No abstract

Background: Video-based interventions have the potential to contribute to long-lasting improvements in health-seeking behaviours. Ghana's upsurge rate of information and communication technology usage presents an opportunity to improve the awareness of HPV vaccination and screening rates of cervical cancer among women in Ghana. This research aimed to assess the impact of video-based educational intervention centred on the Health Belief and Transtheoretical Models of behavioural changes in promoting HPV vaccination, cervical carcinoma awareness and willingness to have Pap smear test (PST) among women in Ghana.Methods: To achieve the intended sample size, convenient, purposive and stratified random sampling techniques were used. SPSS v. 23.0 was used in the data analysis. Percentages and frequencies were used to represent participants' demographic characteristics, knowledge of (1) cervical carcinoma, (2) human papillomavirus vaccine, and (3) Pap smear test. The chi-square test by McNemar was employed to evaluate variations in the post- and pre-intervention responses. A p-value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. The level of significance was adjusted owing to multiple comparisons by using the Bonferroni's correction.Results: Before the intervention, 84.2% of the participant had some knowledge or information about cervical cancer, but after the intervention, 100% of the participant became aware of cervical cancer which represents 15.8% increment at a P < .001. The willingness to have a pap smear test increased from 35.8% to 94.2% (df = 58.4%, P < .001) after the educational intervention. The willingness to be vaccinated increased from 47.5% to 81.7% (df = 34.2%, P < .001) after the educational intervention. Six months after the intervention, participants were followed-up. 253 (42.2%) participants had gone for cervical cancer screening (Pap smear test) while 347 (57.8%) participants had not been screened. In terms of HPV vaccination, 192 participants (32.0%) had begun their HPV vaccination cycle.Conclusion: The study results show that health education, using videos, may be influential in perception changing, self-efficacy improvement and the understanding of cervical carcinoma screening and HPV vaccination.

Purpose: Recent studies have validated microRNAs (miRNAs) as a diagnostic biomarker for haematological cancers. This study aimed to estimate the overall diagnostic accuracy of circulating miRNAs in haematological malignancies. Materials and Methods: Multiple databases (Google Scholar, PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library,) were searched until 19 th August 2017. Results: The meta-analysis included 50 studies from 20 publications. The diagnostic accuracy was assessed by pooled specificity, sensitivity, positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) and area under the curve area (AUC) by random effect model. We used QUADAS (Quality Assessment for diagnostic accuracy studies) to evaluate the quality of the included studies. To perform the meta-analysis, we used Meta-Disk 1.4, Revman 5.3 and Stata 12.0 software. High diagnostic accuracy was demonstrated, with a sensitivity of 0.81, a specificity of 0.85, a PLR of 5.28, an NLR of 0.22, a DOR of 30.39, and an AUC of 0.91. Subgroup analyses showed better outcomes for the African population, combined miRNAs and leukaemia patients compared with other subgroups. Conclusion: Our results indicated that circulating miRNAs especially combined miRNA can be used as a diagnostic marker in haematological cancers.