Treatment of overactive bladder symptoms in women with Diunorm®: preliminary results report

Introduction. Overactive bladder (OAB) with or without urgent incontinence tends to progress with age and occurs in both men and women. However, the frequency of occurrence in the female population averages about 25%.Purpose of the study. To assess the effectiveness and safety of the drug Diunorm® (in caps.) in the prevention and treatment of OAB in women.Materials and methods. The statistical analysis includes the results of a survey of 28 women with symptoms of OAB, whose average age was 35.3 years. The drug Diunorm® was used for treatment in dosage 400 mg QD for 90 days. Patients completed the Overactive Bladder Awareness Tool and a urination diary. Additionally, urinalysis, bacteriological examination of urine, uroflowmetry, bladder ultrasound and cystoscopy were performed.Results. All women throughout the study had negative urine cultures and no pyuria in urinalysis, which excluded an infectious etiology of urinary dysfunction. During therapy, a statistically significant decrease in irritative symptoms was recorded according to the Overactive Bladder Awareness Tool questionnaire. The sum of points after 1 and 3 mo decreased by 3.0 and 4.3 points, respectively (p < 0.05). Positive dynamics in terms of the points' sum was noted in 75%, in relation to nocturia in 82% of patients (p < 0.01). The average urination rate increased from 13.3 ± 0.7 ml/s to 15.1 ± 0.7 ml/s and 15.4 ± 0.5 ml/s after 1.5 and 3 months, respectively (p < 0,0001). A similar trend was observed for maximum urine flow and residual urine volume. The maximum urine flow when taking Diunorm® increased from 15.9 ± 0.6 ml/s to 17.4 ± 0.5 ml/s and 18.1 ± 0.4 ml/s (p < 0.001). Residual urine volume decreased throughout the study. When included in the study, after 1,5 and 3 mo, this indicator was 19.9 ± 1.4; 12.2 ± 1.6 and 6.4 ± 1.1 ml, respectively (p < 0.001).Conclusion. Diunorm® can become a worthy alternative to traditional first-line OAB therapy. Comparative studies are required to obtain a high-level evidence base.

Corpus Routes and Experiments in Language Teaching

Corpus quantitative approach in teaching, which is of growing interest, entails some revision of the L2 vocabulary selection procedures and provides solutions for a wide range of practical problems. The focus throughout is on the discussion of research on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of language which both teaching content and language acquisition practice could draw on. This research regards human language as a rank distribution, which has serious implications on quantitative aspect of learner’s vocabulary. We also looked into the ways to factor in the data from a small professional discourse corpus in order to target the units that have the greatest statistical prominence. Both BNC and our own collection of texts are explored. The study also elaborates on academic writing cohesive devices and grammar patterns introduction, which is approached through concordancing corpus strings to (i) provide frequency evidence and (ii) introduce a contrast in usage in various corpus genres. Striking differences that are evidenced by the frequency lists could be related not only to register, but also to the choice and instances of academic cohesive clusters which are favoured by the apprentice writers and the expert writers. With the aim of capitalizing on corpus approach a number of small-scale corpus research tasks were developed. This study also uses corpus tools and data to give a seemingly subjective phenomenon of hedging some quantitative measurement. While experimenting on corpus in the classroom, the attention of learners was drawn to various means of hedging, such as lexical bundles or down-toners that manifest themselves as important communicative strategies. Thus, corpus was used to inform both the language instructor and the student in the classroom to look in detail at differences in the use of lexical and grammatical units in different varieties of language, address contrasting register variations, and readily provide contemporary professionally relevant examples of actual language usage. It has to be noted that university students have a tendency not to perceive register violations as language errors on a par with those of grammar, lexis or punctuation. Hence, corpus investigation as raising awareness tool also proved to be an effective teaching material generator. Nowadays syllabi have the opportunity to be rather sensitive to the quantitative evidence that corpora offer us; what is more, as a result of this study, we would conclude that university students are responsive to the small-scale investigation of register differences, lexico-grammatical frequency and patterning, which have been brought directly into the L2 classroom.

EatNTrack Malaysia Mobile Application Food Calories Tracker - A Conceptual Paper

Diet and nutrition apps are among the most popular health and fitness apps used by an increasing number of mobile device users. Undeniably, health and nutrition are some of the valuable aspects of life. With the introduction of mobile computing, health knowledge became much easier to understand due to its mobility and usability. A vast range of smartphone apps is emerging for tracking health and food. However, the existing mobile applications in Malaysia are lacking some important features. To address this limitation, the present mobile application responds by attempting to design and develop a Malaysian mobile nutrition application known as EatNTrack. EatNTrack is a mobile nutrition application that provides crucial features such as the ability to capture the food especially Malaysian foods, scanning food barcode, set the goal and calories of the day, a reminder for the user to capture the food, monthly progress of user, and integration with a wearable device. The needs of these features will give insight into many aspects of a user's eating habits. The more specific and accurate users with reporting, the more accurate their information will be. The aim of the study was to establish an innovative mobile-based dietary awareness tool that could be used to monitor target users' food intake. Keywords: nutrition, mobile application, food calories, track calories, health

Promoting regulation of equal participation in online collaboration by combining a group awareness tool and adaptive prompts. But does it even matter?

Unequal participation poses a challenge to collaborative learning because it reduces opportunities for fruitful collaboration among learners and affects learners’ satisfaction. Social group awareness tools can display information on the distribution of participation and thus encourage groups to regulate the distribution of participation. However, some groups might require additional explicit support to leverage the information from such a tool. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of combining a group awareness tool and adaptive collaboration prompts on the distribution of participation during web-based collaboration. In this field experiment, students in a university level online course collaborated twice for two-weeks (16 groups in the first task; 13 groups in the second task) and either received only a group awareness tool, a combination of a group awareness tool and adaptive collaboration prompts, or no additional support. Our results showed that students were more satisfied when the participation in their group was more evenly distributed. However, we only found tentative support that the collaboration support helped groups achieve equal participation. Students reported rarely using the support for shared regulation of participation. Sequence alignment and clustering of action sequences revealed that groups who initiated the collaboration early, coordinated before solving the problem and interacted continuously tended to achieve an equal distribution of participation and were more satisfied with the collaboration. Against the background of our results, we identify potential ways to improve group awareness tools for supporting groups in their regulation of participation, and discuss the premise of equal participation during collaborative learning.

The Impact of MassPAT on Opioid Prescribing Patterns for Otolaryngology Surgeries

Objective Determine whether opioid prescriber patterns have changed for tonsillectomy, parotidectomy, and thyroidectomy after implementation of the Massachusetts Prescription Awareness Tool (MassPAT). Study Design Retrospective cohort study. Setting Single-center tertiary care hospital. Methods Patients were included if they received tonsillectomy, parotidectomy, or thyroid surgery at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center (Burlington, Massachusetts) between October 1, 2015, and October 1, 2019. Prescribing patterns were compared prior to implementation of MassPAT, October 1, 2015, to October 14, 2016, to postimplementation of MassPAT, October 15, 2016, to October 1, 2019. Quantity of opioids prescribed was described using total morphine milligram equivalents (MME). Data were analyzed using univariate analysis, multivariate analysis, and trend line using line of best fit. Results A total of 737 subjects were included in the study. There was a downward trend in the quantity of opioids prescribed for all 3 surgeries during the study period. There was a significant difference in the quantity of opioids prescribed pre- and postimplementation of MassPAT for tonsillectomy (647.70 ± 218.50 MME vs 474.60 ± 185.90 MME, P < .001), parotidectomy (241.20 ± 57.66 MME vs 156.70 ± 72.99 MME, P < .001), and thyroidectomy (171.20 ± 93.77 MME vs 108.50 ± 63.84 MME, P < .001). There was also a decrease in the number of patients who did not receive opioids for thyroidectomy pre- and post-MassPAT (7.56% vs 24.14%). Conclusion We have demonstrated that there is an association with state drug monitoring programs and decrease in the amount of opioids prescribed for acute postoperative pain control for common otolaryngology surgeries.

Features of the Use of Virtual Reality Technologies in the Rehabilitation and Treatment of Depression in Clinical Psychology

The work focused on the examining the use of virtual reality (VR) technologies in the reduction of depression in Europe. More than 70 issues of the journals “Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking”, “European Psychologist” were analyzed. We used the bibliometric analysis, the "keyword method" to analyze the text, which is understood as a search for typical terms, content analysis of the content of articles that used VR and depression. In the journal "European Psychologist" the term VR has not been mentioned for the last 2 years, which indicates the secondary importance of this issue for general psychology. In cyberpsychology, on the contrary, since 2019 in Europe, the interest of researchers in the use of VR technologies in clinical psychology has increased. By the content of the journal articles. "Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking" VR technologies are used primarily for the correction of anxiety disorders, and secondly, for the correction of depression. These technologies are used in various ways. The first option is to create VR programs with a direct impact on depression reduction. Here, VR is used as a symptom awareness tool, to create an avatar environment for client dialogue in a non- judgmental environment. Research has shown that such VR programs are rated by users as a useful tool for informing and emotionally responding to depressive states. The second option is an indirect effect on reducing the level of depression through the reduction of fears, phobias; increased activation, tone, euphoria in mental states; the development of a positive mood, cognitive motivation; an increase in indicators of field independence (cognitive style). A study based on the methods of psychosemantics is presented, which has demonstrated the effect of a specially created VR program with an avatar on changing the unconscious attitudes of the personality, reducing phobia of darkness. The effectiveness of using of VR technologies in reducing depression is determined by modeling of mental experiences and actions in VR, creating a virtual ontology, the influence of VR on conscious and unconscious attitudes, the possibility of responding to unconscious experiences through the user's identification with an avatar.