Background Antidepressant use has continually increased in recent decades and although they are an effective treatment for moderate-to-severe depression, when there is no longer a clinical benefit, deprescribing should occur. Currently, routine deprescribing is not part of clinical practice and research shows that there has been an increase in antidepressant users seeking informal support online. This small scoping exercise used a mixed-methods online survey to investigate the motives antidepressant users have for joining social media deprescribing support groups, and what elements of the groups are most valuable to them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNowadays, synthetic polymers are used in medical applications due to their special biodegradable, biocompatible, hydrophilic, and non-toxic properties. The materials, which can be used for wound dressing fabrication with controlled drug release profile, are the need of the time. The main aim of this study was to develop and characterize polyvinyl alcohol/polycaprolactone (PVA/PCL) fibres containing a model drug.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To determine the effect of deep breathing exercises on lung functions in apparently healthy smokers.
Methods: The pilot study was conducted at Isra University, Islamabad, Pakistan, from May to December, 2017, and comprised apparently healthy smokers aged 20-30 years with a minimum smoking history of 5 years. The participants were divided into control and experimental groups.
Unlabelled: Atraumatic splenic rupture is a rare but potentially life-threatening event. It mostly happens when the spleen is already diseased; however, sometimes it can be drug induced in a previously normal spleen. Although anticoagulation has been attributed to spontaneous splenic rupture quite frequently, the role of dual antiplatelet therapy is underestimated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper focuses on gait abnormality type identification-specifically, recognizing antalgic gait. Through experimentation, we demonstrate that detecting an individual's gait type is a viable biometric that can be used along with other common biometrics for applications such as forensics. To classify gait, the gait data is represented by coordinates that reflect the body joint coordinates obtained using a Microsoft Kinect v2 system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper, a variable threshold voice activity detector (VAD) is developed to control the operation of a two-sensor adaptive noise canceller (ANC). The VAD prohibits the reference input of the ANC from containing some strength of actual speech signal during adaptation periods. The novelty of this approach resides in using the residual output from the noise canceller to control the decisions made by the VAD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF