Background: Coronary artery disease remains the main cause of death despite several preventive programs. Epicardial adipose tissue is a visceral fat depot of the heart located along the large coronary arteries and on the surface of ventricles and apex. Intima media thickness is commonly recognized as the initial stage in the development of atherosclerosis. The development of ultrasound machines, advances in echocardiographic devices and high resolution transducers facilitate comprehensive analysis of epicardial fat thickness (EFT) and carotid –intima media thickness (C-IMT).
Aim: To investigate the relationship of echocardiographic epicardial fat thickness (EFT) and carotid –intima media thickness (C-IMT) with the severity of coronary artery disease.
Methods: A cross sectional multicenter diagnostic accuracy study carried out at Ibn Al-Nafis Cardiovascular Hospital, Ibn Al- Bitar Cardiology Center and Ghazi Al-Hariri Hospital –Iraqi Center for Cardiology during the period between October 2016 and May 2017 assessing. History regarding demographic data and risk factors was taken. Two dimensional transthoracic echocardiographic measurements were done. EFT was measured from parasternal long axis view perpendicular to the right ventricular free wall. C-IMT was measured according to that recommended by the American society of echocardiography (ASE).
Results: The current study demonstrated that the EFT has a direct and significant correlation with the number of involved vessels (P value ˂ 0.001, r= 0.770). The validity of EFT to discriminate between multiple vessels disease and no vessel involvement is excellent (AUC= 0.984, cut point > 8mm, sensitivity=92.9%, specificity= 93.3%). There is inverse and significant correlation between ejection fraction (EF) and three vessels disease (P value ˂ 0.001, r= -0.507). Also there is a direct and significant correlation between C-IMT and severity of CAD. ROC analysis for validity of C-IMT to discriminate between multiple vessels disease and no vessel involvement is excellent (AUC= 0.961, cut point > 1.04mm, sensitivity=92.9%. specificity=86.7%). C-IMT is fair to discriminate between single vessel disease and no vessel involvement (AUC=0.738, cut point ˃ 0.84mm, sensitivity 100%), so if correlated with age, C-IMT above 0.84 can be used as a cut off point for the prediction of CAD. Finally, EFT and C-IMT are more likely to reflect severity of CAD than their ratio.
Conclusions: C-IMT and EFT are simple and reproducible parameters that can be used as a screening tool for the presence and severity of CAD especially before symptoms appearance in high risk patients
BACKGROUND: Helicobacter pylori is an important gastrointestinal infective bacteria with many serious complications including gastric erosions and ulceration, duodenal ulcer, gastric carcinoma and MALT gastric lymphoma. The gastric biopsy is commonly performed in H. pylori-positive dyspeptic individuals, and many previous researchers studied the histopathological features of infected gastric biopsies however little previous studies focused on the histopathological findings in young population in comparison to the older one. AIM: To make a focus on the histopathological effects of H. pylori infection in young patients compared with the older one and predicts the need for endoscopy in this population, also to estimates the prevalence of
... Show MoreThe Gas Assisted Gravity Drainage (GAGD) process has become one of the most important processes to enhance oil recovery in both secondary and tertiary recovery stages and through immiscible and miscible modes. Its advantages came from the ability to provide gravity-stable oil displacement for improving oil recovery, when compared with conventional gas injection methods such as Continuous Gas Injection (CGI) and Water – Alternative Gas (WAG). Vertical injectors for CO2 gas were placed at the top of the reservoir to form a gas cap which drives the oil towards the horizontal oil producing wells which are located above the oil-water-contact. The GAGD process was developed and tested in vertical wells to increase oil r
... Show MoreImage compression is a serious issue in computer storage and transmission, that simply makes efficient use of redundancy embedded within an image itself; in addition, it may exploit human vision or perception limitations to reduce the imperceivable information Polynomial coding is a modern image compression technique based on modelling concept to remove the spatial redundancy embedded within the image effectively that composed of two parts, the mathematical model and the residual. In this paper, two stages proposed technqies adopted, that starts by utilizing the lossy predictor model along with multiresolution base and thresholding techniques corresponding to first stage. Latter by incorporating the near lossless com
... Show MoreObjectives: This study aimed to evaluate the performance of staff nurses at primary health care centers in Baghdad city and to compare them with their demographic characteristics of age, gender and education.
Methodology: A descriptive design was carried out at Baghdad City’s primary health care centers from January 2nd 2019 to May 1st 2020. An instrument was developed for the purpose of the study. A non-probability, multi-stage purposive sample of (52) staff nurses was recruited from nurses working at primary health care centers in Baghdad City. The instrument is used to evaluate staff nurses’ performance which includes (62) items. These items are divided to (13) main domains related to evaluation of work quantity, work quality,
In this work, chemical spray pyrolysis deposition (CSP) technique was used to prepare a mixed In2O3-CdO thin films with different CdO content (10, 30 and 50)%volume ratio on glass substrates at 150 ᵒC substrate temperature. The surface morphology and structural properties were measured to find the optimum conditions to improve thin films properties for using as photo detector. Current –Time, the sensitivity and response speed vary for each mixture. Samples with 10% vol. CdO content has square pulse response with average rise time nearly 1s and fall time 1s.
Results of the current study demonstratedthat out of eighty-three isolatesof Pseudomonas aeruginosa,only twenty-five isolateswere resistant to five different antibiotics (of different classes) that were consequentlyconsideredmultidrug resistant isolates.These isolates developed variable susceptibility toward Eucalyptuscamaldulensisleavesoil (ECO). GC-MS analysis of ECOrevealed that the aromatic oil eugenol is the major constituent.However, the most frequent MIC was 0.39 µg/ml, while the lowest frequent MIC was 3.125 µg/ml.Moreover, this oil at ½ MIC (0.195µg/ml) increased the gene expression of exoU. Itis concluded from the outcomes of the studythat ECOmay cause severe damagewhen used to treat infections caused by P. aeruginosa.
... Show MoreColorectal cancer (CRC) is the most common gastrointestinal malignancy and one of the top ten common cancers worldwide with approximately 2 million cases. There are multiple risk factors that could lead to CRC emergence; of which are genetic polymorphisms. Excision repair cross-complementing group 2 (ERCC2) gene encodes for ERCC2 enzyme which plays a crucial role in maintaining genomic integrity by removing DNA adducts. Several studies suggested that there could be a link between genetic polymorphisms of ERCC2 gene and the risk of CRC development. Hence the present study aims to validate the relationship between the following ERCC2 single nucleotide polymorphisms (rs13181, rs149943175, rs530662943, and rs1799790) and CRC susceptibility. A t
... Show MoreAlthough G6PD deficiency is the most common genetically determined blood disorder among Iraqis, its molecular basis has only recently been studied among the Kurds in North Iraq, while studies focusing on Arabs in other parts of Iraq are still absent.
A total of 1810 apparently healthy adult male blood donors were randomly recruited from the national blood transfusion center in Baghdad. They were classified into G6PD deficient and non-deficient individuals based on the results of methemoglobin reduction test (MHRT), with confirmation of deficiency by subsequent enzyme assays. DNA from defi
In this paper, a least squares group finite element method for solving coupled Burgers' problem in 2-D is presented. A fully discrete formulation of least squares finite element method is analyzed, the backward-Euler scheme for the time variable is considered, the discretization with respect to space variable is applied as biquadratic quadrangular elements with nine nodes for each element. The continuity, ellipticity, stability condition and error estimate of least squares group finite element method are proved. The theoretical results show that the error estimate of this method is . The numerical results are compared with the exact solution and other available literature when the convection-dominated case to illustrate the effic
... Show MoreA study of irrigation water was conducted Baghdad city to find out extent of its pollution by some heavy metals (Pb, Cd, Ni, Co, CU, Cr, Zn and Fe). Water samples were collected randomly from different sources (river, well and stream). Results showed that the concentration of studied heavy metals were as follows: Lead between 0.43-11.75 mg L-1, Cadmium between 0.01-0.95 mg L-1, Nickel between 0.008-0.46 mg L-1, Cobalt between Nil - 0.185 mg L-1, Copper is between 0.326 - 1.58 mg L-1, Chromium is between Nil-0.068 mg L-1, Zinc 0.398-1.182 mg L-1, as for Iro