•Positive religious appraisal and active spiritual coping associated with enhanced self-reported pain endurance in elderly chronic pain patients.•Culturally-sensitive brief arab religious coping ...scale quantified dimensions of religious coping strategies used.•Pain endurance and average intensity separately evaluated to distinguish constructs, linked appraisal and coping to tolerance.•Substantiated theories on neurocognitive mechanisms underlying spiritual practices' pain-modulating impacts.•Contextualized understanding of faith-based resources’ role within comprehensive biopsychosocial geriatric healthcare approaches.
Chronic pain diminishes the quality of life for many Older Adults individuals. Identifying effective coping methods to enhance pain resilience is imperative as populations age. Older Adults commonly use religious faith and spiritual practices to endure pain, yet little research has explored their impact on pain tolerance.
This cross-sectional study examined relationships between positive/negative religious coping styles and pain endurance in 200 Arab elders with chronic pain. Participants completed the Brief Arab Religious Coping Scale, Numeric Pain Rating Scale, WHOQOL-BREF, and demographic/medical history questionnaires.
Quantitative analysis demonstrated significant positive associations between positive religious reappraisal and active spiritual coping with higher self-reported pain endurance (p<.05). Negative religious coping styles lacked meaningful relationships with pain tolerance. Multiple regression confirmed the unique effects of reappraisal and spiritual practice on improving pain resilience, controlling for covariates.
Outcomes align with perspectives highlighting multidimensional neurocognitive, emotional, and psychosocial pain relief from religious coping. Findings underscore integrating positive faith-based resources in biopsychosocial paradigms for Older Adult's pain management. Additional research should investigate causal pathways and contextual factors influencing religious coping effects on diverse Older Adult subgroups.
The medical profession is one of the most highly respected and desired professions among students worldwide, most likely because it provides opportunities for both a financially and socially ...rewarding career. However, while it has been quite established that factors such as self-interest, family pressure, friend pressure, and socioeconomic status do influence the choice of medicine among students worldwide, the exact reasons for an individual to join a medical school may actually vary worldwide. The aim of this study was to comprehensively explore factors influencing medical students to opt in/out medical careers in Sudan.
An institutional based descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at University of Khartoum in the year 2022 with a random sample of 330 students that was obtained from the medical students at the The University of Khartoum, Faculty of Medicine using stratified random sampling.
Self-interest was the most common factor influencing opting in (choosing) medical profession (70.6%) (n = 233), followed by getting a very high score in high-school that qualifies into the faculty (55.5%) (n = 183). Regarding the factors affecting medical students' choices, parental pressure was the main factor (37.0%) (n = 122), followed by other relatives' pressure (12.4%) (n = 41), and 4.2% (n = 14) chose Peer pressure. 59.7% (n = 197) of the participants stated that they were not affected by any of these factors. Most of the participants felt that the general perception of the medical profession by society is that it is prestigious and has good career opportunities, only 5.8% (n = 19) believed that it is "Not appreciated at all" by the society. A statistically significant association was found between the type of admission & parent pressure (p value 0.01). out of 330 participants, (56.1%) (n = 185) have opted out i.e. lost their interest or regretted their choice of medical career. Academic difficulties was the most common factor causing students to opt-out of the medical career (37%) (n = 122) followed by Multiple suspensions of education (35.2%) (n = 116), Current political & security conflicts in Sudan (29.7%) (n = 98), Poor quality of education (24.8%). The proportion of students having regrets for the medical profession was significantly higher among females. Over one third of the participants reported having depressive symptoms more than half days of the week. No statically significant correlation was established between the academic level and having these depressive symptoms and no statistically significant correlation was established between the decision to opt-out and the academic level (class) of the individuals (P = 0.105).
Over half of Sudanese medical students at the University of Khartoum have already lost their interest or regretted their choice of medical career choice. Whether these future doctor chose to drop out or continue their path in the medical career suggests that they are more prone to serious hardships in their future careers. A careful comprehensive approach should further explore and try to offer solutions for problems like "Academic difficulties", "multiple suspension of education", and "poor quality of education" for they were the most common factors that caused medical students to opt out of the medical career.
Salinity is a major abiotic stress that poses great obstacles to wheat production, especially in arid regions. The application of exogenous substances can enhance plant salt tolerance and increase ...its productivity under salinity stress. This work aimed to assess the mechanisms of selenium (Se) at different concentrations (2, 4 and 8 μM SeCl2) to mitigate hazardous impacts of salt toxicity at physiological, biochemical and agronomic levels in bread wheat. The results displayed that Se foliar application increased chlorophyll content, net photosynthetic rate, transpiration rate, stomatal conductance, relative water content, membrane stability index, excised leaf water retention, proline, total soluble sugars, Ca content, K content, antioxidant enzyme activities and non-enzymatic antioxidant compounds compared to untreated plants. On the other hand, Se application decreased the content of Na, hydrogen peroxide and superoxide contents. Accordingly, our findings recommend exogenous Se application (in particular 8 μM) to alleviate the deleterious effects induced by salinity stress and improve wheat yield attributes through enhancing antioxidant defense systems and photosynthetic capacity.
Abstract
Background
Over the past 10 years, inclusion body hepatitis outbreaks, essentially from commercial broiler flocks, have been detected in different geographic regions highlighting the wide ...distribution of FAdVs around the world resulting in serious economic losses due to increased mortalities as well as poor performance within poultry farms in Assiut province, Egypt. Thus, this study was achieved to detect fowl adenovirus in broiler chicken flocks in Assiut province, Egypt and to recognize the pathogenicity of the isolated virus.
Results
The phylogeny of the L1 loop of the hexon gene exposed that the isolated virus clustered and belonged to the reference strains serotype D FAdV. The isolated virus is closely related to inclusion body hepatitis (IBH) strains causing extensive economic losses. The pathogenicity study of the virus showed typical macroscopic lesions with 6% mortality; furthermore, histopathological inspection exhibited severe hepatitis and degenerative changes after 5d from infection in the immune system.
Conclusion
Results in this research support the primary pathogenicity and mortality caused by FADV serotype 2 (IBH) alone without immunosuppressive agents thus robust control measures should be implanted against FAdV to evade the serious economic losses in poultry farms.
Medical students are the source of a country's physicians. Determining how medical students select their areas of specialization is the key to achieve a balanced distribution of doctors among all ...specialties. The objective is to identify the number of medical students who have decided their postgraduate specialty career, their career specialties preference, and factors that may influence their decision to select a particular specialty.
A facility based cross-sectional study was conducted in September 2013 at Faculty of Medicine, University of Medical Sciences and Technology, Khartoum, Sudan. A self-administered semi-structured questionnaire comprising demographic data and questions about future specialties preferences and factors influencing those preferences was distributed to 887 male and female students, (from first to fifth academic years) recruited in the study.
Response rate was 73% with 647 questionnaires collected, out of 887 eligible medical students. Of the returned questionnaires, 604 were valid. The majority of students (541, 89.6%) have chosen a specialty. Surgery, medicine, paediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology were the most selected specialties. The least selected specialty was anaesthesiology. A significant association was found between gender and specialty choice using Chi-square test (p = 0.00). There was no association between undergraduate level and specialty choice (p = 0.633). The most common reason for choosing a specific specialty was "Personal Interest" (215, 39.7%) followed by being "Helpful to the community" (144, 26.6%).
Surgery, medicine, paediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology were the most selected specialties.
This paper presents a dynamic modeling and trajectory tracking control design for a hyper-redundant continuum manipulator (HRM), which is able to continuously bend along its length. The HRM has the ...advantages of high flexibility, large workspace, and low inertia, but also poses challenges of complex kinematics, and dynamic coupling. To address these challenges, the kinematics model was developed based on the piecewise constant curvature (PCC) assumption that captures the relationship between the cable lengths, joint angles, and end-effector pose. Inverse kinematics is presented geometrically by solving trigonometric equations. The dynamic model for the continuum robot (CR) is derived using the Euler–Lagrange representation, which incorporates the effects of gravity and elasticity. Accordingly, three control strategies are developed and applied to a two-section continuum robot, which are the inverse dynamic proportional integral derivative controller (PID), fuzzy logic controller (FLC), and sliding mode controller (SMC). We validate our proposed methods through simulations on various 3D trajectories, utilized MATLAB symbolic math toolbox in conjunction with Simulink simulation; demonstrate and evaluate different close-loop dynamic control responses for different scenarios. This simulation used in the creation of a unique animated simulation for a whole 3D continuum robot while tracking its desired trajectories. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that our proposed methods can effectively control the HRM with high tracking performance, exhibiting enhanced responses in terms of settling time, rising time, and steady-state error. While the developed SMC outperforms Poth's PID and FLC in terms of robustness and settling time (51% and 10.3%), respectively.
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