Agreement between heart failure patients and their primary caregivers on symptom assessment

Background: To decrease the readmission rate of heart failure [HF] patients, patients and their caregivers [CGs] should participate in symptoms assessment. This study aimed to assess the agreement between HF patients and their CGs on symptoms assessment

Methods: Using a correlational design, 100 HF patients with their CGs [100 dyads] were recruited from Department of Cardiology, Iranshahr, during August-December 2014. Data were collected using modified Heart Failure Symptom Survey [HFSS].Pearson and intra-class correlation coefficients [ICC] were used to analyze the degree of agreement within HF dyads, using SPSS16. The level of significance was set at 0.05

Results: The most frequent and severe symptom assessed equally by partners was shortness of breath [SOB]. Dyads had a good agreement on assessment of extremity swelling [r=0.87, P

Conclusion: Most of the HF dyad members did not agree with each other on the assessment of symptoms. Knowledge, skills and ability of each dyad in HF symptoms assessment should be included in the patients' discharge planning and nurses must modify their misunderstanding or inability

Spoken and Written Narrative in Persian-Speaking Students Who Received Cochlear Implant and/or Hearing Aid

OBJECTIVES: To compare narrative skills between fourth and fifth grades of Persian-speaking students with hearing impairments and typical hearing students of the same grade and also to evaluate the effects of group, sex, hearing age, and educational grade of the students on their spoken/written narrative performance. METHODS: The subjects were 174 students aged 10–13 years, 54 of whom wore cochlear implants, 60 suffered from moderate to severe hearing losses and wore hearing aids, with the remaining 60 students being typical hearing in terms of the sense of hearing. The micro- and macrostructure components of spoken and written narrative were elicited from a pictorial story (The Playful Little Elephant) and then scored by raters. RESULTS: Compared to the typical hearing, the students with hearing impairments had significantly lower scores in all of the microstructure components of narratives. However, the findings showed no significant difference among different groups in macrostructure components of narratives. It was also revealed that the students had equal performance in spoken and written narrative. Finally, factor analysis manifested that group, sex, hearing age, and educational level of children might alter the outcome measures in various interactions. CONCLUSION: Although cochlear implantation was more effective than hearing aid on spoken and written narrative skills, the Persian-speaking students with hearing impairments were seen to need additional trainings on microstructure components of spoken/written narrative.

Word finding difficulties in multiple sclerosis

Word finding difficulty is a known impairments in multiple sclerosis (MS). The purpose of this study is to adapt homophone meaning generation test to Persian language, and then examine word storage and access in multiple sclerosis patients through these three word-finding tests. This study examined the word retrieval in 90 Persian speaking patients with multiple sclerosis and 90 matched healthy controls through three tasks: semantic fluency, phonemic fluency, and homophonic meaning generation. The Persian homophone meaning generation test had a strong convergent validity with semantic and phonemic switching and an adequate divergent validity with semantic and phonemic clustering. There was a significant difference between two groups in all three tests (p<0.001) except semantic and phonetic clustering (p≥ 0.05). Multiple sclerosis is a disease affecting word access, but not the word storage, and Persian homophone meaning generation test is an appropriate, valid, and reliable test to evaluate word-finding difficulties in this population. HMGT

Speech Intelligibility in Persian Hearing Impaired Children with Cochlear Implants and Hearing Aids

The aim of present study is to evaluate and compare speech intelligibility in hearing impaired children with cochlear implants (CI) and hearing aid (HA) users and children with normal hearing (NH). The sample consisted of 45 Persian-speaking children aged 3 to 5-years-old. They were divided into three groups, and each group had 15, children, children with CI and children using hearing aids in Hamadan. Participants was evaluated by the test of speech intelligibility level. Results of ANOVA on speech intelligibility test showed that NH children had significantly better reading performance than hearing impaired children with CI and HA. Post-hoc analysis, using Scheffe test, indicated that the mean score of speech intelligibility of normal children was higher than the HA and CI groups; but the difference was not significant between mean of speech intelligibility in children with hearing loss that use cochlear implant and those using HA. It is clear that even with remarkabkle advances in HA technology, many hearing impaired children continue to find speech production a challenging problem. Given that speech intelligibility is a key element in proper communication and social interaction, consequently, educational and rehabilitation programs are essential to improve speech intelligibility of children with hearing loss.

computational visual neuroscience model for object recognition

In this study with the inspirations from both neuroscience and computer science, a combinatorial framework for object recognition was proposed having benefited from the advantages of both biologically-inspired HMAX-S architecture model for feature extraction and Extreme Learning Machine [ELM] as a classifier. HMAX model is a feed-forward hierarchical structure resembling the ventral pathway in the visual cortex of the brain and ELM is a powerful neural network, which randomly chooses hidden nodes and specifies analytically the single-hidden layer. ELM theories conjecture that this randomness may be true for biological learning in animal brains. It should be noted that the principle reason of using ELM is mainly as a result of its biological structure in order to imitate the biological object recognition system of mammalians and partly for its incredible speed which drastically lessens the runtime. Classification results are reported in Caltech101 dataset, at the focal point with its combinatorial framework serving considerable improvements over latest studies in both classification rate [96.39%] and the low runtime [0.417s]

High Frequency Tympanometry (1,000 Hz) for Neonates with Normal and Abnormal Transient Evoked Otoacoustic Emissions

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: This paper aimed at evaluating the characteristics of high-frequency (1,000 Hz) acoustic admittance (ya) for the neonates with transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE) as either pass or refer group. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Using a 1,000 Hz probe tone, 297neonates (152 male, 145 female aged 0–104 days old) were evaluated. Tympanometric parameters admittance value at +200 dapa, middle ear admittance, and tympanometric peak pressure were calculated for each tympanogram. RESULTS: The mean of ya was 0.9678 mmho in the TEOAE for the pass group and 0.7229 mmho in the refer group. The mean of acoustic admittance at +200 (y200) was 2.0657 in the TEOAE for the pass group and 1.7191 for the refer group. The mean of Tpp was 23/8591 in the TEOAE for the pass group and 59/7619 for the refer group. CONCLUSIONS: There were significant differences in the distribution of different types of tympanograms, the mean of ya, tympanic peak pressure, and y200 between the TEOAEs for the pass and the refer groups.

Prevalence of Helicobacter pylori infection in Arak, Iran during 2011

Helicobacter pylori [H. pylori] is a global pathogen with a widely varied prevalence [30%-80%] among different countries and populations. This study aims to determine the prevalence ofH. pylori in the population of Arak, Iran. This was an epidemiologic cross-sectional population-based study with multistage sampling. The population of Arak according to the 2006 census was 615,722 [493,845 urban and 121,857 rural residents]. In this survey, five urban and four rural Health Service Centers were randomly selected. The study population was divided between these centers based on the population of individuals covered by these centers. Subsequently, clustered samples were randomly chosen according to Health Care Unit Family Codes and the Right Hand Rule. After obtaining informed consent and completion of a demographic questionnaire, 5 cc of venous blood was taken from each participant for theH. pylori IgG antibody test. In this study IgG antibody against H. pylori was measured by ELISA. Of 1187 participants, 1150 [853 urban and 297 rural] completed the study. Overall, 673 [58.5%] were positive for H. pylori. The prevalence of H. pylori infection increased with age from 43.9% among those<20 years old to>70% in participants over 50 years old [p=0.002]. A total of 57% urban samples and 63.3% rural samples were H. pylori positive [p=0.028]. There was no relationship between H. pylori infection and education level [p=0.37], career [p=0.39] and income, [p=0.29] in either the urban or rural areas [p=0.64 [education level], 0.48 [career], and 0.57 [income]]. Our study showed a lower prevalence ofH. pylori compared to some Asian countries, however this prevalence was more common than Western countries. Using disinfected tap water in both urban and rural areas in addition to improved access to general health care might have a role in this relative lower prevalence