ABSTRACT
Background: Smoking electronic cigarette is a current world phenomenon, however, the vaping community had ignorant about its health effects. Considering this view, this study was conducted to determine the level of knowledge and attitude toward e-cigarette and factors associated with it.Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among adults in the KOSPEN locality in Kuching district. Six out of the 64 KOSPEN localities had been chosen randomly as study locations. Systematic random sampling with replacement method was used to select the respondent. A total of 354 adults were interviewed by face to face interview using adapted and validated questionnaire. The data entry and analysis were done by IBM SPSS Version 22.0. A p<0.05 was considered as statistically significant.Results: Data revealed that 66% of the respondents admitted that they heard about e-cigarette. Among them 54.3% of the respondent had good knowledge about e-cigarette. However, more than half (52.8%) do not support the use of e-cigarette. Bi-variate analysis revealed that male gender and attitude towards supporting e-cigarette was significantly associated with practice of e-cigarette (p<0.05). However, for the conventional practice of smoking, age, gender, marital status, level of education and occupation found to be significantly associated with practice of conventional smoking.Conclusions: Though the study did not depict the national scenarios of e-smoking and conventional cigarette smoking as well, but the factors identified in this study appeared to be policy options for the programme managers, health administration, and health educators designing the preventive programmes against e-smoking and conventional smoking
ABSTRACT
Hepatitis C virus [HCV] infection rate is rising in the underdeveloped world and genotype 3 is the 2nd most common subtype to involve. Sofosbuvir has shown good results in the recent times
Objective: To determine the efficacy of sofosbuvir for the treatment of hepatitis c genotype 3
Study Design: This was a descriptive case series study
Place of Study: Medical wards of Sheikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore
Period: From January 2016 to July 2016
Methodology: The cases of HCV infection of genotype 3 assessed by PCR were included. These cases then were treated with oral sofosbuvir in a dose of 400 mg daily along with RBV with age appropriate doses. The efficacy was labelled as yes when there was negative result on PCR done at completion of 3 months. Results: In the present study there were total 200 patients that had HCV PCR positive for genotype III, out of which 112 [56%] were males and 88 [44%] were females with mean age of 46.21 +/- 4.27 years. Efficacy of sofosbuvir was seen in 184 [92%] of the patients. This efficacy was better in those that had age 50 or less where it was seen in 118 [94.4%] of cases as compared to 66 [88%] with age more than this [p=0.07]. The duration of HCV less than 1 year revealed success rate of 96.67% as compared to 90% with p value of 0.08
Conclusion: Sofosbuvir has shown a very high efficacy rate in cases with HCV infection due to genotype 3 and results were near significantly better in those that had age less than 50 years and infection for less than 1 year