Background. Alopecia areata (AA) is a common form of noncicatricial hair loss of unknown cause, affecting 0.1-0.2% of the general population. Most evidence supports the hypothesis that it is disease of the hair follicle of autoimmune nature mediated by T-cells, with important cytokine role. Objective of the Study. The objective of this study is to study the association and changes in serum levels of interleukin-15 (IL-15) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) in patients with AA in relation to the type, activity, and disease duration. Patients and Methods. Thirty-eight patients with AA and 22 individuals without the disease as controls were enrolled in this case-controlled study conducted in the Department of Dermatology in the Al-K

Background: Medical-surgical nurses are responsible of providing competent care to clients with a wide-array of acute and chronic health problems. This challenging task requires arming nurses with advanced competencies of health literacy to effectively educate their clients. However, evidence about medical-surgical nurse’s health literacy-related knowledge and experience is limited.  Purposes: This study aimed to determine the level of the health literacy-related knowledge and experience among medical-surgical nurses.Design: A descriptive-cross-sectional study was conducted among a total sample of 177 nurses who were practicing in medical-surgical wards in teaching hospitals in Iraq. A convenience sampling method was used to sele

     Community detection is an important and interesting topic for better understanding and analyzing complex network structures. Detecting hidden partitions in complex networks is proven to be an NP-hard problem that may not be accurately resolved using traditional methods. So it is solved using evolutionary computation methods and modeled in the literature as an optimization problem.  In recent years, many researchers have directed their research efforts toward addressing the problem of community structure detection by developing different algorithms and making use of single-objective optimization methods. In this study, we have continued that research line by improving the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm using a

Hepatitis B and C is a serious global public health problem that causes chronic liver disease and accelerates high risk of death from cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer.

The substantial key to initiate an explicit statistical formula for a physically specified continua is to consider a derivative expression, in order to identify the definitive configuration of the continua itself. Moreover, this statistical formula is to reflect the whole distribution of the formula of which the considered continua is the most likely to be dependent. However, a somewhat mathematically and physically tedious path to arrive at the required statistical formula is needed. The procedure in the present research is to establish, modify, and implement an optimized amalgamation between Airy stress function for elastically-deformed media and the multi-canonical joint probability density functions for multivariate distribution complet

In this work, the relationship between the ionospheric parameters (Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF), Lowest Usable Frequency (LUF) and Optimum working Frequency (OWF)) has been studied for the ionosphere layer over the Iraqi zone. The capital Baghdad (44.42oE, 33.32oN) has been selected to represent the transmitter station and many other cities that spread over Iraqi region have represented as receiver stations. The REC533 communication model considered as one of the modern radio broadcasting version of ITU has been used to calculate the LUF parameter, while the MUF and OWF ionospheric parameters have been generated using ASAPS international communication model which represents one of the most advanced  and accurate HF sky wave prop