Comparative study on damage identification from lso-Eigen-Value-Change contours and smeared damage model

The paper proposes two methodologies for damage identification from measured natural frequencies of a contiguously damaged reinforced concrete beam, idealised with distributed damage model. The first method identifies damage from Iso-Eigen-Value-Change contours, plotted between pairs of different frequencies. The performance of the method is checked for a wide variation of damage positions and extents. The method is also extended to a discrete structure in the form of a five-storied shear building and the simplicity of the method is demonstrated. The second method is through smeared damage model, where the damage is assumed constant for different segments of the beam and the lengths and centres of these segments are the known inputs. First-order perturbation method is used to derive the relevant expressions. Both these methods are based on distributed damage models and have been checked with experimental program on simply supported reinforced concrete beams, subjected to different stages of symmetric and un-symmetric damages. The results of the experiments are encouraging and show that both the methods can be adopted together in a damage identification scenario

Prevalence of Depression in Diabetes Mellitus: A hospital based Cross sectional study

Introduction: Diabetes is a metabolic disorder that has life-changing consequences for individuals affected by it. Diabetes may be diagnosed and treated, but the depression in these patients often goes unnoticed. Most of the time depression is not considered as an important factor and often ignored and left untreated. Depression is associated with poor health behaviors (i.e., smoking, physical inactivity, caloric intake) that increase risk of type 2 diabetes .Depression is also associated to central obesity and potentially to impaired glucose tolerance and may worsen diabetes.Objectives of the study: The primary aim is to study the prevalence of depression in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients.Materials & Methods: A hospital based observational study was carried out on diabetic patients attending the general medicine OPD in a tertiary care hospital during the period June-October2018. Results: The prevalence of depression in diabetic patients is 56% in the current study which is in par with earlier studies. In the present study, among depressed patients 38.39% had mild depression, 34.82% has moderate symptoms, 19.64% had moderately severe depression, 7.14% had very severe symptoms. On evaluation of various parameters of diabetes, the parameters that are significantly associated with depression are glycated hemoglobin ( p=0.028),Fasting blood sugar(p=0.019),Body mass index(p=0.004),Duration of diabetes(p-0.002).Depression is mostly observed in patients with diabetes duration of 7-9 years. Among the parameters evaluated in the present study, number of complications and treatment regimen (p=0.000) have showed the most significant association with severity of depression.Conclusion: Higher glycated hemoglobin value, fasting blood sugar levels and duration of diabetes, higher BMI all are significantly associated with severity of depression. The number of complications and treatment regimen in diabetes are also significantly associated with depression. As the disease burden of depression increases in terms of duration of illness or poor control or complications, the severity of depression also seems to increase. Therefore adequate screening and intervention of depression is necessary for better outcome on both diabetes and depression especially in diabetic patients with higher morbidity and longstanding illness