Australasian Medical Journal
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Under-Nutrition Among Children in Udupi Taluk of Karnataka, India
No full textBackground Despite her apparent economic success, India is plagued by a high burden of under-nutrition among children under five. This study was aimed at understanding some of the risk factors for under-nutrition in a region with favourable maternal and child health indicators. Method A case control study was carried out among children aged one to five years attending the paediatric outpatient department in six rural health care centres in Udupi taluk of Karnataka in Southern India. A total of 162 children were included in the study, of which 56 were cases. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to interview the caregivers of the children and the nutritional status was graded according to the Indian Academy of Paediatrics (IAP) grading of protein-energy malnutrition. Results Under-nutrition was associated with illness in the last one month [OR- 4.78 (CI: 1.83 -12.45)], feeding diluted milk [OR- 14.26 (CI: 4.65 – 43.68)] and having more than two children with a birth interval < 2 years [OR- 4.93 (CI: 1.78 – 13.61)]. Lack of exclusive breast feeding, level of education of the caregiver and environmental factors like source of water did not have an association. Conclusion Childhood illness, short birth interval and consumption of diluted milk were some of the significant contributory factors noted among this population. Information, Education, Communication (IEC) campaigns alleviating food fads and promoting birth spacing is needed.
Extractive Summarisation of Medical Documents
Get PDFBackground Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) practice requires practitioners to extract evidence from published medical research when answering clinical queries. Due to the time-consuming nature of this practice, there is a strong motivation for systems that can automatically summarise medical documents and help practitioners find relevant information. Aim The aim of this work is to propose an automatic query-focused, extractive summarisation approach that selects informative sentences from medical documents. Method We use a corpus that is specifically designed for summarisation in the EBM domain. We use approximately half the corpus for deriving important statistics associated with the best possible extractive summaries. We take into account factors such as sentence position, length, sentence content, and the type of the query posed. Using the statistics from the first set, we evaluate our approach on a separate set. Evaluation of the qualities of the generated summaries is performed automatically using ROUGE, which is a popular tool for evaluating automatic summaries. Results Our summarisation approach outperforms all baselines (best baseline score: 0.1594; our score 0.1653). Further improvements are achieved when query types are taken into account. Conclusion The quality of extractive summarisation in the medical domain can be significantly improved by incorporating domain knowledge and statistics derived from a specialised corpus. Such techniques can therefore be applied for content selection in end-to-end summarisation systems
Barriers to the Management of Diabetes Mellitus - is there a Role for Laser Doppler Flowmetry?
No full textDiabetes Mellitus (DM) is a chronic disease that carries a significant disease burden in Australia and worldwide. The aim of this paper is to identify current barriers in the management of diabetes, ascertain whether there is a benefit from early detection and determine whether LDF has the potential to reduce the disease burden of DM by reviewing the literature relating to its current uses and development. In this literature review search terms included; laser Doppler flowmetry, diabetes mellitus, barriers to management, uses, future, applications, vasomotion, subcutaneous, cost. Databases used included Google Scholar, Scopus, Science Direct and Medline. Publications from the Australian government and textbooks were also utilised. Articles reviewed had access to the full text and were in English
Optic Neuropathy Following Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting
Get PDFPostoperative vision loss (POVL) after major non-ocular surgery is a very rare but devastating complication since it has the potential to cause bilateral, severe and permanent loss of vision. The common major procedures resulting in POVL are cardiac and spinal procedures. We are reporting two patients who presented with features of bilateral anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy after coronary artery bypass grafting
Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction
Get PDFBackgroundAppropriate graft tension and secure graft incorporation in bone tunnels are essential for successful anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction using hamstrings tendon autografts. The WhipKnot™ soft tissue cinch, introduced by Smith and Nephew in 2004, is an alternative option to the commonly used whipstitch technique during preparation of the hamstring autograft in ACL reconstruction.AimsTo investigate the effectiveness of the WhipKnot™ soft tissue cinch and technique during the preparation of the tendon graft for ACL reconstruction.MethodA total of 33 ACL reconstruction operations performed between February 2011 and December 2011 were included in this study. These were performed by a single senior surgeon who used the Whipknot™ technique for the preparation of each graft. Four were used for each operation; two for each end of the harvested hamstrings tendons, including semitendinosus and gracilis tendons respectively.ResultsIn total, 132 WhipKnots were used during the knee operations. Use of the WhipKnot™ technique resulted in successful graft preparations, tensioning and effective graft placement in the tibial and femoral tunnels in almost all instances. Only one case of WhipKnot™ failure (slippage) was recorded.ConclusionThese results indicate that the Whipknot™ technique is a safe, reliable and practical option for the preparation of the hamstrings autografts