Pakistan BioMedical Journal

Prevalence and Determinants of Anxiety Among Hospitalized Children in Nowshera

2025-04-03T07:46:50+00:00

Hospital admission is a stressful experience for children. It leads to high anxiety levels. Objectives: To investigate the prevalence of anxiety among hospitalized children and the causes contributing to its severity. Methods: 118 children fulfilling inclusion criteria were selected by convenient sampling to carry out a cross-sectional observational study in Qazi Complex, Nowshera from December 2023 to May 2024. The children were aged between 9-15 years. Data were collected using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children, a validated self-reported questionnaire. Anxiety levels were classified into mild, moderate, and severe anxiety depending upon scoring. Results: The results showed that prior hospitalizations, experiencing painful processes, and lengthy hospital stays considerably increased the probability of severe anxiety. Children experiencing painful procedures had an odds ratio of 6.27 (p<0.001) and those with a history of previous hospitalization were 4.56 times more expected to experience severe anxiety (p<0.001). The key factor was extended hospital stays, with an OR of 9.09 (p<0.001). Gender and age, however, did not significantly affect anxiety levels. Conclusions: The results emphasize the prerequisite for targeted interventions, such as decreasing hospital stays, reducing painful procedures, and providing emotional support. Understanding these features is vital for emerging attitudes to lessen anxiety in hospitalized children, thus refining their overall treatment results and well-being.

Influence of Lithium On Micro-Hardness of Dental Tissues

2025-04-03T07:47:07+00:00

Lithium in pregnancy is related to the risk of preterm birth. The study is related to the influence of Lithium in which female rabbits were involved as an experimental model, the drug was given during pregnancy which might instigate the defects of teeth in their developing offspring which were utilized as a sample to evaluate the micro-hardness of dental tissues i.e. enamel and dentine. Objective: To evaluate the influence of lithium on the micro-hardness of dental tissues. Methods: The subjects were divided into two sets i.e. investigational and regulator, containing seven subjects per cluster (n=7), the sum of 168 samples. Micro-hardness was estimated on two tissues of teeth. Vickers Hardness gradation was tested by taking three indentations on each sample for enamel and dentine, distinctly with 50 gm of weight for 15 sec. Results: The statistical analysis was done by applying Student’s t-tests using SPSS version 25. A noteworthy decline occurred in maxillary incisors, premolars, and molars, with p-values of 0.001, 0.012, and 0.003, separately. Comparatively, mandibular teeth, affected the incisors and molars, with p-values 0.003 and 0.011. Hardness affected the dentine of maxillary incisors, premolars, and molars, with p-values of 0.006, 0.005, and 0.004 individually. Micro-hardness in dentine was lowered in all the maxillary and mandibular teeth except mandibular molars. Conclusions: It was concluded that the tested values indicated the drug’s effect on maxillary and mandibular teeth by reduced standards. The clinicians should therefore be careful prescribing the medication, particularly during pregnancy, eluding the unfortunate consequence of neonate’s teeth.

Enhancing Nurses' Professional Quality of Life: A Psycho-Educational Intervention Study

2025-04-03T07:46:58+00:00

The nursing staff's professional quality of life is significantly impacted by their exposure to other people's trauma and anguish on the job. By reducing secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout, the project intends to develop a psycho-education-based solution that will enhance nurses' professional quality of life. Objective: To assess the impact of a psycho-education-based intervention on nurses' professional quality of life, stress, anxiety, depression, and resilience. Methods: This quasi-experimental study assessed stress, anxiety, depression, and resilience through pre- and post-testing. Purposive sampling was used, and participants were assigned to intervention or control groups without randomization. The ProQOL, BRS, and DASS scales measured outcomes. Data analysis included repeated measures ANOVA for group differences and bivariate correlation analysis. Results: The results showed that the intervention doesn’t have an effect on compassion satisfaction and stress while it significantly decreases burnout, secondary trauma stress, and depression. The current study also found out an increase in the levels of anxiety for the participants at the assessment after intervention. The compassion satisfaction significantly increased, while burnout, secondary trauma, anxiety, stress, and depression decreased significantly. Furthermore, burnout showed to be negatively correlated with resilience, while secondary trauma stress was not correlated with resilience. Compassion fatigue was also positively correlated with resilience. Conclusion: The research concludes that the interventions based on psycho-education are significant to be utilized in the healthcare sector.

Association of Pelvic Floor Dysfunction with Conception Challenges Among PCOS Female

2025-04-03T07:46:42+00:00

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine disorder in women, often linked to reproductive challenges and pelvic floor dysfunction. Objective: To find out the association of pelvic floor dysfunction and with conception challenges among females with Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome. Methods: A cross sectional descriptive study was conducted; data were collected from Jinnah Hospital, Central Park Hospital, Suraya Azeem teaching hospital and from private clinics of Lahore. Data were collected after getting approval from University Research Ethical Committee from July to October 2024 with a Reference number RE-085-2024. Non probability purposive sampling technique was used. Pelvic floor dysfunction was confirmed through pelvic floor dysfunction inventedry-20 along with some self-made questions for descriptive statistics.192 married female were included in the study and data were analyzed through SPSS version 22.0 software. Results: Out of 192 respondents were of age group 21-30(68.2%). In distribution of BMI, 91 (47.4%) were overweight, 163 (84.9%) were trying to get pregnant, 170(88.5%) were facing difficulty in getting pregnant, 169(88%) of female faced miscarriages, 72(37.5%) females had 2 miscarriages, 78(40.6%) had 1 stillbirth, 83(43.2%) had 1 preterm birth, 154 (80.2%) were taking treatment of PCOS. 115(59.9%) had severe pelvic organ prolapse, 135(70.3%) had mild colorectal anal distress and 97(50.5%) had mild urinary distress. Conclusions: The study concluded that there is a high prevalence of severe pelvic floor dysfunction among PCOS females. Moreover, pelvic organ prolapse is significantly associated with miscarriages in women with PCOS

The Bidirectional Link Between Mental Health Conditions and Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders Among Medical Students. A Cross-Sectional Study in KPK

2025-04-08T07:47:19+00:00

Functional gastrointestinal disorders are common among medical students worldwide, but little is known about how common they are in KPK, Pakistan. Objective: To find out how common FGIDs are among KPK medical students and investigate their connections to other mental health conditions. Methods: This cross-sectional study assessed the FGIDs and mental health of medical students in KPK, Pakistan, using the Rome IV criteria, GAD-7, and PHQ-9 scales. Results: The study found that 162 medical students (104 men and 58 females) with a median age of 18 (between 18 and 25) had an 11.7% FGID frequency (females 15.52% vs. males 9.62%), with GERD (12.3%) and IBS (27.5%) being the most common conditions, followed by FD (2.5%). Additionally, the IBS-FD, GERD-FD, GERD-IBS-FD, and GERD-FD overlapping distributions were 1.2%, 6.2%, 1.9%, and 1.2%, respectively. The prevalence of GAD and MDD were 17.9% and 22.2%, respectively. Multivariable logistic regression analysis revealed that the prevalence of GERD alone was significantly greater in MDD patients than in non-MDD patients (p<0.01). With p-values of 0.042 and 0.001, respectively, FD alone also showed a strong association with MDD and GAD. Additionally, a significant connection (p = 0.024) was seen between IBS and GAD. Participants with GAD showed the highest overlap between FD, IBS, and GAD (p = 0.02). Conclusions: FGIDs were rather common among the medical students in this study (11.7%). Furthermore, these results imply that MDD is linked to FGIDs and OS among Pakistani KPK medical students.

The Use of Organoids to Decode the Molecular Association with the Behavioral Traits in Schizophrenic Person

2025-04-03T07:46:34+00:00

Most essential but complex organ of a human body is brain. Several attempts have been made to understand the chemistry behind its functioning. So, that intricate cell signaling behind numerous neurodevelopmental disorders can be decoded. Moreover, determining the molecular basis behind neuro-disorders has been of great interest in the past years. Traditional methods of using animal models for disease modelling and drug designing have played a great role in generating the knowledge for our understanding. But despite the contribution, due to their unsatisfactory translatability of human brain make them less demanding for drug development.

Brain disorders, particularly Schizophrenia, in which brain functioning is immensely compromised. This complex disease comes with disorganized speech, impaired cognitive ability, weird behavior, and hallucination. Regardless, the scientific efforts that has been made to understand the pathophysiology of this disease, the knowledge is still fragmented as genetic make up behind Schizophrenia is still a mystery. The animal models used to explore its genetic, cellular basis and behavioral complexity have not provided enough theoretical information. In addition to this, human brain is quite distinct from animal brain in its development, structural and functional basis behind the psychiatric disorders. As the result of the limitation of animal models, researches are indulged in the development of better models to identify the mutations in the genes and how these are associated with behavioral traits and phenotype of Schizophrenic person. hiPSC-derived organoids have been developed that mimic the cerebral brain.

Organoids are actually a 3D cellular mass capable of artificially showing the function of an organ. These are usually produced by the differentiation of stem cells. For brain or cerebral organoids exhibiting regional identities, self-organizing embryonic stem cells are used. In case of Schizophrenia, cerebral Organoids have shown that mature neurons are extinct in the cortex but present more in subcortical areas. This happens due to nFGFR1 is more expressed in the subcortical cells but less expressed in cortical region which indicates that nFGFR1 may be involved in developmental abnormalities in cortical neurons in schizophrenia. So, getting this information regarding this disease has make it easy to develop drugs or offer preventive medicine for the people whose are at great risk of getting schizophrenia later in life.

Organoids more closely resemble the actual diseased condition than animal models, they have catalyzed the biological research and have shown potential to advance both translational and basic neuroscience studies. Additionally, organoids have been useful in drug discovery, drug toxicity assessments, development of personalized medicine, and therapeutic testing. The development of gene and cell-based therapeutics, more accurate disease modeling, high-throughput drug screening, and regenerative medicine are all anticipated to be aided by organoid technology in the future.