Modeling the Factors Associated with Incomplete Immunization among Children

Immunization is a precautionary measure that helps to stop diseases before their occurrence. Vaccine-preventable diseases are a primary cause of death among children under the age of five in many developing nations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the immunization status and associated demographic characteristics among children aged 12-23 months in Punjab, Pakistan. The study used the data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) for Punjab, Pakistan. Data were collected from caregivers using interviewer-administered questionnaires. To summarize the data, descriptive statistics are computed, and logistic regression is used to identify the significant factors that are responsible for complete immunization among the children in Punjab. Odds ratios, 95% CI, and Chi-square statistics were computed to identify the factors associated with no or partial immunization. The prevalence of complete immunization coverage was 89.1%. Women in the rich wealth quantile had the highest odds of completing the immunization for their children (AOR = 2.314; 95% CI: 1.642-3.261) compared to those who are poor. Those in rural areas were more likely to fully vaccinate their children (AOR = 1.54; 95% CI: 1.232-1.925) compared to those in urban areas. Those in the highest level of the educational group (AOR = 2.639; 95% CI: 1.800-3.87) are more likely to complete vaccination for their children compared to those with no formal education. However, female children are less likely to complete immunization compared to male children (AOR = 0.813; 95% CI: 0.687-0.963). The immunization status of children shows a significant association with maternal education, wealth status, and area of residence

The effects of different types of diets on obese individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetics

The United Nation set out a goal to reduce poverty rates by 50% as part of its millennial goals, which was reached in 2010. Despite this reduction, attention is still given by organisations to decrease poverty further. Obesity was also mentioned in the UN report, however despite and the global effort, its rate is increasing exponentially with projections of a billion adults being obese by 2025. Historically this has been explained by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which state that the most basic need of all people is food, which led to the belief that affordable food choices usually not as healthy as others and usually contains food groups which are known to contribute to obesity. Obesity can lead to diabetes which is likely preventable. This systematic review aim was to investigate the effect of food groups such as carbohydrate, protein and fat in different type of diets compared to the Mediterranean diet, to determine which diet provided the best benefit to decreasing fasting glucose, body mass index, waist circumference, low density cholesterol, systolic blood pressure levels as well as increasing high density cholesterol levels. This review concluded that low carbohydrate diet provided the best benefits compared to high protein, high fat and Mediterranean diet. A ketogenic diet was not as effective as standard low carbohydrate diet due to a risk of dehydration. Based on these findings, this review recommends that the e best diet is that contains a combination of low carbohydrate, high protein and high fat

Post-Operative Complications of Surgery for Chronic Subdural Hematoma (SDH) and Prevention

Objective:  The study aimed to determine the rate and type of complications during surgery for treatment of chronic subdural hematoma and assess ways for their prevention. Material and Methods:  A total of 50 patients of chronic SDH were selected from the Neurosurgery Department of Bahawal Victoria Hospital. Patients were treated surgically with a single burr hole evacuation under local anesthesia, introduced a subdural drain, nursed in a head-down position for 24 hours, and given plenty of fluids orally and intravenous route. The surgical technique involved a formation of a single burr hole at the point of maximum density. Results:  Out of 50, 43 patients recovered smoothly postoperatively and discharged on the 7th postoperative day. Two patients were re-operated due to inadequate evacuation or reaccumulation. One patient developed subdural empyema post-operatively and expired in spite of good antibiotic cover. In one patient subdural drain penetrated the brain parenchyma resulting in dysphasia. Another patient formed an intracerebral hematoma due to irrigation of the cavity with pressure. One patient with GCS 4/15 developed seizures postoperatively and expired after one hour. One patient developed gross subdural tension pneumocephalus after removing the subdural drain was re-operated and recovered. Conclusion:  Single burr hole evacuation of chronic SDH under local anesthesia is the most accepted surgical treatment. Using proper aseptic surgical techniques, the introduction of the minimum necessary length of the subdural catheter to avoid penetration into the brain parenchyma, followed by careful irrigation of the subdural cavity can help prevent complications

Examining consequences of brand hate in business-to-business relationships : The moderating role of relationship length

This study advances the ongoing scholarly research on brand hate discourse by investigating its consequences in the business-to-business (B2B) context – thereby attempting to initiate a novel trajectory in brand hate literature by including the B2B perspective. The paper demonstrates and validates a conceptual model that connects brand hate with complaining (an immediate behavior), boycott, and retaliation (next stage behaviors) adopted by business buyers with varying relationship lengths with the selling brand. Based on two empirical studies, a survey, and a scenario-based quasi-experiment, results demonstrate that aggressive behaviors of business customers are associated with buyers’ emotional processes (hate). In particular, it confirms the direct effect of brand hate on complaining, boycott, and retaliation. Further, it demonstrates the mediation mechanism of complaining between hate-boycott and hate-retaliation relationships. Interestingly, these effects are more substantial for customers with longer relationship length. The findings enrich B2B literature on negative customer-brand relationships and provide managerial guidance for devising strategies to cope with brand hate and unfavorable consequential behaviors

Compressed Sensing and Adaptive Graph Total Variation for Tomographic Reconstructions

Compressed Sensing (CS) and Total Variation (TV)- based iterative image reconstruction algorithms have received increased attention recently. This is due to the ability of such methods to reconstruct from limited and noisy data. Local TV methods fail to preserve texture details and fine structures, which are tedious for the method to distinguish from noise. In many cases local methods also create additional artifacts due to over smoothing. Non-Local Total Variation (NLTV) has been increasingly used for medical imaging applications. However, it is not updated in every iteration of the algorithm, has a high computational complexity and depends on the scale of pairwise parameters. In this work we propose using Adaptive Graph- based TV in combination with CS (ACSGT). Similar to NLTV our proposed method goes beyond spatial similarity between different regions of an image being reconstructed by establishing a connection between similar regions in the image regardless of spatial distance. However, it is computationally much more efficient and scalable when compared to NLTV due to the use of approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm. Moreover, our method is adaptive, i.e, it involves updating the graph prior every iteration making the connection between similar regions stronger. Since TV is a special case of graph TV the proposed method can be seen as a generalization of CS and TV methods. We test our proposed algorithm by reconstructing a variety of different phantoms from limited and corrupted data and observe that we achieve a better result with ACSGT in every case