Minimizing outliers on cardiovascular signals: an open-source solution

Context: Intravenous cardiovascular recording of conscious animals is susceptible to outlier’s presence, due to freely movement and manipulations. These outliers can interfere on heart rate variability results, indicating erroneous results of sympathetic or parasympathetic modulation.Objective: Develop an automated computational approach to minimize the presence of outliers in cardiovascular recorded signals.Method: An application was developed according to the problem addressed based on free-use web frameworks.Results: The use of the proposed application detected and minimized respectively 1% and 0.97% of points outliers in signals of systolic arterial pressure (SAP) and pulse interval (PI) from a representative blood pressure recording. As until then the work of minimization of outliers was carried out manually; the use of the new application considerably reduced time spend analyzing the data.Conclusion: The proposed algorithm can detect and minimize interferent points, reducing chances of an erroneous interpretation about the cardiovascular modulation by the autonomic nervous system. The method can also significantly reduce the time of manual point-to-point screening performed by researchers.

Metabolic syndrome in urban and rural communities of Bangladesh

Background: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a rising public health concern. Bangladesh profile need exploration through research.Methods: Socio-epidemiologic factors of 341 urban and 149 rural people were studied with anthropometric examination, blood pressure recording and fasting blood for sugar (FBS), triglyceride (TG) and high density lipoprotein (HDL) analysis. MetS was decided on the basis of National Cholesterol Education Program ATP III criteria.Result: Prevalence of MetS was 38.78% (95% CI: 34.56%-43.16%). Rural prevalence (48.99%; 95% CI: 41.09%-56.94%) was more (p=0.002) than urban (34.31%; 95% CI: 29.47%-39.50%); low HDL cholesterol prevailed around 97% urban and 93% rural respondents; high TG was found among 48% urban and 59% rural respondents (p=0.02), 21% urban and 44% rural respondents were obese (p<0.001); around 15% urban and 22% rural had hypertension (HTN, p=0.04); high FBS was found among 28% urban and 26% rural respondents. Age (OR=1.06, 95% CI: 1.04-1.09) and exercise (OR=2.31, 95% CI: 1.40-3.80) of urban area whereas only males of rural (OR=5.88, 95% CI: 2.52- 13.73) area were significantly associated with MetS.Conclusions: Prevalence of MetS is higher in rural Bangladesh than urban in terms of dyslipidaemia, HTN and obesity. Health education and mass campaign regarding the risk factors including change in lifestyle can modify the condition.International Journal of Human and Health Sciences Vol. 02 No. 02 April’18. Page : 71-77

Man versus Machine: the importance of manual blood pressure measurement skills amongst registered nurses

Background: The manual recording of blood pressure is widely accepted to be more accurate than the recording of blood pressure using an automated device. Despite this many western healthcare systems have moved almost entirely to the automated recording of this important vital sign using oscillometric devices. Such devices may either fail to record the patient’s blood pressure in persistent hypotension or may give inaccurate readings in people with arteriosclerotic or atherosclerotic changes. This paper explores the importance of manual blood pressure recording, the availability of aneroid sphygmomanometers in UK hospitals and the maintenance of the skills of the workforce following initial nurse education.Methods: Using a survey of nursing students to explore what opportunities they have to practice manual blood pressures in the clinical setting, the paper explores the maintenance of skills following initial nurse education. The paper also describes the results of data collection, using unobtrusive methods, regarding the availability of aneroid sphygmomanometers in general and specialist hospital facilities in Northern England (UK). Data using both methods were collected in the spring of 2014.Results: The results suggest that despite most hospitals having some aneriod sphygmomanometers available (mean was 1 device for every 6 beds in acute, 1 device for every 3 beds in specialist hospitals and 1 device for every 12 beds in mental health) they were rarely used in clinical practice with only 35% of students reporting that they had undertaken a manual blood pressure in a clinical setting during the first year of their course. In addition, some hospitals had no aneroid devices and several others had no central record of location and regular calibration of such devices.Conclusions: The suggested infrequent use of aneroid devices raises a concern that nurses skills in manual blood pressure recording may be subject to decay over time. Given the importance of these skills in patient safety and, in ensuring accurate and effective care, failure to ensure adequate equipment and opportunities for skill maintenance could result in practitioners and hospitals being open to negligence claims