A Comparative Study of Intrathecal Bupivacaine with Fentanyl versus Plain Bupivacaine in Elective Lower Segment Caesarean Section

Pregancy is a very stressful condition for every women. Most of them live in a fear of complications and the safety of the unborn baby. Many have lots of questions and confusions when it comes to surgery. Regional anaesthesia is the best choice for a elective lower segment caesarean section. Making sure that the pregnant women co-operates to perform a lumbar puncture to deliever the drugs is at most important to have a succesful spinal block. It is also very important to choose drugs which last for longer time and provide analgesia even after the surgery. The practice of adding additives to local anaesthetic agents is very come from decades. The best and the safest additive with very low complication is the one which doesn’t affect the degree of anaesthetic block and has very safe haemodynamic response. Fentanyl is a time tested drug and it is very safe as per the available litracure and can be safely given in pregnancy. In this comparative study we are going to compare the potentail of fentanyl and bupivacaine with bupivacaine alone when given intrathecally

FETAL QRS-COMPLEXES DETECTECTIONS IN ABDOMINAL SIGNAL BY USING WAVELET-BISPECTRUM

Fetal hypoxia or distress is a physical stress experienced by a fetus due to a lack of oxygen. Intrauterine hypoxia and the resultant perinatal brain damages may lead to extraordinary effects, including continuous lifelong treatments. One of the ways for detecting symptoms of hypoxia is monitoring of the fetus heart activity. At present, the basic method of monitoring the condition of unborn baby is the ultrasound cardiotocography (CTG). Considerably more information for early detection of the fetal hypoxia may be obtained by analyzing fetal electrocardiogram (FECG).

The mental health crisis of expectant women in the UK: effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on prenatal mental health, antenatal attachment and social support

BackgroundExperiences of prenatal trauma exacerbates vulnerability to negative health outcomes for pregnant women and their infants. We aimed to examine the role of: 1) anxiety, depression, and stress related to COVID-19 in predicting the quality of antenatal attachment; 2) perceived social support and COVID-19 appraisal in predicting maternal anxiety and depression.MethodsA sample of 150 UK expectant women were surveyed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Questions included demographics, pregnancy details, and COVID-19 appraisal. Validated measures were used to collect self-reported maternal antenatal attachment (MAAS), symptoms of anxiety (STAI), depression (BDI-II), and stress related to the psychological impact of COVID-19 (IES-r). ResultsWe found that the pandemic has affected UK expectant mothers’ mental health by increasing prevalence of depression, anxiety and stress. Women for whom COVID-19 had a higher psychological impact were more likely to suffer from depressive symptoms. High depressive symptoms were associated with reduced attachment to the unborn baby. Whilst women who appraised the impact of COVID-19 to be more negative showed higher levels of anxiety, higher social support acted as a protective factor and was associated with lower anxiety.LimitationsThe cross-sectional nature of the study hinders conclusions about causality. Future research should include paternal prenatal mental health. ConclusionsDirect experience of prenatal trauma, such as the one experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, significantly amplifies mothers’ vulnerability to mental health symptoms and impairs the formation of a positive relationship with their unborn baby. Health services should prioritise interventions strategies aimed at fostering support for pregnant women.

The Rationality of Ethics: Teleological Theory reconciled in the context of Abortion

This paper sought to argue about the notion of abortion, and its immorality within a society. Viewed teleologically, human behaviour such as committing abortion, may be designated as being moral or immoral according to the goals clearly established by a person and reasons given. Teleologic theory thus proposes that the ethical decision for carrying out an abortion focusses on the outcome of the abortion and its outcome on society. Realizing a goal and what one is doing is required and is an adequate condition to consider moral action without bearing in mind any transitional action taken to arrive at a particular objective. The article also seeks to reveal the importance of the biblical view of life as gift emanating from a Creator God. The author places emphasis on the ethical values deemed to be appropriate for Christians based on Holy Scripture relating to life and death issues. The themes for this paper were addressed by the researcher as follows: The immorality on abortion, some reasons given for abortion, the right to abortion, the unborn baby has a right to life, the unwanted pregnancy, Church views on abortion, society’s view on abortion and what is considered to be right or wrong, ethical and unethical in having an abortion.

“Motherese” Prosody in Fetal-Directed Speech: An Exploratory Study Using Automatic Social Signal Processing

Introduction: Motherese, or emotional infant directed speech (IDS), is the specific form of speech used by parents to address their infants. The prosody of IDS has affective properties, expresses caregiver involvement, is a marker of caregiver-infant interaction quality. IDS prosodic characteristics can be detected with automatic analysis. We aimed to explore whether pregnant women “speak” to their unborn baby, whether they use motherese while speaking and whether anxio-depressive or obstetrical status impacts speaking to the fetus.Participants and Methods: We conducted an observational study of pregnant women with gestational ages from 26 to 38 weeks. Women were recruited in a university hospital department of obstetrics. Thirty-five women agreed to participate in the study, and 26 audio records were exploitable. We collected obstetrical and sociodemographic data, pregnancy outcomes, anxiety and depressive status using the Covy and Raskin Scales, and life events using the Sensations During Pregnancy and Life Event Questionnaire. Each participant was left alone with an audio recorder with a recommendation to feel free to speak to her fetus as she would have done at home. The recording was stopped after 3 min. Audio recordings were analyzed by two methods: psycholinguist experts' annotation and computational objective automatic analyses.Results: Most mothers (89%) reported speaking to their fetuses. We found a correlation between maternal first perceptions of fetal movements and the start of mother's speaking to fetus. Motherese prosody was detected with both annotation and automatic analysis with a significant correlation between the two methods. In this exploratory study, motherese use was not associated with maternal anxiodepressive or obstetrical status. However, the more future mothers were depressed, the less they spoke with their fetuses during the recording.Conclusion: Fetal directed speech (FDS) can be detected during pregnancy, and it contains a period of prosody that shares the same characteristics of motherese that can be described as prenatal motherese or emotional fetal-directed speech (e-FDS). This means that pregnant women start using motherese much earlier than expected. FDS seems to be correlated with maternal first perceptions of fetal movements and depression scores. However, more research is needed to confirm these exploratory results.

Syllabic Gasps: M. NourbeSe Philip and Charles Olson’s Poetic Conspiration

In her essay ‘The Ga(s)p’, M. NourbeSe Philip sketches a respirational poetics that embeds the precarity of African American breath in a natal scene of conspiration. In a gesture of ‘radical hospitality’, every mother breathes for the unborn baby. Her book Zong!, consisting of words torn from a legal document about a massacre on a slave ship, is described as a ‘series of ga(s)ps for air with syllabic sounds attached or overlaid’. In the moment when Philip’s reflections turn to syllables, a striking resonance with Charles Olson’s poetics of breathing from the 1950s can be observed. Both Olson and Philip develop their thoughts on breath and syllables around the act of taking over word-material from a problematic ‘mother-text’. The essay investigates the tensions between the ethical act of ‘breathing with’ as Philip outlines it and the more common sense of ‘conspiration’ (conspiring, conspiracy).

Sea Imagery in Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses

This article examines how Palestinian American novelist Hala Alyan employs sea imagery in her debut novel Salt Houses (2017) to reflect her characters’ emotions and thoughts. In particular, this article shows that by examining a number of events in which characters are sitting by the sea or wading into the waters of the sea, the reader is given an insight into these characters’ inner feelings and beliefs and the way they perceive their identities and contextualise their experiences as they move from one city to another. As the novel relates the narratives of four generations of a Palestinian family, sometimes using flashbacks, sea imagery increasingly occupies central positions in these narratives which reveal Alia’s and her descendants’ endeavours to express their opinions through memories and experiences of displacement, exile and estrangement. Although the title of the novel rightly heralds the significance of houses, it is the sea that forcefully emerges as a pivotal component in the narratives that these characters relate in their quests for a homeland that lives in the older generation’s memories and the young people’s imaginations. As Alia’s granddaughter, Manar, visits Palestine in the final chapter of the novel and draws the family tree of the Yacoubs on Jaffa’s beach, including her unborn baby, memories and imaginations merge to assert the right of Palestinians to “belong” to their homeland.

Investigating Turkish Pre-service Science Teachers’ Moral Reasoning in Genetics related Socioscientific Issues

In this study, Turkish pre-service science teachers' moral reasoning patterns and the factors which influence their decisions while discussing genetics-related socio-scientific issues (SSI) were investigated. A basic qualitative approach was adopted for this purpose. Seven third-grade pre-service science teachers enrolled in the study. Semi-structured interviews for different genetics related SSI were conducted. The results revealed that decisions were generally based on the consequences of genetic applications (consequentialist) or based on moral principles or prescripts (principle-based). Most participants used consequence-based moral reasoning in their decisions, while principle-based moral reasoning was less used. They also used emotion-based moral reasoning. Their decisions were influenced by emotions, including empathy or sympathy toward the characters, or the unborn baby, in the scenarios. Additional and varied factors, including legal, ethical, economic, and technological concerns, were revealed as influential. Participants' decisions were also shaped by their own experiences, media resources, and faith in science. The implications for science teacher education programs are discussed.