Background The quantification of asthma medication reduction and its relation to an aggravation of asthma during pregnancy at an individual level are unclear. Methods We conducted a nationwide retrospective cohort study of asthmatic pregnant women in South Korea. All of the asthma medications were ranked from 1 to 4 according to the guideline-based stepwise approach. We assessed the daily sums of the ranks of the asthma medications and their association with exacerbations during three phases based on the individual's delivery date: before, during, and after pregnancy. Results The study cohort included 115,169 asthmatic pregnant women who gave birth between 2011 and 2013. The subjects were clustered into four groups according to the daily rank sums of their asthma medication. Asthma medications were rapidly reduced at the beginning of the pregnancy and then slowly increased after delivery. Exacerbations were more frequent in the group with higher rank-sum values than in the group with lower values. Overall exacerbations were reduced during pregnancy compared to before or after delivery. Conclusions Asthmatic pregnant women tended to reduce their asthma medication use during pregnancy. This led to a greater number of exacerbations in a small part of the study population.
In this paper, we suggest an elegant and cost-effective Backlight Unit which is slim and has locally confined light needed for 1dimensional local dimming and scanning. We fabricated LGP with micro-structures patterned by CO2 Laser. Lights from LGP are well distributed and uniform with density control of micropatterns because they are continuous over the whole region of LGP. With one dimensional local dimming, we obtained 43% power-saving effect and contrast ratio of 11400:1 without any hot spot and the artifact.
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