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In spite of abundant sunlight, healthy individuals in Kashmir valley are vitamin D deficient, particularly women. Serum 25 (OH) D concentrations are significantly related to sun exposure.

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Background/Aim: To provide the most recent estimate of childhood obesity and determine the trend in childhood obesity in Riyadh city over the past two decades, by comparing our results with previous studies that published data comparable to our study in terms of geography, sample age (6–16 years), and use of World Health Organization (WHO) cut-offs to define obesity. Patients and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2015 among school children in Riyadh city. A sample of 7930 children (67% girls) aged 6–16 years were randomly selected. Body mass index for age and gender above +1 and below +2 standard deviation scores (SDS) defined overweight (SDS, z-scores) and >+2 SD scores defined obesity. Results: The overall prevalence of overweight and obesity was 13.4% (14.2% for girls and 12% for boys; P = 0.02) and 18.2% (18% for girls and 18.4% for boys; P = 0.73), respectively. When compared with the WHO-based national prevalence rate of obesity reported in 2004 (≈9.3%), the obesity rate has doubled over a 10-year period. There was a significantly higher prevalence of obesity in adolescents (>11 years) than in children (20.2% vs 15.7%; P < 0.01). Overweight and obesity increased significantly with higher levels of socioeconomic status. Obese children were at 1.5 and 2 times risk of developing gas bloating and vomiting than non-obese children. Conclusion: The prevalence of overweight and obesity has risen alarmingly among Saudi children and adolescents over the past decade and should make a strong case to initiate and monitor effective implementation of obesity prevention measures.

Background:Emphysematous pyelonephritis (EPN) is a necrotizing infection which results in gas within the renal parenchyma, collecting system, or perinephric tissue. A majority of cases occur in patients with diabetes mellitus (DM). In EPN, early aggressive medical treatment may avoid nephrectomy.Aims:The aim of this study was to analyze the characteristics of patients with EPN with respect to patient demographics, clinical presentation, diagnostic investigations, microbiological findings, treatment modality and outcome, and the influence of prognostic factors on the outcome.Materials and Methods:We reviewed the hospital records of 26 patients with EPN for clinical, laboratory, radiological, and microbiological findings, treatments given, and outcome. The severity of EPN was graded as per the Huang classification. We applied the reported prognostic factors to our patients to find out whether these factors correlated with failure of conservative treatment.Results:All the study subjects had DM and all but two of them were females. The majority of our patients (61.5%) had extensive EPN (class 3 or 4) and majority (76.9%) had two or more bad prognostic factors. Escherichia coli was the most common causative organism involved in 50% of our cases. Twenty-three (88.5%) of our patients responded to conservative treatment, two required nephrectomy, and one expired on conservative treatment.Conclusions:In this series of patients with EPN, all had DM, nearly all were women, and E. coli was the most frequently isolated pathogen. Nearly a third of our patients had bilateral disease. Despite the presence of two or more bad prognostic factors and extensive EPN (class 3 or 4) in a majority of our patients, conservative treatment afforded a striking success rate of 88.5%. We recommend early aggressive medical treatment and suggest that nephrectomy should be considered only if patients deteriorate or do not improve on conservative treatment.

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Abstract-Exponential growth in mobile technology and mini computing devices has led to a massive increment in social media users, who are continuously posting their views and comments about certain products and services, which are in their use. These views and comments can be extremely beneficial for the companies which are interested to know about the public opinion regarding their offered products or services. This type of public opinion otherwise can be obtained via questionnaires and surveys, which is no doubt a difficult and complex task. So, the valuable information in the form of comments and posts from micro-blogging sites can be used by the companies to eliminate the flaws and to improve the products or services according to customer needs. However, extracting a general opinion out of a staggering number of users' comments manually cannot be feasible. A solution to this is to use an automatic method for sentiment mining. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is one of the widely used classification techniques for polarity detection from textual data. This study proposes a technique to tune the SVM performance by using grid search method for sentiment analysis. In this paper, three datasets are used for the experiment and performance of proposed technique is evaluated using three information retrieval metrics: precision, recall and f-measure.

Background: Mortality studies can show the relative contribution of diabetes to mortality in the total population, and they can provide important descriptions of the changes in causes and frequency of diabetes mortality over time. Objective: To find the mortality pattern in people with diabetes admitted to a tertiary care hospital in a developing country, using underlying/contributory causes of death. Methods: In this retrospective study, mortality trends among people with diabetes admitted to Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Srinagar, Kashmir, India were reviewed by screening the hospital records of all people with diabetes who died over the last 9 years, carrying forward earlier observations from the same centre. Results: Of 234 776 people admitted to the centre during the review period, 16 690 (7.11%) died; 741 (383 men) of these had diabetes mellitus mentioned on the death certificate. The mean (SD) age at death for people with diabetes was 60.07 (13.62) years in men and 57.36 (13.40) years in women. The leading contributory causes of death were infections (40.9%), chronic renal failure (33.6%), coronary artery disease (16.9%), cerebrovascular disease (13.2%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (6.9%), acute renal failure (6.2%), malignancy (4.2%), hypoglycaemia (3.5%) and diabetic ketoacidosis (3.4%). The cause of death could not be ascertained in 2.8% of cases; in 52.9%, 36.3% and 8.0% cases one, two and three or more causes, respectively, were recorded as the cause of death. Conclusions: The aetiological spectrum of mortality in people with diabetes at this Indian centre continues to be dominated by infections and renal failure, which is different from that in the developed world, where coronary artery disease and cerebrovascular disease are the principal causes of death in people with diabetes.