probiotic improving their sleep (p=0.05 and 0.03 at weeks 2 and 6, respectively). Patients with constipation-predominant IBS showed no response to the probiotic; while patients with diarrhea-constipation mixed IBS showed unfavorable response to the probiotic in the need for strain to pass a motion compared to the placebo (p=0.03 and 0.02 at weeks 4 and 6, respectively)

Prevalence of antimicrobial resistance in Helicobacter pylori isolates from Iran

Helicobacter pylori, a gram negative bacterium is capable of being resistant to a wide spectrum of antimicrobial drugs. The prevalence of antibiotic resistance in H. pylori strains differs amongst distinct geographical areas and has increased worldwide. Therefore, information concerning the prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant H. pylori strains is important in predicting therapeutic response. In this study, drug susceptibility of H. pylori in patients was investigated in Laleh hospital, Tehran, Iran from 2007 - 2008. 104 antral biopsies of patients with non ulcer dyspepsia and peptic ulcer were cultured. Susceptibility patterns were determined by disk diffusion method. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) was performed for resistant isolates of H. pylori. In our study, 51.5% of clinical isolates showed resistance to metronidazole. All of the isolates were sensitive to other antibiotic disks including clarithromycin, amoxicillin, tetracycline and furazolidone. MIC was determined as 16 μg/ml in 5.8% and 32 μg/ml in 94.1% of isolates for metronidazole resistance isolates. The results indicated that the major drug resisted by H. pylori is metronidazole and it should be considered when recommending drugs to patients in this region.Keywords: Helicobacter pylori, antimicrobial resistance, MICAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 9(36), pp. 5962-5965, 6 September, 201

Development and optimization of a new suspension system for lower limb prosthesis

The increasing rate of lower limb amputations reinforces the need to develop a new suspension system that provides a better quality of life for the lower limb amputees. This study aimed to present a novel suspension system that improves amputee’s satisfaction in terms of donning and doffing process of the prosthetic lower limb. The design of the proposed suspension system was developed following the design methodology, to establish the amputee’s needs, objectives, functions, requirements and specifications in order to op-timize the final solution. The final solution is a combination of a guiding and fixation mechanisms that improve the donning and doffing process by driv-ing the serrated pin to the fixation system. The proposed suspension system is a good alternative to improve the quality of life of amputees with lower activity level on the daily basis.(undefined

Early Disruption of the Microbiome Leading to Decreased Antioxidant Capacity and Epigenetic Changes: Implications for the Rise in Autism

Currently, 1 out of every 59 children in the United States is diagnosed with autism. While initial research to find the possible causes for autism were mostly focused on the genome, more recent studies indicate a significant role for epigenetic regulation of gene expression and the microbiome. In this review article, we examine the connections between early disruption of the developing microbiome and gastrointestinal tract function, with particular regard to susceptibility to autism. The biological mechanisms that accompany individuals with autism are reviewed in this manuscript including immune system dysregulation, inflammation, oxidative stress, metabolic and methylation abnormalities as well as gastrointestinal distress. We propose that these autism-associated biological mechanisms may be caused and/or sustained by dysbiosis, an alteration to the composition of resident commensal communities relative to the community found in healthy individuals and its redox and epigenetic consequences, changes that in part can be due to early use and over-use of antibiotics across generations. Further studies are warranted to clarify the contribution of oxidative stress and gut microbiome in the pathophysiology of autism. A better understanding of the microbiome and gastrointestinal tract in relation to autism will provide promising new opportunities to develop novel treatment modalities

Reduction Operators of Linear Second-Order Parabolic Equations

The reduction operators, i.e., the operators of nonclassical (conditional) symmetry, of (1+1)-dimensional second order linear parabolic partial differential equations and all the possible reductions of these equations to ordinary differential ones are exhaustively described. This problem proves to be equivalent, in some sense, to solving the initial equations. The ``no-go'' result is extended to the investigation of point transformations (admissible transformations, equivalence transformations, Lie symmetries) and Lie reductions of the determining equations for the nonclassical symmetries. Transformations linearizing the determining equations are obtained in the general case and under different additional constraints. A nontrivial example illustrating applications of reduction operators to finding exact solutions of equations from the class under consideration is presented. An observed connection between reduction operators and Darboux transformations is discussed.Comment: 31 pages, minor misprints are correcte

Self-Supervised Deep Equilibrium Models for Inverse Problems with Theoretical Guarantees

Deep equilibrium models (DEQ) have emerged as a powerful alternative to deep unfolding (DU) for image reconstruction. DEQ models-implicit neural networks with effectively infinite number of layers-were shown to achieve state-of-the-art image reconstruction without the memory complexity associated with DU. While the performance of DEQ has been widely investigated, the existing work has primarily focused on the settings where groundtruth data is available for training. We present self-supervised deep equilibrium model (SelfDEQ) as the first self-supervised reconstruction framework for training model-based implicit networks from undersampled and noisy MRI measurements. Our theoretical results show that SelfDEQ can compensate for unbalanced sampling across multiple acquisitions and match the performance of fully supervised DEQ. Our numerical results on in-vivo MRI data show that SelfDEQ leads to state-of-the-art performance using only undersampled and noisy training data

Group classification of (1+1)-Dimensional Schr\"odinger Equations with Potentials and Power Nonlinearities

We perform the complete group classification in the class of nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations of the form $i\psi_t+\psi_{xx}+|\psi|^\gamma\psi+V(t,x)\psi=0$ where $V$ is an arbitrary complex-valued potential depending on $t$ and $x,$ $\gamma$ is a real non-zero constant. We construct all the possible inequivalent potentials for which these equations have non-trivial Lie symmetries using a combination of algebraic and compatibility methods. The proposed approach can be applied to solving group classification problems for a number of important classes of differential equations arising in mathematical physics.Comment: 10 page

Nonisospectral integrable nonlinear equations with external potentials and their GBDT solutions

Auxiliary systems for matrix nonisospectral equations, including coupled NLS with external potential and KdV with variable coefficients, were introduced. Explicit solutions of nonisospectral equations were constructed using the GBDT version of the B\"acklund-Darboux transformation

Type 1 diabetes genetic risk score discriminates between monogenic and Type 1 diabetes in children diagnosed at the age of < 5 years in the Iranian population

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordAim To examine the extent to which discriminatory testing using antibodies and Type 1 diabetes genetic risk score, validated in European populations, is applicable in a non‐European population. Methods We recruited 127 unrelated children with diabetes diagnosed between 9 months and 5 years from two centres in Iran. All children underwent targeted next‐generation sequencing of 35 monogenic diabetes genes. We measured three islet autoantibodies (islet antigen 2, glutamic acid decarboxylase and zinc transporter 8) and generated a Type 1 diabetes genetic risk score in all children. Results We identified six children with monogenic diabetes, including four novel mutations: homozygous mutations in WFS1 (n=3), SLC19A2 and SLC29A3, and a heterozygous mutation in GCK. All clinical features were similar in children with monogenic diabetes (n=6) and in the rest of the cohort (n=121). The Type 1 diabetes genetic risk score discriminated children with monogenic from Type 1 diabetes [area under the receiver‐operating characteristic curve 0.90 (95% CI 0.83–0.97)]. All children with monogenic diabetes were autoantibody‐negative. In children with no mutation, 59 were positive to glutamic acid decarboxylase, 39 to islet antigen 2 and 31 to zinc transporter 8. Measuring zinc transporter 8 increased the number of autoantibody‐positive individuals by eight. Conclusions The present study provides the first evidence that Type 1 diabetes genetic risk score can be used to distinguish monogenic from Type 1 diabetes in an Iranian population with a large number of consanguineous unions. This test can be used to identify children with a higher probability of having monogenic diabetes who could then undergo genetic testing. Identification of these individuals would reduce the cost of treatment and improve the management of their clinical course.Wellcome TrustDiabetes U