Publications by authors named "Tasnim Ara"

Background: Despite high coverage of antenatal care (ANC) and family welfare assistant (FWA) visits, emergency contraceptive pill (ECP) awareness is critically low in Bangladesh. We aim to investigate the missed opportunities in generating ECP awareness through ANC and FWA visit programs; and assess the missed opportunities and sociodemographic discrimination in receiving family planning (FP) counseling during ANC.

Methods: We used data from the nationwide Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2017-18.

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Objective: This study aims to investigate the role of community-level emergency contraceptive pill (ECP) awareness in reducing unwanted births (UWBs) in Bangladesh and explore the regional variation in women's appropriateness to adopt long-acting reversible contraceptives or permanent methods (LARCPMs) based on their child desire.

Design, Settings And Participants: We used data from the cross-sectional Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2017-2018. We analysed the planning status of the last live birth 3 years preceding the survey of 20,127 ever-married women of reproductive age.

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Objective: This explorative study aims to identify the gaps in COVID-19 management and their consequences on physicians in terms of contracting infection and psychological well-being during the early phase of the pandemic.

Design, Settings And Participants: We conducted a nationwide cross-sectional online study to collect information from 420 intern doctors who were at their internship in government medical colleges from February to August 2020.

Methods: We performed univariate and bivariate analyses to assess COVID-19 management.

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Objective: This study aims to explore the rural-urban differentials in the influences of individual and geospatial preparedness on institutional childbirth in Bangladesh. A related aim of this paper is to derive estimates to measure geospatial preparedness for institutional births, through statistical modelling, when no data are available for measuring this areal indicator.

Design, Settings And Participants: The paper used data from a large-scale nationally representative Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2019.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the health-related quality of life (QoL) and coping strategies among 2,198 COVID-19 survivors in Bangladesh, using door-to-door interviews and standardized questionnaires.
  • - Results show that males were more affected by COVID-19 than females, with various factors like age, marital status, occupation, and co-morbidities significantly influencing QoL across physical, psychological, and social dimensions.
  • - The main coping strategy identified among survivors was avoidant coping, followed by problem-focused coping, with emotional-focused coping being the least common; these strategies were also influenced by factors such as education and living area.
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Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the leading causes of the decline in high-value species. Crime-reduction strategies to counter IWT can have unintended effects, with crime displacement occurring when offenders react to such interventions. Despite the value of understanding how and why displacement occurs for informing conservation strategies, few examples are published.

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Objectives: Despite a significant decline over time, maternal mortality remains high in Bangladesh. Institutional delivery during childbirth is crucial to reducing maternal mortality, but uptake of institutional delivery services (IDS) remains suboptimal in Bangladesh. Though women's education plays a crucial role in the use of IDS, the educational status of the household head and area-level literacy rate also appear to act as predictors of IDS uptake.

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Background: Health care workers have been facing difficulties in coping with the COVID-19 infection from the beginning. The study aimed to compare Quality of Life (QOL) among health care workers (HCWs) with and without prior COVID-19 disease.

Methods: This study was conducted from July 2020 to January 2021 among 444 HCWs.

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Objectives: During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, countries around the world framed specific laws and imposed varying degrees of lockdowns to ensure the maintenance of physical distancing. Understanding changes in temporal and spatial mobility patterns may provide insights into the dynamics of this infectious disease. Therefore, we assessed the efficacy of lockdown measures in 16 countries worldwide by analyzing the relationship between community mobility patterns and the doubling time of COVID-19.

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Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) quickly surged the whole world and affected people's physical, mental, and social health thereby upsetting their quality of life. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the quality of life (QoL) of COVID-19 positive patients after recovery in Bangladesh. This was a study of adult (aged ≥18 years) COVID-19 individuals from eight divisions of Bangladesh diagnosed and confirmed by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) from June 2020 to November 2020.

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Objectives: With COVID-19 vaccination underway, this study aimed to understand belief, attitude and intention of the people in the South Asia region towards the vaccine.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study using semi-structured questionnaires among 18201 individuals in four South Asian countries; Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Nepal between January 17 and February 2, 2021. We used the Health Belief Model (HBM) to identify the predictors related to vaccine acceptance.

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Objective: The main objective of this study is to investigate how the direction and strength of the association between infant mortality and its predictors are changing over time in Bangladesh using a nationally representative sample for the period 2011-2014.

Design, Setting And Participants: Data from two repeatedly cross-sectional Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys (BDHSs) for the years 2011 and 2014 were used. A total of 7664 (with 312 infant death) and 7048 (with 264 infant death) complete cases, respectively, from BDHS 2011 and 2014 datasets were included in the study.

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Drug resistance is a major cause of treatment failure in cancer. Here, we have evaluated the role of STAT3 in environment-mediated drug resistance (EMDR) in human neuroblastoma. We determined that STAT3 was not constitutively active in most neuroblastoma cell lines but was rapidly activated upon treatment with interleukin (IL)-6 alone and in combination with the soluble IL-6 receptor (sIL-6R).

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Neuroblastoma is the most common extracranial solid tumor in the pediatric population. Sorafenib (Nexavar), a multikinase inhibitor, blocks cell proliferation and induces apoptosis in certain types of cancers. Here, we tested antitumor effects of sorafenib (≤ 10 µM) on four human neuroblastoma cell lines, CHLA255, CHLA171, CHLA90 and SK-N-AS.

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Background: Zoledronic acid, a bisphosphonate, delays progression of bone metastases in adult malignancies. Bone is a common metastatic site of advanced neuroblastoma. We previously reported efficacy of zoledronic acid in a murine model of neuroblastoma bone invasion prompting this Phase I trial of zoledronic acid with cyclophosphamide in children with neuroblastoma and bone metastases.

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The bone and bone marrow are among the most frequent sites of cancer metastasis. It is estimated that 350,000 patients die with bone metastases annually in the United States. The ability of tumor cells to colonize the bone marrow and invade the bone is the result of close interactions between tumor cells and the bone marrow microenvironment.

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Tumor infiltration with Valpha24-invariant NKT cells (NKTs) associates with favorable outcome in neuroblastoma and other cancers. Although NKTs can be directly cytotoxic against CD1d+ cells, the majority of human tumors are CD1d-. Therefore, the role of NKTs in cancer remains largely unknown.

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Neuroblastoma, the second most common solid tumor in children, frequently metastasizes to the bone marrow and the bone. Neuroblastoma cells present in the bone marrow stimulate the expression of interleukin-6 (IL-6) by bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) to activate osteoclasts. Here we have examined whether stromal-derived IL-6 also has a paracrine effect on neuroblastoma cells.

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Valpha24-invariant natural killer T (NKT) cells are potentially important for antitumor immunity. We and others have previously demonstrated positive associations between NKT cell presence in primary tumors and long-term survival in distinct human cancers. However, the mechanism by which aggressive tumors avoid infiltration with NKT and other T cells remains poorly understood.

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Neuroblastoma is the second most common solid tumor in children that is metastatic in 70% of patients at the time of diagnosis. The ability of neuroblastoma cells to colonize distant organs like the bone marrow and the bone is the result of close interactions between tumor cells and the microenvironment. Significant progress has been recently made in our understanding of the mechanisms that promote the colonization and invasion of the bone by neuroblastoma cells and these mechanisms are reviewed in this article.

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Pleuropulmonary blastoma (PPB) is rare childhood tumor oniginating from either lung or pleura. Although several cytogenetic changes, such as tisomy 2, trisomy 8, and loss of 17p material, have been reported, evidence of gene mutations is still lacking. Pathologically, PPB shares similarities with rhabdomyosarcoma in which p53 mutations arefrequently detected.

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