Exploring the Social and Environmental Determinants of Child Health in Ilorin, Nigeria

Death of children under the age of five years is a major challenge to health profile in Africa and the realization of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Sub-Saharan Africa has been shown to have performedpoorly in the effort to realize the goals due partly to the soaring infant and childhood mortality. This study examines the factors-social and environmental- that affect child health in the Sub-Saharan Africa using theexample of Ilorin in Nigeria. The study adopts a multi-stage sampling procedure to select 300 nursing mothers from the twenty wards of Ilorin metropolis while structured questionnaires was used to obtain information on the socio-economic characteristics of mothers as well as the residential quality in their households. Thus, ten variables were selected; covering residential quality, socio-economic status, access to health care and healthcare options mothers often adopt when illness occur in their children. These variables were expected to offer varying degrees of explanation to the observed pattern of child health in Ilorin metropolis. The surrogateadopted for child health in the study was occurrence of childhood diarrhea during the six weeks preceding the survey. A multiple regression analysis was used to determine the relative contributions of the selected variablesto the observed pattern of child health. The result shows that the variables in the residential quality domain offer the highest explanation for the occurrence of childhood diarrhea while all other variables also possessedpositive relationships. This finding corroborates earlier studies and draws implications for public health in cities of Africa. It particularly advocates for a deliberate intervention by urban administrators in the urban renewal processes that are ongoing in the inner parts of the traditional African cities with a view to providing basic home and environmental services in the old houses in these areas that are being renovated. The study  believes that the MDGs are achievable if micro-level interventions were given priority over and above the macro- scale solutions that may fall short of local realities.Keywords: Under-five mortality, diarrhea, residential quality, MDGs, child health, Nigeri

Spectrum of histopathological findings in postmenopausal bleeding

Objective:To determine the frequencies of histopathological findings in endometrial and endocervical biopsy samples with clinical history of Postmenopausal Bleeding (PMB). Study Design:Descriptive cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study:Section of Histopathology, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, The Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, from February 2012 to January 2013. Methodology:Atotal of 157 consecutive endometrial and endocervical biopsy specimens with history of postmenopausal bleeding were included. After microscopic examination, frequencies of histological findings in different age groups were generated. Chi-square and independent sample t-tests were applied to see whether the difference was significant which was set at p \u3c 0.05. Results:One hundred and twenty-one (77.1%) specimens showed benign pathologies while 36 (22.9%) were malignant. Endometrial polyp was seen in 67 (42.7%) cases followed by endometrial carcinomas in 25 (15.9%), endometrial hyperplasia in 21 (13.4%), cervical carcinoma in 12 (7.6%) and cervical polyps in 9 (5.7%) cases. Ahighly significant increase in the percentage of malignant and pre-malignant lesions was seen with increasing age group (p \u3c 0.001). Mean age of patients with type-2 endometrial carcinoma was higher than type-1 endometrial carcinoma but statistical significance was not observed (70.2 ±6.5 vs. 61.8 ±9.1 years respectively, p=0.069). Conclusion:Although benign pathologies were more common in postmenopausal bleeding but the collective proportion of endometrial and cervical malignancies and pre-malignant conditions was quite high. Therefore, PMB should be urgently evaluated for cause and early commencement of treatmen

Assessment of extracurricular activities relating to physical activities in primary schools in Gwagwalada Area Council, federal capital territory, Nigeria

BACKGROUNDPhysical inactivity, a phenomenon that cuts across age groups, is increasingly becoming a menace among children globally. With a rise in the obesity rates among children in the last three decades, lack of physical activity is a cause for major concern among school-aged children. AIMThis study aimed to assess extracurricular activities relating to physical activities in primary schools in Gwagwalada Area Council, of the Nigerian capital METHODOLOGYA cross-sectional study was conducted among 146 primary schools. Respondents’ interviews and direct observations were used. The findings were entered into a questionnaire adapted from School Health Program Evaluation questionnaire. RESULTWhile 5 (3.4%) of the schools surveyed allotted three periods a week for physical activities/ health education, 106 (72.6%) assigned two periods per week for this. All the schools surveyed observed break periods/ recess. A total of 39(36.8%) private schools, compared with 33(82.5%) public schools, had sports fields (p<0.001). Within the preceding year of the study, one hundred and seventeen (80.1%) of the schools staged drama as a form of periodic extracurricular activity. Inter-house sports was organized by 22(55.0%) public and 19(17.9%) private schools (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONMost of the schools carried out varying forms of extracurricular activities on a daily, weekly or annual basis. Physical activities were more commonly undertaken in public schools. Private schools should be compelled by the appropriate authorities to provide adequate space for sporting and other physical activities. The schools should be made to adopt the recommendations of the World Health Organizatio

Clinicopathological prognostic factors of oral squamous cell carcinoma: An experience of a tertiary care hospital

Locoregional recurrence accounts for majority of the treatment failures in oral cancer patients. Current study aimed to determine the predictors of recurrence and survival in patients with biopsy proven Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC) of the oral cavity. This study included 88 patients of squamous cell carcinoma treated at our institution from 2007 till 2013. Primary intervention was surgery in all patients with radiation and chemotherapy in selected patients. Primary end point was locoregional recurrence, distant metastasis and death. Out of 88 patients, 23 (26.1%) patients developed locoregional recurrence and 6 (6.8%) patients developed distant metastasis. Overall survival rate was 77.3%. Follow up ranged from 1 month to 63 months with mean of 17.8±16.2. On multivariate analysis, lymph node involvement and loco-regional recurrence were independent parameters related to decrease overall survival. Lymphovascular invasion, perineural spread, TNM stage and lymph node involvement had significant impact on recurrence

Distribution of chromosomal abnormalities commonly observed in adult acute myeloid leukemia in Pakistan as predictors of prognosis

Objective: The heterogenous response to treatment in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) can be attributed largely to the difference in cytogenetic features identified in between cases. Cytogenetic analysis in acute leukemia is now routinely used to assist patient management, particularly in terms of diagnosis, disease monitoring, prognosis and risk stratification. Knowing about cytogenetic profile at the time of diagnosis is important in order to take critical decisions in management of these patients. The study was conducted to determine the distribution of cytogenetic abnormalities in Pakistani adult patients with AML in order to have insights regarding behavior of the. method: A retrospective analysis of all the cases of AML (≥15years old) diagnosed at Aga Khan University from January 2011 to December 2016 was performed. Cytogenetic analysis was made for all cases using the trypsin-Giemsa banding technique. Karyotypes were interpreted using the International System for Human Cytogenetic Nomenclature (ISCN) criteria. Result: A total of 321 patients were diagnosed with AML during the study period, of which 288 samples successfully yielded metaphase chromosomes. The male to female ratio was 1.7:1. A normal karyotype was present in 61% (n=176) of the cases whereas, 39% (n=112) had an abnormal karyotype. Of the abnormal cases, t (8;21) (q22;q22) and t (15;17) (q22;q12) were identified in 8.3% and 4.9% cases respectively. Adverse prognostic cytogenetic subgroups including complex karyotype, monosomy 7 and t(6;9)(p23;q34) were identified in 9%, 1% and 0.7% patients respectively. Conclusion: This largest cytogenetic data in adult AML from Pakistan showed comparable prevalence of favorable prognostic karyotype to international data. The prevalence of specific adverse prognostic karyotype was low

Exploiting tweet sentiments in altmetrics large-scale data

This article aims to exploit social exchanges on scientific literature, specifically tweets, to analyse social media users’ sentiments towards publications within a research field. First, we employ the SentiStrength tool, extended with newly created lexicon terms, to classify the sentiments of 6,482,260 tweets associated with 1,083,535 publications provided by Altmetric.com. Then, we propose harmonic means-based statistical measures to generate a specialised lexicon, using positive and negative sentiment scores and frequency metrics. Next, we adopt a novel article-level summarisation approach to domain-level sentiment analysis to gauge the opinion of social media users on Twitter about the scientific literature. Last, we propose and employ an aspect-based analytical approach to mine users’ expressions relating to various aspects of the article, such as tweets on its title, abstract, methodology, conclusion or results section. We show that research communities exhibit dissimilar sentiments towards their respective fields. The analysis of the field-wise distribution of article aspects shows that in Medicine, Economics, Business and Decision Sciences, tweet aspects are focused on the results section. In contrast, in Physics and Astronomy, Materials Sciences and Computer Science, these aspects are focused on the methodology section. Overall, the study helps us to understand the sentiments of online social exchanges of the scientific community on scientific literature. Specifically, such a fine-grained analysis may help research communities in improving their social media exchanges about the scientific articles to disseminate their scientific findings effectively and to further increase their societal impact

Vision based intelligent traffic light management system using Faster R-CNN

Transportation systems primarily depend on vehicular flow on roads. Developed countries have shifted towards automated signal control, which manages and updates signal synchronisation automatically. In contrast, traffic in underdeveloped countries is mainly governed by manual traffic light systems. These existing manual systems lead to numerous issues, wasting substantial resources such as time, energy, and fuel, as they cannot make real-time decisions. In this work, we propose an algorithm to determine traffic signal durations based on real-time vehicle density, obtained from live closed circuit television camera feeds adjacent to traffic signals. The algorithm automates the traffic light system, making decisions based on vehicle density and employing Faster R-CNN for vehicle detection. Additionally, we have created a local dataset from live streams of Punjab Safe City cameras in collaboration with the local police authority. The proposed algorithm achieves a class accuracy of 96.6% and a vehicle detection accuracy of 95.7%. Across both day and night modes, our proposed method maintains an average precision, recall, F1 score, and vehicle detection accuracy of 0.94, 0.98, 0.96 and 0.95, respectively. Our proposed work surpasses all evaluation metrics compared to state-of-the-art methodologies