Objective:To evaluate the effects of the consumption of energy drinks on cardiovascular parameters in a group of healthy young individuals.Methods:In a quasi-experimental study, 44 healthy adult participants aged between 15 and 30 years were evaluated. The blood pressure (BP) as well as electrocardiographic indices, including heart rate (HR), PR interval, QRS duration, corrected QT (QTc) interval, and ST-T changes were recorded before consumption of a caffeine-containing energy drink and at the specific time points over a 4-h test duration.Results:We found statistically significant HR decline (p=0.004) and more frequent ST-T changes (p=0.004) after the participants consumed the energy drink. However, readings for systolic BP (p=0.44), diastolic BP (p=0.26), PR interval (p=0.449), QRS duration (p=0.235), and QTc interval (p=0.953) showed no significant change post-consumption.Conclusion:In conclusion, we demonstrated that the consumption of energy drinks could contribute to HR decline and ST-T change in healthy young adults.
Background: The COVID-19 infection is a novel virus without any specific targeted therapies; thus, focusing on primary epidemiologic concerns, preventive strategies, risk factors, exacerbation factors, and mortality-related factors are of great importance to better control this disorder. There are some controversies about the factors associated with COVID-19 in different theories, and addiction is no exception. Methods: We conducted a large cross-sectional study of 513 hospitalized Iranian patients with COVID-19 infection to evaluate the severity of disease courses in patients with or without history of opium addiction. We recorded these data retrospectively after patients’ discharge from the hospital. For the quantitative data, we used independent-samples t and Mann-Whitney tests. The qualitative data were calculated using Fisher exact and chi-square tests in IBM SPSS Statistics Version 22. Also, p<0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: There was no significant difference regarding mean days of hospitalization in opium positive and negative groups (7.95±8.39 vs 8.35±5.11, respectively) (p=0.771); however, the need for intensive care unit (ICU) admission was significantly higher in the opium positive group (36% vs 11%) (p=0.005). The mean days of ICU stay was significantly higher in the opium positive group (2.36±3.81 vs 0.86±2.90) (p=0.026). The percentage of febrile patients, anosmia/hyposmia, and dysgeusia at the initiation of hospitalization was significantly lower in the opium positive group (39% vs 66%; 8% vs 23%; 8% vs; 20%, respectively) (p=0.002, 0.018, and.031, respectively). In the laboratory tests, only the white blood cell (WBC) count and the segmented cells were higher in the opium positive group (10.1±6.60 vs 7.38±4.14 and 73±20.47 vs 56.5±32.60, respectively) (p=0.018 and.001, respectively) and lymphocytes were lower in the opium positive (15.60±8.25 vs18.70±10.12) (p=0.048). Opium addicts had a significantly lower rate of azithromycin and lopinavir/ritonavir prescription in their initiation therapy (19% vs 34%, and 47% vs 70%, respectively) (p=0.038 and 0.012, respectively). Conclusion: Opium addict patients with COVID infection may be more febrile and experience more disease-specific symptoms and more severe disease course. These patients may show more evidence of laboratory inflammation and probable superinfections, so may manage with more caution and somehow different therapeutic regimen.
In an emergency situation prior to an imminent accident, first in-vehicle warning systems would intervene and aim to make the driver to take a suitable action. If the risk of accident was not eliminated, then an autonomous collision avoidance manoeuvre can prevent it. In this work, path and speed control are intended to be used to perform such a manoeuvre by using steering and braking actuators respectively. In order to provide actuators with suitable control inputs, first a path is planned for the heavy vehicle to follow during the manoeuvre. Then the path is used to calculate feedforward control inputs whereas a feedback controller assures the path tracking by compensating for errors. As a result, a robust path planning and control algorithm is designed and implemented that can perform autonomous collision avoidance manoeuvres for a heavy vehicle. Promising simulation results support ongoing works on vehicle demonstration and experiments on a real heavy vehicle.
The aim of this study was to validate the 2010 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) preliminary criteria for fibromyalgia (FM) in an Iranian population. In this multicenter prospective study, we enrolled 168 FM patients and 110 controls. All participants underwent dolorimetry examination by study assessors and completed a questionnaire containing variables of both the ACR 2010 preliminary and ACR 1990 criteria. We compared the performance of the ACR 2010 criteria with the expert diagnosis as well as the ACR 1990 criteria. Receiver operator characteristic analyses and Youden index were used to evaluate the test characteristics of a set of different cutoff points for two subcomponents of ACR 2010 criteria including widespread pain index (WPI) and symptom severity (SS) scale. Considering expert diagnosis as the gold standard, the ACR 2010 criteria showed comparable specificity with ACR 1990 (92.8 vs. 88.3 %, P = 0.073), but lower sensitivity (58.9 vs. 71.4 %, P = 0.003) and a tendency for lower accuracy (72.4 vs. 78.4 %, P = 0.105). Applying the ACR 1990 criteria as the gold standard, we observed a trend toward an increase in overall accuracy (72.4 vs. 79.1 %, P = 0.064). Optimal test characteristics were achieved for WPI ≥6 and SS scale score ≥4 and improved sensitivity and accuracy of ACR 2010 criteria when compared to expert, 76.1 and 81.7, respectively. The preliminary ACR 2010 criteria performed less desirably in terms of sensitivity in our set of Iranian patients. Selecting lower cutoff points as WPI ≥6 and SS scale score ≥4 improved the diagnostic values of the criteria.
Background severe disease available on CO COVID-19 in a Methods: In diagnosed betw a hospitalized p used univariab COVID-19, adm Results: Of t the multivariab ratio (OR), 2.3 with both COV 3.04; p=0.001) Conclusion: Also, the prese
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