Malnutrition and liver disease in a developing country

Malnutrition is a highly prevalent and under recognized condition in developing countries of South Asia. The presence of malnutrition causes a severe impact on patients with liver cirrhosis. The etiology of cirrhosis differs in the South Asian region compared to the West, with hepatitis B and C still being the leading causes and the prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease increasing over time. Comorbid malnutrition worsens outcomes for cirrhosis patients. Urgent attention to address malnutrition is needed to improve patient outcomes. The etiology and pathophysiology of malnutrition in liver diseases is multifactorial, as reduction in liver function affects both macronutrients and micronutrients. A need for nutritional status assessment for liver disease patients exists in all parts of the world. There are many widely studied tools in use to perform a thorough nutritional assessment, of which some tools are low cost and do not require extensive training. These tools can be studied and evaluated for use in the resource limited setting of a country like Pakistan. Treatment guidelines for proper nutrition maintenance in chronic liver disease exist for all parts of the world, but the knowledge and practice of nutritional counseling in Pakistan is poor, both amongst patients and physicians. Emphasis on assessment for nutritional status at the initial visit with recording of vital signs is needed. Simultaneously, treating physicians need to be made aware of the misconceptions surrounding nutritional restrictions in cirrhosis so that patient education is done correctly based on proper scientific evidence

A Simple Systematic Approach to Mood Invariant Handwriting Analysis Using SVM Classifier

Handwriting is actually brain writing. The subconscious mind comes into play, which reveals the traits .A systematic approach is proposed towards understanding the Human behaviors through handwriting. The feature vector is built by considering the distance between words, orientation and alignment of the words right or left. The data set was developed using 200 samples from people belonging to different works of life. This system developed is mood invariant since the samples were collected by different people at different point of time and unconstrained hand writing analysis. The handwriting of 100 adults was submitted for graphological analysis. The graphologist's answers to questions on the person’s personality, her description of his character and her assessment of his inclination towards past ,present and current were checked by the person’s own answers to the questionnaire, by the personality descriptions in the case-sheets, and by the results of the Progressive Matrices Test . Further SVM classifier was used. The results were checked and compared with graphologist. The result as high as 95%were obtained

Education and Management Engineering

Abstract Identification of Personality is a complex process. Personality traits are stable over time .Individual's behavior naturally varies from occasion to occasion. But there is a core consistency which defines the true nature. The paper addresses this issue of behavior. Graphology is normally a technique used to identify the traits. Accuracy of this technique depends on how skilled the analyst is. Although human intervention in handwriting analysis has been effective, but it is costly and prone to fatigue. An automation of handwritten text is proposed. Basically we have considered three important features in the direction of orientation of the lines :(i) up hill (ii) down hill (iii) constant line. Edge histogram and bounding boxes was used for feature extraction .Known classifiers like SVM & ANN are used for training and the results were compared. The results were about 98% for SVM & 70% with ANN. The analysis was done using single line

Pharmacovigilance

Pharmacovigilance started about 170 years ago, although it was not yet named as such at that time. It is structured activity in the professional health field, with important social and commercial implications aimed at monitoring the risk/benefit ratio of drugs, improving patient’s safety and the quality of life. In this commentary we report the milestones of pharmacovigilance up to the present day, in order to understand all the steps that have characterized the historical evolution; from the first reports, which were essentially letters or warnings sent by clinicians to publishers of important and famous scientific journals, up to today’s modern and ultrastructured electronic registries. The historical phases also help us to understand why pharmacovigilance helped us to achieve such important results for man’s health and for pharmacology itself, and to identify the challenges that await Pharmacovigilance in future years.</jats:p