Effect of diuretics on sodium, potassium and chloride levels- a cross sectional study

Background: Diuretics are one of the widely used class of drugs used in various cardiovascular and other disorders. However, they can cause various metabolic adverse effects, electrolyte imbalance being among important changes.Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted in which patients diagnosed with hypertension for at least one month were included. Over a period of 6 months patients were enrolled irrespective of whether they were taking diuretics or not. Demographic details, drug therapy and electrolyte levels were recorded in a proforma. Data was analyzed for difference in serum electrolyte levels between diuretic and nondiuretic groups as well as between different diuretic groups.Results: Out of total 177 participants, 71 were on diuretic therapy. There was significant difference in mean serum sodium (S. Na), potassium (S. K) and chlorine (S. Cl) levels between diuretic and nondiuretic groups (P<0.05). Hyponatremia, hypokalemia and hyperkalemia were observed. Thiazide diuretic group showed significantly greater hyponatremia compared to other diuretics (P=0.028). Hyperkalemia was observed in participants receiving K sparing diuretic or combination of loop and K sparing diuretics. Old age and number of comorbidities showed negative association with S. Na. Females had significantly more hyponatremia than male participants.Conclusions: The study confirms that diuretics cause various abnormalities in electrolytes namely Na and K levels. Old age, comorbidities and female sex are risk factors for hyponatremia

Knowledge and awareness regarding various aspects of early childhood caries among general dental practitioners of Gujarat, India: A questionnaire study

Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the amount of knowledge and awareness regarding early childhood caries (ECC) among general dental practitioners of Gujarat state. Materials and Methods: A list of inquiries by means of questionnaires for gauging the knowledge regarding ECC was sent via E-mail to 500 general dental practitioners utilizing Google online survey form. Results: The results were based on the answers given by the participants according to their own perception and were quantified accordingly with the help of a pie chart. Conclusion: Although Dental Practitioners have good awareness regarding ECC, there is a need to update their knowledge in order to contribute towards the prevention and treatment of ECC

CNN Variants for Computer Vision: History, Architecture, Application, Challenges and Future Scope

Computer vision is becoming an increasingly trendy word in the area of image processing. With the emergence of computer vision applications, there is a significant demand to recognize objects automatically. Deep CNN (convolution neural network) has benefited the computer vision community by producing excellent results in video processing, object recognition, picture classification and segmentation, natural language processing, speech recognition, and many other fields. Furthermore, the introduction of large amounts of data and readily available hardware has opened new avenues for CNN study. Several inspirational concepts for the progress of CNN have been investigated, including alternative activation functions, regularization, parameter optimization, and architectural advances. Furthermore, achieving innovations in architecture results in a tremendous enhancement in the capacity of the deep CNN. Significant emphasis has been given to leveraging channel and spatial information, with a depth of architecture and information processing via multi-path. This survey paper focuses mainly on the primary taxonomy and newly released deep CNN architectures, and it divides numerous recent developments in CNN architectures into eight groups. Spatial exploitation, multi-path, depth, breadth, dimension, channel boosting, feature-map exploitation, and attention-based CNN are the eight categories. The main contribution of this manuscript is in comparing various architectural evolutions in CNN by its architectural change, strengths, and weaknesses. Besides, it also includes an explanation of the CNN’s components, the strengths and weaknesses of various CNN variants, research gap or open challenges, CNN applications, and the future research direction