Specialty Preference Among Medical Students and Factors Affecting It

Introduction: Medical education is one of the core part of educational system of any country. Medical education requires undergraduate students to study a wide range of medical specialties. It is often assumed that students do not make their career preferences until after they have graduated from medical school. So the reasons and factors responsible for preferences need to be found out among medical students. Material and Methods: It was a Cross sectional study on 180 medical students to assess preference for specialty and factors responsible. Results: Out of total 190 medical students more or less everyone (97.89%) wanted to pursue specialization and majority of them (96.84%) wanted to pursue the same in Medical Field(p>0.05). majority of male students were interested to pursue their specialization in the field of medicine (37.63%), surgery (23.65%) and pediatrics (13.97%). On the other hand female students were more interested in medicine (24.17%), pediatrics (32.96%) and obstetrics & gynecology (24.17%)(p<0.05). Interest, by far was found to be most common factor (76.63%) responsible for the preference of particular medical specialty among all four groups of students (1st professional-25.27%, 2nd professional-75.92%, final professional-89.47%, interns-68.42%).Conclusion: It is thus concluded there are many factors playing role in the specialty selection and preference among the medical students and should be equally justified and addressed

Inequity in the Utilization of Maternal-Health Care Services in South Asia: Nepal, India and Sri Lanka

To review the inequities in utilization of Skilled Birth Attendants (SBA) and institutional delivery services using “Three Delays framework” to categorize and explain socio economic determinants in Nepal, India and Sri Lanka. Design: This is an article review which adopted narrative synthesis (a mixed method approach). Literature search was conducted from a relevant database including: Scopus, ProQuest and PubMed. The search was performed using developed list of search terms to find out published papers from Nepal, India and Sri Lanka. The paper also used data from Nepal Demographic Health Survey (NDHS, 2011), National Family Health Survey, India (NFHS, 2006) and Sri Lanka Demographic Health Survey (DHS, 2007). Findings: From 438 articles, sixteen studies were included, from Nepal, India and Sri Lanka. Findings were organised under three delays themes: (1) deciding to seek health care by women and/or her family, (2) Reaching health care facility and (3) Receiving adequate and appropriate health care at the facility. The evidence from these studies showed wide variation in use of maternal health services exist both between and within respective countries. These differences are affected by education, distance, lack of transportation, cost of transportation and cost of delivery at hospitals. Key conclusions: This study has shown high variations in the use of maternal health care services in South Asian countries. Nepal and India had lower access and higher inequalities in utilization of SBAs at delivery and institutional delivery by socio-economic determinants compared with Sri Lanka

Prospective study of comparing efficacy of Continuous Subcutaneous Insulin Infusion of Insulin Aspart versus Multiple Daily Injection of Insulin Aspart/Insulin Glargine in patients of Type 1 Diabetic mellitus

Background: Intensive insulin therapy is an aggressive treatment approach to control the blood sugar levels of diabetic patient. Multiple daily injection (MDI) therapy and continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) are current methods of it. Intensive insulin therapy requires close monitoring of blood sugar levels along with multiple doses of insulin. Aims and Objective: To compare the CSII of insulin aspart with MDI of insulin aspart / insulin glargine in type 1 diabetic (T1DM) patients previously treated with CSII. Materials and Methods:&nbsp; Eighty T1DM patients were randomly selected. Initially for first week all subjects were kept on insulin aspart by CSII. After one week 40 subjects shifted to MDI therapy i.e. insulin aspart before meal and insulin glargine at bedtime and 40 subjects remained with CSII. After 5 weeks of first treatment subjects were shifted to the alternate treatment for 5 weeks. During the last week of each treatment blood glucose was monitored for 48 to 72 h continuously. Results: Mean serum fructosamine levels were significantly lower after CSII therapy than after MDI therapy (343 ± 47 vs. 355 ± 50 µmol/l, respectively; P = 0.0001). Continuous glucose monitoring profiles over a 24-h time period showed that glucose exposure was 24 and 40% lower for CSII than MDI. Hypoglycemic episodes were reported as 92% in CSII and 94% in MDI. Conclusion: Subject on CSII therapy with insulin aspart showed lower glycemic exposure without enhanced risk of hypoglycemia, as compared to the subjects on MDI with insulin aspart and insulin glargine

Assessment of maintenance breeding methods in maize (Zea mays L.)

An investigation was conducted at IASc. BHU, Varanasi (Rabi 2014-15 to Kharif 2017) with four maize inbreds using three maintenance methods (selfing, half-sibbing and full-sibbing) for four generations in which a significant amount of genetic correlation was found between the morphological and molecular analyses. The comparison offour inbreds revealed a deviation in the clustering pattern after the four generations of maintenance. A maximum similarity coefficient was recorded between HKI 193-1 FS and LM 10 FS lines; full-sibbing showed the highest similarity between the first and fourth generation. Most of the inbreds followed a similar clustering pattern in morphological as well as in molecular diversity analyses. HKI 1105 is considered as most stable inbred in terms of giving a wide range of partitioning the regression coefficient. The quadratic and cubic trend through the graphical method showed self-ingled to a negative [cb1] response as well as maximum changes whereas, the full-sibbingmethod recorded with the minimum changes over the generations. Comparison of the combining ability of the inbreds by three methods revealed that CML-161 followed by HKI 1105 recorded maximum and LM 10 recorded minimum significant GCA effects. Through all the experiments it was proved that selfing caused the highest lossof vigour whereas full-sibbing was most stable