Effectiveness of supportive educational intervention on knowledge, self-care behavior, disease activity and health status among arthritis patients

Background: Arthritis is the group of conditions affecting the joints and typically causes swelling, pain and stiffness. Osteoarthritis & rheumatoid arthritis are the most common type of arthritis. Patient education should lead not only to changes in knowledge, but also to changes in behavior and in health status. Objective of the study was to assess effectiveness of supportive educational intervention on knowledge, self-care behaviour, disease activity and health status among arthritis patients.Methods: Pre-experimental, one group pre-test post-test research design (O1 × O2) was used. Total 20 patients of osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis were selected for the study by purposive sampling technique.Results: There was very high statistical significant difference in the mean pre-test and post test score of knowledge, self-care behavior, disease activity and health status among arthritis patients at p value was 0.001 level of significance. The study found significant fair correlation between knowledge gain score and self-care behaviour gain score, self-care behaviour gain score and reduction of disease activity and self-care behaviour gain score and health status at p value was 0.01 level of significance.Conclusions: Study concludes that supportive educational intervention is effective to enhance knowledge, self-care behaviour & health status among arthritis patients

Analysis of the pattern of ADR’s reported to an ADR monitoring center in South India: a prospective study

Background: All medicines with an ability to produce a desired therapeutic effect will also have the potential to cause unwanted adverse effects. It has been established that ~ 2.9%-5.6% of all hospital admissions are caused by Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) & as many as 35% of the hospitalized patients experience an ADR during their hospital stay. An incidence of fatal ADRs is 0.23%-0.41%. In some countries, ADRs rank among the top 10 leading causes of mortality. In order to increase awareness, observe the pattern of ADRs and communicate scientific data to prevent ADRs, this study was undertaken.Methods: It was a prospective observational study conducted at a tertiary hospital in Kochi. All the spontaneously reported ADRs were assessed and analyzed for type, severity and causality.Results: A total of 120 ADRs were reported during the study period. Most of the ADRs were seen in females in the age group of 61-70 years. Skin and appendage disorders were the most common manifestation of different type of ADRs (49.2%). Antineoplastic and immunomodulating agents (30.8%), followed by anti-infectives for systemic use (29.2%) were mostly implicated in the causation of ADRs. Majority of the ADRs were of mild to moderate in severity (89.2%).Conclusions: Although small, but significant number of patients had severe ADRs. Hence, we require a robust system for monitoring the medication use process. So that we can prevent and reduce the morbidity and mortality due to therapeutic agents

Proteinuria in early detection of human leptospirosis

Background: Leptospirosis is an infectious disease caused by spirochetes bacteria Leptospira spp. and is reported from all over the world. As the clinical signs and symptoms of Leptospirosis often are nonspecific and the disease is early mistaken for other major infectious febrile illness, laboratory test to confirm the clinical diagnosis thus is essential for optimal treatment and patient management.Methods: Serum and urine samples were collected from patients clinically suspected cases of Leptospirosis. Preparations of urine concentrate by precipitation and centrifugation.Results: It was interesting to note that immunoglobulins are present in the urine protein concentrate of patients with Leptospirosis on the day of admission in the hospital, with urine albumin reports either positive or negative. By ELISA test it was noted that antibodies present in urine and serum were of both IgM and IgG class against the Leptospiral antigens from three pathogenic serovars and one non-pathogenicserovars. In the immunospot test which was done and compared with standard ELISA test for serum antibodies using same antigen showed that antibodies present in urine protein concentrate, which was collected on the day of admission when patients come with suspecting symptoms of Leptospirosis.Conclusions: Proteinuria is the most frequent abnormality noted in all patients at some stage of illness. This is the first report on the presence of immunoglobulins in urine samples, which were found to be of IgM and IgG classes. These findings are of significant diagnostic potential as a simple immune-spot test can be done for detecting anti-leptospiral antibodies in urine samples of suspected cases. The present attempt was aimed at developing an immunospot test, a simple and rapid diagnostic test to detect Leptospirosis using urine samples of clinically suspected patients of the infection at the earliest. It was found to be in good correlation with standard ELISA method which is being used to detect serum antibodies in Leptospira infected patients using the same antigen

Automatic Optic Disc Boundary Extraction from Color Fundus Images

Efficient optic disc segmentation is an important task in automated retinal screening. For the same reason optic disc detection is fundamental for medical references and is important for the retinal image analysis application. The most difficult problem of optic disc extraction is to locate the region of interest. Moreover it is a time consuming task. This paper tries to overcome this barrier by presenting an automated method for optic disc boundary extraction using Fuzzy C Means combined with thresholding. The discs determined by the new method agree relatively well with those determined by the experts. The present method has been validated on a data set of 110 colour fundus images from DRION database, and has obtained promising results. The performance of the system is evaluated using the difference in horizontal and vertical diameters of the obtained disc boundary and that of the ground truth obtained from two expert ophthalmologists. For the 25 test images selected from the 110 colour fundus images, the Pearson correlation of the ground truth diameters with the detected diameters by the new method are 0.946 and 0.958 and, 0.94 and 0.974 respectively. From the scatter plot, it is shown that the ground truth and detected diameters have a high positive correlation. This computerized analysis of optic disc is very useful for the diagnosis of retinal diseasesCochin University of Science and Technology(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 5, No. 7, 201