ABSTRACT
Background: Health-care providers (HCP) engaged in demanding work like being involved in the care of COVID-19 positive and suspected cases are likely to have a lot of stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. It will be noteworthy to have an idea about the magnitude of the mental health problems in them to formulate effective intervention strategies for their well-being. Aims and Objectives: The aim of this study is to determine whether frontline HCP engaged in the treatment and care of COVID-19 positive and suspect cases experienced increased mental health problems. Methodology: Two hundred and fifty-one frontline HCPs engaged in COVID-19 duty and 97 nonfrontline (controls) HCP were assessed and compared using tools like General Health Questionnaire 12, Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. Appropriate statistical tools such as analysis of variance and Chi-square were used. Results: Frontline HCP who were directly involved in COVID-19 duty had a higher proportion (28.3%) of psychological morbidities as compared to 19.6% among controls; HCP-frontline had significantly 2.17 times chances of having psychological distress compared to HCP controls. Among, HCP-frontline 13.1% had clinical depression, whereas in the HCP control, this was 6.2%. Further, 20.3% of HCP frontline and 10.3% of HCP control had clinical anxiety, and the difference between the two groups was statistically significant (P = 0.0011). Conclusion: Frontline HCPs working in demanding work such as COVID-19 patient care are susceptible to psychological distress, anxiety, and depression which warrant urgent attention.
ABSTRACT
Ovarian cancer has a high mortality rate due to its unclear symptomology and the lack of precise early detection tools. If detected in the first stage, over 90% of patients reach remission. As such, developing a reliable method of early detection is crucial in reducing the mortality rate of the disease. One potential method would be to identify specific biomarkers that are unique to ovarian cancer, which could be detected using a blood test. While this can be done using gas chromatography - mass spectrometry (GC-MS), identifying these biomarkers is an enormous task. One way to expedite the process is to utilize trained scent detection canines. In this study, dogs who were previously trained to respond to positive blood samples from ovarian cancer patients were then tested on their ability to recognize samples prepared by micro-preparative gas chromatography (MP-GC) techniques. MP-GC employed a gradient-cooled glass tube connected to the GC outlet to collect GC eluents containing the plasma-derived volatiles in positive blood samples. These post-column fractions were collected at the exit of the GC according to their eluent times (i.e., 0-15 min, 15-25 min and 25-35 min or 0-35 min) and these full or fractional collections were presented to the trained dogs to judge their responses. Dogs' time spent investigating the odor was used as an indication of odor recognition and was significantly longer on the early (0-15 min) and middle (15-25 min) fractions of the ovarian cancer than the late (25-35 min) fraction of plasma odorants or either the negative fractions or distractors odorants. These findings suggest that characteristic odor biomarkers of ovarian cancer for dogs may exist in the relatively small and more volatile compounds. Additionally, variation between dogs suggests that there may be a number of different biomarkers that can be used to identify ovarian cancer.
