Scalable Screening and Treatment Response Monitoring for Perinatal Depression in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Common perinatal mental disorders such as anxiety and depression are a public health concern in low- and middle-income countries. Several tools exist for screening and monitoring treatment responses, which have frequently been tested globally in clinical and research settings. However, these tools are relatively long and not practical for integration into routine data systems in most settings. This study aims to address this gap by considering three short tools: The Community Informant Detection Tool (CIDT) for the identification of women at risk, the 4-item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-4) for screening women at high-risk, and the 4-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD-4) for measuring treatment responses. Studies in rural Pakistan showed that the CIDT offered a valid and reliable key-informant approach for the detection of perinatal depression by utilizing a network of peers and local health workers, yielding a sensitivity of 97.5% and specificity of 82.4%. The PHQ-4 had excellent psychometric properties to screen women with perinatal depression through trained community health workers, with a sensitivity of 93.4% and specificity of 91.70%. The HAMD-4 provided a good model fit and unidimensional construct for assessing intervention responses. These short, reliable, and valid tools are scalable and expected to reduce training, administrative and human resource costs to health systems

Impact of Employee Job Attitudes on Ecological Green Behavior in Hospitality Sector

Notwithstanding the significant contribution made by employees towards addressing environmental issues, few research studies have explored this important contemporary theme in the hospitality sector. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this research examines the direct and interactive effects of employee environmental job attitudes and behaviors on ecological practices. Using PROCESS Macros on an actual convenient sample of 508 employees working in the hospitality industry, the results show a mixture of anticipated and surprising outcomes. The anticipated outcome is associated with the direct effects of environmental attitude on ecological behavior, while surprising outcomes are in the interaction of job attitudes and behavior (customer-oriented discretionary behavior, organizational commitment). These outcomes provoke employees’ green behavior and contentment with the organization. The originality of this research is to investigate the significant contribution of employees in greening the hospitality sector in an emerging economy

Benchmarking performance of document level classification and topic modeling

Text classification of low resource language is always a trivial and challenging problem. This paper discusses the process of Urdu news classification and Urdu documents similarity. Urdu is one of the most famous spoken languages in Asia. The implementation of computational methodologies for text classification has increased over time. However, Urdu language has not much experimented with research, it does not have readily available datasets, which turn out to be the primary reason behind limited research and applying the latest methodologies to the Urdu. To overcome these obstacles, a medium-sized dataset having six categories is collected from authentic Pakistani news sources. Urdu is a rich but complex language. Text processing can be challenging for Urdu due to its complex features as compared to other languages. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (TFIDF) based term weighting scheme for extracting features, chi-2 for selecting essential features, and Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for dimensionality reduction have been used. TFIDF matrix and cosine similarity measure have been used to identify similar documents in a collection and find the semantic meaning of words in a document FastText model has been applied. The training-test split evaluation methodology is used for this experimentation, which includes 70% for training data and 30% for testing data. State-of-the-art machine learning and deep dense neural network approaches for Urdu news classification have been used. Finally, we trained Multinomial Naïve Bayes, XGBoost, Bagging, and Deep dense neural network. Bagging and deep dense neural network outperformed the other algorithms. The experimental results show that deep dense achieves 92.0% mean f1 score, and Bagging 95.0% f1 score

The effect of emotional intelligence on academic performance of medical undergraduates

Aim: To determine the association between Emotional Intelligence and academic performances of medical students at undergraduate level. Background: In our field of medical education, intelligence quotient is considered as a successful interpreter of academic performance and intelligence. However, little importance has been given to EI. Our study examined the relationship between EI and academic performance or workforce of preclinical medical students (1st and 2nd year MBBS students of Jinnah Sindh Medical University). Methods: We used a prospective, cross sectional study design and measured the EI by questionnaire based on a study by Petrides and Furnham, 2006. The grade point average (GPA) of their last semester was used to analyze the academic performance. Nonprobability consecutive technique was done. Our sample size comprises of 120 students out of which 14 were males and 106 were females of 1st and 2nd year of MBBS. The structured paper-based questionnaire also included pretest demographic information which was filled by the students, after taking a verbal consent. The data were collected in the month of July 1, 2015–July 30, 2015. Results: The number of participants was 120. The response rate was 100%. The result revealed that out of 4 factors, 2 were the most significant: well-being (P = 0.005) and sociability (P = 0.01). The value of EI was significantly higher in the male than in the female students. Conclusion: Our study proved a strong relationship between academic performance in terms of higher GPA and two individual factors of EI that were well-being and sociability. Overall EI values of male students were statistically higher and significant than female students. Thus, appropriate measures should be taken to strengthen emotional well-being in medical students for better academic performances

Amphibian fauna of Pakistan with notes on future prospects of research and conservation

Research on amphibians and their conservation have gained worldwide attention, as the group includes the highest number of threatened and Data Deficient species when compared to other vertebrates. However, amphibians have long been neglected in wildlife conservation, management decisions, policy making, and research agendas in Pakistan. In this paper, an annotated checklist of the 21 amphibian species of Pakistan, a key to their identification, and detailed discussions on variation in species, including the genera Minervarya and Sphaerotheca, are provided. We found a statistically significant difference in the morphometric measurements of males but non-significant difference in the females of the two forms (rusty dorsum and dotted dorsum) of S. maskeyi. Some genera, such as Microhyla, Uperodon, Minervarya, Allopaa, Chrysopaa, Euphlyctis, Nanorana, and Sphaerotheca, in Pakistan are in need of additional data for molecular and morphological comparisons with taxa in other South Asian countries. The predicaments of amphibian research in Pakistan are discussed, gaps identified, and suggestions are made. Although the occurrence of chytrid fungus in Pakistan is predicted of low likelihood, a lack of data merits studying the prevalence of the fungus, particularly in the northern regions of the country which exhibit complex and dynamic ecosystems. It is recommended that systematic and coordinated surveys are conducted throughout the country to build a database of species occurrences and distributions. Additionally, the monitoring of wild populations and threat mitigation, as well as appropriate legislation, are suggested as long-term measures. By adopting an inclusive wildlife conservation approach in Pakistan, amphibians could be integrated into wildlife conservation and management efforts

Technology-assisted cognitive-behavior therapy delivered by peers versus standard cognitive behavior therapy delivered by community health workers for perinatal depression: study protocol of a cluster randomized controlled non-inferiority trial

Abstract Background The lack of trained mental health professionals is a key barrier to scale-up of evidence-based psychological interventions in low and middle-income countries. We have developed an app that allows a peer with no prior experience of health-care delivery to deliver the cognitive therapy-based intervention for perinatal depression, the Thinking Healthy Programme (THP). This trial aims to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of this Technology-assisted peer-delivered THP versus standard face-to-face Thinking Healthy Programme delivered by trained health workers. Methods We will employ a non-inferiority stratified cluster randomized controlled trial design comparing the two formats of intervention delivery. A total of 980 women in the second or third trimester of pregnancy with a diagnosis of Major Depressive Episode, evaluated with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-V Disorders (SCID), will be recruited into the trial. The unit of randomization will be 70 village clusters randomly allocated in a 1:1 ratio to the intervention and control arms. The primary outcome is defined as remission from major depressive episode at 3 months postnatal measured with the SCID. Data will also be collected on symptoms of anxiety, disability, quality of life, service use and costs, and infant-related outcomes such as exclusive breastfeeding and immunization rates. Data will be collected on the primary outcome and selected secondary outcomes (depression and anxiety scores, exclusive breastfeeding) at 6 months postnatal to evaluate if the improvements are sustained in the longer-term. We are especially interested in sustained improvement (recovery) from major depressive episode. Discussion This trial will evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a technology-assisted peer-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy-based intervention in rural Pakistan. If shown to be effective, the novel delivery format could play a role in reducing the treatment gap for perinatal depression and other common mental disorders in LMIC. Trial registration The trial was registered at Clinicaltrials.gov (NCT05353491) on 29 April 2022

Chemical composition and antioxidant, antimicrobial and haemolytic activities of crambe cordifolia roots

In the current study, we investigated the chemical composition, in vitro antioxidant, antimicrobial and haemolytic activities of the crude (methanolic) and n-hexane, chloroform, and ethyl acetate extracts of roots of Crambe cordifolia Steven. The GC-MS analysis led to identification of erucic acid (20.8%), p-cymene (20.9%), palmitic acid (19.2%) and vitamin E (13.8%) as major components of methanol, n-hexane, chloroform and ethyl acetate extracts respectively. The results of spectrophotometric assays showed that the methanol extract had the highest total phenolic contents (210.3 ± 0.74 μg GAE/mg of dry plant material), total flavonoid contents (75.5 ± 0.32 μg QE/mg of dry plant material) and antioxidant potential. It was established by disc diffusion and minimum inhibitory concentration methods that, overall, the methanol extract exhibited the highest antimicrobial activity against most of the tested microbial strains (Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Pasteurella multocida, Staphylococcus aureus, Aspergillus niger and Fusarium solani) as compared with the nhexane, chloroform, and ethyl acetate extracts. The outcome of the haemolytic assay showed that the tested extract and different solvent fractions were safe to human erythrocyte membran