Breastfeeding education, early skin-to-skin contact and other strong determinants of exclusive breastfeeding in an urban population: a prospective study.

OBJECTIVE: The current study aims to demonstrate independent associations between social, educational and health practice interventions as determinants of exclusive breastfeeding in an urban Ecuadorian population. DESIGN: Prospective survival analyses. SETTING: Ecuadorian mother-child dyads in urban settings. PARTICIPANTS: We followed-up 363 mother-baby dyads who attended healthcare centres in Portoviejo, province of Manabi, for a median time (P25-P75) of 125 days (121-130 days). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: We performed a survival analysis, by setting the time-to-abandonment of exclusive breastfeeding measured in days of life, that is, duration of exclusive breastfeeding, periodically assessed by phone, as the primary outcome. Crude and adjusted mixed-effects Cox proportional hazards model were performed to estimate HRs for each explanatory variable. RESULTS: The incidence rate of abandonment of breastfeeding was 8.9 per 1000 person-days in the whole sample. Multivariate analysis indicated the three most significant protective determinants of exclusive breastfeeding were (a) sessions of prenatal breastfeeding education with an HR of 0.7 (95% CI: 0.5 to 0.9) per each extra session, (b) self-perception of milk production, with an HR of 0.4 (95% CI: 0.3 to 0.6) per each increase in the perceived quantity of milk production and (c) receiving early skin-to-skin contact with an HR of 0.1 (95% CI: <0.1 to 0.3) compared with those not receiving such contact, immediately after birth. CONCLUSIONS: Prenatal education on breastfeeding, self-perception of sufficient breast-milk production and early skin-to-skin contact appear to be strong protectors of exclusive breastfeeding among urban Ecuadorian mother-baby dyads.

Hernia diafragmática congénita en un niño de 12 años. Reporte de caso / Congenital diaphragmatic hernia in a boy of 12 years-old. Case report

Fundamento: La hernia diafragmática congénita con debut tardío es una anomalía congénita rara, la cual se diagnostica ante una amplia gama y grados diversos de presentación sintomática, o como hallazgos radiológicos, lo que puede llevar a errores diagnósticos y fracasos terapéuticos. Objetivo: Mostrar un caso de presentación tardía de hernia diafragmática congénita dada la importancia de tenerla presente para los posibles diagnósticos a esa edad. Presentación de caso: Niño de 12 años de edad que llegó al cuerpo de guardia con disfagia y disnea progresiva de tres días de evolución. Se realizó rayos X donde se le diagnosticó la enfermedad, se operó y tuvo una evolución satisfactoria. Conclusiones: La identificación oportuna de la afección permitió el éxito del tratamiento y la recuperación.

Background: The Congenital diaphragmatic hernia with late premiere is a strange congenital anomaly, which is diagnosed before a wide range and diverse grades of symptomatic presentation, or as radiological discoveries, what can take to diagnostic errors and therapeutic failures. Objective: To show a case of late presentation of congenital diaphragmatic hernia given the importance of having it present for the possible diagnoses to that age. Case presentation: A 12 years-old boy that arrived to guard's body with dysphagia and progressive dyspnea of three days of evolution. He was carried out X rays where he was diagnosed the illness, he was operated and he had a satisfactory evolution. Conclusions: The opportune identification of the affection allowed the success of the treatment and the recovery.

Effective proximity retrieval by ordering permutations.

We introduce a new probabilistic proximity search algorithm for range and K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) searching in both coordinate and metric spaces. Although there exist solutions for these problems, they boil down to a linear scan when the space is intrinsically high-dimensional, as is the case in many pattern recognition tasks. This, for example, renders the K-NN approach to classification rather slow in large databases. Our novel idea is to predict closeness between elements according to how they order their distances towards a distinguished set of anchor objects. Each element in the space sorts the anchor objects from closest to farthest to it, and the similarity between orders turns out to be an excellent predictor of the closeness between the corresponding elements. We present extensive experiments comparing our method against state-of-the-art exact and approximate techniques, both in synthetic and real, metric and non-metric databases, measuring both CPU time and distance computations. The experiments demonstrate that our technique almost always improves upon the performance of alternative techniques, in some cases by a wide margin.