Validation of the Working Ability, Location, Intensity, Days of Pain and Dysmenorrhea (WaLIDD) Scale in Arabic-Speaking Young Female Adults.

Background: Dysmenorrhea, characterized by painful menstrual cramps, significantly impacts the well-being of women globally. Despite its prevalence and adverse effects, dysmenorrhea is often underdiagnosed and inadequately treated. This study aims to validate the Arabic version of the Working ability, Location, Intensity, Days of pain, and Dysmenorrhea (WaLIDD) scale among Lebanese female university students aged 18-45. Methods: This cross-sectional study, involving 729 participants, utilized a translated WaLIDD scale and the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scales (DASS-8). Results: Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) confirmed the one-factor structure of the WaLIDD scale, demonstrating excellent fit indices, with good internal reliability. Concurrent validity analysis revealed significant associations between higher WaLIDD scores and elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. The prevalence of dysmenorrhea in the study was estimated at 7.3%. Conclusion: The study underscores the importance of the WaLIDD scale as a reliable and valid tool for assessing dysmenorrhea among Arabic-speaking populations. The successful validation of the Arabic version facilitates its application in Lebanon and potentially other Arab regions, providing a universal tool to predict and assess dysmenorrhea and its impact. Further research is encouraged to explore the scale's applicability in clinical settings and tailor interventions for improved women's well-being.

Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the 2021 Louisiana Needs Assessment Questionnaire for Arabic-speaking people living with HIV.

BACKGROUND: Despite the global decline in HIV infections and mortality worldwide, the HIV epidemic is still growing in the MENA region. In the region, People Living with HIV (PLWH) are facing many challenges related to cultural values, norms, and provided services which create significant obstacles to HIV prevention and control efforts. This study aimed to translate, culturally adapt, and validate the "2021 Louisiana Needs Assessment Questionnaire" for use among Egyptians and Arabic-speaking population. METHODS: Arabic translation and cultural adaptation of the questionnaire passed through five stages. The questionnaire was translated forward and backward then an expert committee reviewed the translated version. Another expert committee reviewed the developed version after modification to assess the content validity using the Content Validity Index (CVI). The last step included a cognitive interview of a convenient sample of 50 adult PLWH in five consecutive rounds to assess subjects' understanding of questions and response items and their meanings. RESULTS: Modifications were carried out all through the translation and adaptation process of the questionnaire including used words, nomenclature of services, adding or omitting response items, and ordering of questions and response items. The synthesized Arabic-adapted questionnaire has adequate content validity and all questions are clearly understood by the studied subjects. The calculated Content Validity Index of all questionnaire items ranged from 0.82 to 1. CONCLUSION: The developed culturally adapted questionnaire has adequate content validity/semantic appropriateness. It can be used to assess the needs of PLWH in the MENA region with minor adaptations to fit each country. It can also be used to follow the outcome and impact of implemented programs and services. Further research is recommended to assess its psychometric properties.

Sociodemographic and Health Determinants of Loneliness in Older Immigrants in Canada: A Cross-Sectional Study.

The COVID pandemic brought to light the pressing issues of social isolation and loneliness for older adults. Immigrant older adults' experience of loneliness is even more exacerbated by factors, such as, language barriers, and the loss of cultural community. Key determinants of loneliness in older immigrants are not clear in the literature. A cross-sectional study was conducted in nine cities across Canada to: describe the experience of emotional, social and overall loneliness; and examine the determinants of loneliness among Punjabi, Mandarin, and Arabic-speaking older immigrants. A total of 647 older immigrants participated in the study. Descriptive statistics were used to describe their experience of loneliness, and multiple regression analysis was performed to examine the determinants of loneliness. Most participants had a post-secondary education, were married, and had been in Canada for about 16 years. On average, the participants reported good physical and mental health, and moderate levels of emotional, social, and overall loneliness. Ethnocultural group, emotional wellbeing, and depression were associated with emotional loneliness. Social loneliness was associated with education, depression, psychological distress, age, and ethnocultural group. Determinants of overall loneliness were age, gender, ethnocultural group, self-rated mental health, emotional wellbeing, depression, and psychological distress. Community based interventions that target these key factors must be designed to address loneliness experienced by older immigrants.

Crooked Nose: Aesthetic and Functional Outcomes.

Purpose: To highlight a detailed analysis of aesthetic and functional rhinoplasty outcomes utilizing the most recent highly validated Standardized Cosmesis Health Nasal Outcomes Survey (SCHNOS) for Middle Eastern crooked nose patients. Methods: A longitudinal cohort study scrutinizing preoperative rhinoplasty patients' satisfaction retrospectively and their postoperative outcomes prospectively. The patients fulfilled the Arabic SCHNOS during postoperative follow-up. Preoperative and postoperative responses were recorded and then reviewed and analyzed. Results: This study included 41 patients with a mean age of 27.8 years. Females represented 41.5% of patients. About 73% of patients had a history of trauma. 90% of patients underwent primary procedures for crooked nose correction. Twelve patients (29.3%) underwent surgery for functional reasons, and twenty-six (63.4%) had it for both aesthetic and functional issues. There was a statistically significant difference regarding changes in SCHNOS regarding nasal obstruction scores (SCHNOS-O) and nasal cosmesis scores (SCHNOS-C) (p < 0.001). These findings coincided with a substantial reduction of all SCHNOS items postoperatively (p < 0.001). There was no statistically significant relationship between changes in (SCHNOS-O) or (SCHNOS-C) pre-and postoperatively and either age, sex, history of trauma, or type of surgery. However, a statistically significant difference was detected when assessing the relationship between changes in SCHNOS-O and the reason for surgery. Conclusion: A thorough knowledge of three-dimensional pathology and time-associated changes is required to achieve optimal aesthetic and functional outcomes for crooked nose patients. The use of highly validated questionnaires like SCHNOS in clinical practice is highly encouraged to modify and trace surgical techniques to the most appropriate and successful ones for the patients.

Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the Arabic version of the knee and hip health-related quality of life (Mini-OAKHQOL) questionnaire in male Saudi patients with osteoarthritis: a methodological observational design.

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is common in Saudi Arabia, has a significant impact on quality of life (QoL), and lacks a specific questionnaire to measure QoL. The primary objective of this study was to translate and cross-culturally adapt the Mini Osteoarthritis Knee and Hip Quality of Life (Mini-OAKHQOL) questionnaire into Arabic and to determine its psychometric properties among OA knee and/or hip patients in Saudi Arabia. Methods: A methodological observational design was conducted and followed standard guidelines for cross-cultural adaptation of Mini-OAKHQOL into Saudi Arabic. Two hundred and eight primary OA knee and/or hip male participants aged between 45 and 80 years with a mean age of 58.65 ± 13.8 years and a BMI of 29.5 ± 1.2 kg/m2 were included and performed the stages of translation to target Arabic language (forward T1 and T2), synthesized an Arabic draft (T12), then back-translated to English (BT1 and BT2), followed by expert committee review to rectify the deficiencies leading to a prefinal stage involving a pilot test on native Arabic speakers, thereby finalized a final Arabic version. The Arabic Mini-OAKHQOL, Arabic Short Form 12 (SF12), and visual analog scale (VAS) were administered to analyze internal consistency (IC), test-retest reliability at baseline as well as one week later (up to the 10th day). The construct validity was tested using Spearman's rank correlation, and factor analysis was done to establish a five-factor fit model. Homogeneity was determined using principal component analysis (PCA). Floor and ceiling effects calculated in percentages. Results: The Arabic Mini-OAKHQOL showed an excellent Cronbach's alpha of the overall scale (α = 0.931) for its internal consistency and an excellent intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.947 for its retest reliability, with a high response rate of 93.75%. The construct validity of this scale was good with Ar-SF12 and VAS pain. A five-factor model fit was considered acceptable, and factor loading for each item found within the permissible limits confirmed the factorial validity. None of the items, dimensions, or overall scale showed either a floor or ceiling effect. Conclusion: The adapted and tested Arabic Mini-OAKHQOL is a reliable and valid questionnaire to measure the impact of knee and/or hip OA on quality of life in the Saudi Arabian male OA population to reduce the respondent's burden for use in clinical and prospective studies.

A novel approach to secure communication in mega events through Arabic text steganography utilizing invisible Unicode characters.

Mega events attract mega crowds, and many data exchange transactions are involved among organizers, stakeholders, and individuals, which increase the risk of covert eavesdropping. Data hiding is essential for safeguarding the security, confidentiality, and integrity of information during mega events. It plays a vital role in reducing cyber risks and ensuring the seamless execution of these extensive gatherings. In this paper, a steganographic approach suitable for mega events communication is proposed. The proposed method utilizes the characteristics of Arabic letters and invisible Unicode characters to hide secret data, where each Arabic letter can hide two secret bits. The secret messages hidden using the proposed technique can be exchanged via emails, text messages, and social media, as these are the main communication channels in mega events. The proposed technique demonstrated notable performance with a high-capacity ratio averaging 178% and a perfect imperceptibility ratio of 100%, outperforming most of the previous work. In addition, it proves a performance of security comparable to previous approaches, with an average ratio of 72%. Furthermore, it is better in robustness than all related work, with a robustness against 70% of the possible attacks.

Real-Time Air-Writing Recognition for Arabic Letters Using Deep Learning.

Learning to write the Arabic alphabet is crucial for Arab children's cognitive development, enhancing their memory and retention skills. However, the lack of Arabic language educational applications may hamper the effectiveness of their learning experience. To bridge this gap, SamAbjd was developed, an interactive web application that leverages deep learning techniques, including air-writing recognition, to teach Arabic letters. SamAbjd was tailored to user needs through extensive surveys conducted with mothers and teachers, and a comprehensive literature review was performed to identify effective teaching methods and models. The development process involved gathering data from three publicly available datasets, culminating in a collection of 31,349 annotated images of handwritten Arabic letters. To enhance the dataset's quality, data preprocessing techniques were applied, such as image denoising, grayscale conversion, and data augmentation. Two models were experimented with using a convolution neural network (CNN) and Visual Geometry Group (VGG16) to evaluate their effectiveness in recognizing air-written Arabic characters. Among the CNN models tested, the standout performer was a seven-layer model without dropout, which achieved a high testing accuracy of 96.40%. This model also demonstrated impressive precision and F1-score, both around 96.44% and 96.43%, respectively, indicating successful fitting without overfitting. The web application, built using Flask and PyCharm, offers a robust and user-friendly interface. By incorporating deep learning techniques and user feedback, the web application meets educational needs effectively.

Adaptation and validation of the Moroccan dialect version of the nomophobia questionnaire (NMP-Q): Among university students.

The fear of being without a mobile phone, known as nomophobia, is a new psychological issue that has arisen with the widespread use of information and communication technologies. To understand this phenomenon, more research is needed. The present study aimed to assess the factor structure of the Moroccan dialect version of the Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q) among a sample of Moroccan university students. The study included 400 students selected by convenience sampling from two universities (Fez and Rabat). First, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted using the principal component method with Varimax rotation. Then, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), and Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) were carried out. The results showed that a 20-item, four-factor model was the best fit for the data collected from the sample, indicating cross-cultural validity and the robustness of the NMP-Q's structure. This suggests that the Moroccan version of the NMP-Q is useful for assessing nomophobia behavior among Moroccan university students.

Investigation of physicochemical and antibacterial properties of dill (Anethum graveolens L.) microencapsulated essential oil using fluidized bed method.

The present study delves into the encapsulation of dill essential oil utilizing the fluidized bed coating methodology. The investigation focused on the impact of essential oil concentration and the application of maltodextrin and arabic gum as the primary and secondary coating agents. The dominant compounds in the dill essential oil were identified as limonene (32.32%), carvone (35.43%), and cis-dihydrocarvone (5.43%). The antimicrobial potency of the dill essential oil was evaluated, demonstrating notable inhibition against Streptococcus mutans with inhibition zone diameters ranging from 5.4 mm to 16 mm for concentrations between 250 µg/mL and 2000 µg/mL. For Streptococcus sobrinus, the inhibition zones measured from 6.6 mm to 18 mm across the same concentration gradient. An increase in maltodextrin concentration was associated with a decrease in moisture content, bulk density, and tapped density, while it improved microencapsulation efficiency and loading capacity. In contrast, a higher concentration of arabic gum increased moisture content, loading capacity, and encapsulation efficiency, but reduced bulk density and tapped density. Elevating the essential oil concentration increased all physicochemical properties of the microcapsules, except for tapped density. The optimal conditions for microencapsulation involve using a 2000 ppm concentration of dill essential oil with 75% maltodextrin and 0.1% arabic gum as carrier agents. Scanning electron microscopy images indicated that the microcapsule particles were nearly spherical with a smooth, intact surface. The release rate of phenolic compounds in a simulated saliva environment reached its maximum at 98.32% after 20 min, showcasing an efficient release profile.

Arabic dialect identification in social media: A hybrid model with transformer models and BiLSTM.

Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) is a challenging task in natural language processing applications due to its diversity and regional variations. Despite previous efforts, this task is still difficult. Therefore, this study aims to use transformers to address the issue of ADI on social media. A combination of two hybrid models is proposed in this study: one that combines Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) with CAMeLBERT, and the second model that combines the BiLSTM model with AlBERT. In addition, a novel dataset comprising 121,289 user-generated comments from various social media network platforms and four major Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Jordanian, Gulf and Yemeni) was introduced. Several experiments have been conducted using conventional Machine Learning Classifiers (MLCs) and Deep Learning Models (DLMs) as baselines to measure the performance and effectiveness of the proposed models. In addition, binary classification is performed between two dialects to determine which are closest to each other. The performance of the model is measured using common metrics such as precision, recall, F-score and F-measure. Experiment results demonstrate the superior efficiency of the proposed hybrid models in ADI, CAMeLBERT with BiLSTM and ALBERT with BiLSTM, which both recorded an accuracy of 87.67 % and 86.51 %, respectively.

Introducing the Arabic inflammatory bowel disease disk as a tool for assessing disability in patients with inflammatory bowel disease in Jordan.

BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIM: Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are chronic relapsing-remitting disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. IBD causes significant impairment in the patient's quality of life that should be assessed and monitored in a flexible and easy way. The IBD-Disability Index (IBD-DI) is the only validated tool to assess disability in IBD patients, but it is difficult to use in clinical practice. The IBD Disk is a new shortened, self-administering version of the IBD-DI that allows quick assessment of IBD patients and tracks changes in disease burden over time. However, the IBD Disk has not been used yet in clinical practice in Jordan. The aim of the study was to translate the IBD Disk to Arabic language and introduce it in clinical practice in Jordan. PATIENTS AND METHODS: After translating the original IBD Disk to Arabic language, IBD patients referred to outpatient clinic or admitted to the medical department at the new Al-Hussein hospital, Al-Salt, Jordan, from September 2021 until March 2022, filled the translated IBD Disk. RESULTS: A total of 50 IBD patients (52 % males) were included in the study and filled the IBD Disk. The IBD Disk was easy to complete by the patients. Energy, regulating defecation, and emotions were the most disabling domains for relapsing patients. Polygonal shape area of the mean for IBD Disk scores decreased during remission. Education & work and energy had the strongest correlation at relapse. CONCLUSION: The IBD Disk is a reliable visual representation of IBD disability. In this study, a translated version of IBD Disk to Arabic language was introduced for the first time in clinical practice in Jordan. The reduction in the polygonal shape area of the scores' mean represents decreased disease burden.

AHD: Arabic healthcare dataset.

With the soaring demand for healthcare systems, chatbots are gaining tremendous popularity and research attention. Numerous language-centric research on healthcare is conducted day by day. Despite significant advances in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP), challenges remain in natural language classification and generation due to the lack of suitable datasets. The primary shortcoming of these models is the lack of suitable Arabic datasets for training. To address this, authors introduce a large Arabic Healthcare Dataset (AHD) of textual data. The dataset consists of over 808k questions and answers across 90 categories, offered to the research community for Arabic computational linguistics. Authors anticipate that this rich dataset would make a great aid for a variety of NLP tasks on Arabic textual data, especially for text classification and generation purposes. Authors present the data in raw form. AHD is composed of main dataset scraped from medical website, which is Altibbi website. AHD is made public and freely available at http://data.mendeley.com/datasets/mgj29ndgrk/5.

Comprehension of verb morphology in Arabic-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with a range of morphosyntactic skills, particularly with tense and subject - verb agreement. Many studies have examined verb-morphology production in children with DLD. We extend this line of research by profiling verb-morphology comprehension in 67 monolingual Saudi Arabic-speaking children, comprising 33 with DLD (M = 61 months, SD = 10.70), and 34 age-matched typically developing (TD) children (M = 63 months, SD = 8.94). Children completed a novel picture selection task developed to assess their comprehension of verb tense, gender agreement, and number agreement. Children with DLD scored significantly lower than TD children on the verb morphology comprehension task. They showed greater difficulty identifying verb tense forms, particularly future tense. They also demonstrated lower accuracy in identifying subject-verb agreement in general, with specific difficulty in comprehending masculine verbs, and singular verbs. These findings were compared with production verb-morphology data from previous Arabic studies. Overall, this study highlights the challenges experienced by Arabic-speaking children with DLD in comprehending verb morphology, particularly tense and subject-verb agreement inflections. These findings can be used to tailor appropriate assessment designs and interventions for an Arabic-speaking DLD population.

Non-Word Repetition in Arabic-speaking children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A closer look into accuracy and error patterns.

Non-Word Repetition (NWR) tasks effectively identify language impairments and assess phonological skills across diverse populations and languages, including Arabic. Prior research revealed heterogeneity of performance in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on NWR tasks. The current study is the first to evaluate phonological skills of Palestinian-Arabic-speaking children with and without ASD, employing a Palestinian-Arabic NWR task. A total of 142 Palestinian-Arabic-speaking children, aged 5-11 participated in the study, including 75 children with Typical Language Development (TLD) and 67 children with ASD. The NWR task included 18 non-words of varying length (1-4 syllables) and complexity (with and without consonant clusters). Quantitative analysis examined the effects of length and phonological complexity on the NWR accuracy scores in children with TLD and ASD. Error pattern analysis accounting for phoneme and syllable substitutions/deletions/additions and lexicalisations aimed to shed light on the phonological representations of children with and without ASD. Within the ASD group, two subgroups emerged: 72% exhibited age-appropriate NWR performance, while 28% showed performance at-risk for phonological impairment. Non-word length, rather than complexity, significantly influenced the children's performance. Consonant substitution was the most frequent error pattern across all groups. On the theoretical side, these findings extend cross-linguistic evidence of phonological skill heterogeneity in children with ASD to Arabic-speaking children. Additionally, they highlight an overall delayed but qualitatively similar pattern of phonological development in children with ASD. On the clinical side, results underscore the importance of comprehensive language assessment in children with ASD.

A scarce dataset for ancient Arabic handwritten text recognition.

Developing Deep Learning Optical Character Recognition is an active area of research, where models based on deep neural networks are trained on data to eventually extract text within an image. Even though many advances are currently being made in this area in general, the Arabic OCR domain notably lacks a dataset for ancient manuscripts. Here, we fill this gap by providing both the image and textual ground truth for a collection of ancient Arabic manuscripts. This scarce dataset is collected from the central library of the Islamic University of Madinah, and it encompasses rich text spanning different geographies across centuries. Specifically, eight ancient books with a total of forty pages, both images and text, transcribed by the experts, are present in this dataset. Particularly, this dataset holds a significant value due to the unavailability of such data publicly, which conspicuously contributes to the deep learning models development/augmenting, validation, testing, and generalization by researchers and practitioners, both for the tasks of Arabic OCR and Arabic text correction.

Character recognition system for pegon typed manuscript.

The Pegon script is an Arabic-based writing system used for Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and Indonesian languages. Due to various reasons, this script is now mainly found among collectors and private Islamic boarding schools (pesantren), creating a need for its preservation. One preservation method is digitization through transcription into machine-encoded text, known as OCR (Optical Character Recognition). No published literature exists on OCR systems for this specific script. This research explores the OCR of Pegon typed manuscripts, introducing novel synthesized and real annotated datasets for this task. These datasets evaluate proposed OCR methods, especially those adapted from existing Arabic OCR systems. Results show that deep learning techniques outperform conventional ones, which fail to detect Pegon text. The proposed system uses YOLOv5 for line segmentation and a CTC-CRNN architecture for line text recognition, achieving an F1-score of 0.94 for segmentation and a CER of 0.03 for recognition.

Feasibility and Acceptability Study of a Culturally Adapted Web-Based Intervention to Reduce Suicidal Ideation for Syrian Asylum Seekers and Refugees in the United Kingdom: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Study.

BACKGROUND: The war in Syria has displaced over 6.8 million people, more than any other conflict since the Second World War. As a result, Syrian asylum seekers and refugees have experienced several life-changing events, resulting in high rates of anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicidal ideation (SI). To address the treatment gap and reduce the burden of help-seeking, a web-based intervention to reduce SI developed for general populations was culturally adapted for and with Syrian asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom. The study revealed the importance of understanding their lived experience with migration and the acculturative process in providing treatment for SI. This study will now assess the feasibility and acceptability of the culturally adapted intervention for this population. OBJECTIVE: The first phase of the study will include recruiting participants and delivering the web-based intervention (1) to assess the feasibility of meeting recruitment goals and recruitment rates and (2) to assess the feasibility of outcome measures. The second phase of the study will include one-to-one semistructured interviews (1) to assess the suitability of the culturally adapted intervention in terms of recruitment and adherence rates and barriers and facilitators to engagement and (2) to assess the acceptability of the intervention in terms of its cultural relevance and appropriateness. METHODS: This is a protocol for a single-group, noncontrolled, mixed methods feasibility and acceptability study of a culturally adapted web-based intervention to reduce SI for Syrian asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom. The study will assess the feasibility of recruitment goals, recruitment rates, adherence rates, and outcome measures using individual participant tracking forms, which will be analyzed quantitatively. The suitability and acceptability of the intervention will be assessed using one-to-one semistructured interviews with 12 participants who completed the intervention, which will be analyzed qualitatively. RESULTS: Recruitment began in February 2024 and will run until 30 participants are recruited to the study or until the end of July 2024. Thus far, 19 participants have provided informed consent, 16 were eligible and enrolled, and 12 have completed a postintervention interview. No data have been analyzed. The study, including the write-up period, is expected to end in December 2024. CONCLUSIONS: Despite experiencing several stressors related to forced displacement and high rates of mental health issues, access to treatment is still limited for Syrian asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom. To address the treatment gap and reduce the burden of help-seeking, a web-based intervention to reduce SI was culturally adapted in collaboration with Syrian asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom. This study will now assess the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention and culturally appropriate recruitment strategies. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN ISRCTN11417025; https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN11417025. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): PRR1-10.2196/56957.

Re-entrant phase transitions in Laponite/Gum Arabic nanocomposites.

A re-entrant gel transition is observed in a discotic clay, Laponite (Lap) aqueous suspensions with the addition of a complex polysaccharide, Gum Arabic (GA). For fixed concentrations of Lap (1-3 % w/v) and at low GA concentrations (CGA < 10 % w/v), the composites exhibit gel behaviour, while the suspensions undergo liquid phase separation for intermediate GA concentrations (10 % w/v < CGA < 20 % w/v). Gel behaviour is again observed in the samples at even higher GA concentrations (CGA > 30 % w/v). Here, we identify a thermodynamic phase transition in Lap/GA mixtures that is caused by a variation in GA content. The viscoelastic characteristics, phase transitions, and gelation kinetics of the Lap/GA mixtures have been studied by employing rheology, small-angle X-ray scattering, and optical investigations. Reduction of the negative values of zeta-potential and growth of the composite system's hydrodynamic size indicated the presence of interactions in Lap/GA mixtures. The phase diagram enables the apparent interactions and phase transitions between the nanoplatelets and the complex polysaccharides. Thus, our study provides new perspectives on a nanocomposite's tuneable rheological and structural features.

Downsizing gum Arabic-based abamectin particles using flash nanoprecipitation method for enhanced pesticide deposition.

Pesticides are vital for ensuring crop protection and stable yields, but their low efficiency and eco-unfriendly carriers raise environmental concerns. In this study, abamectin nanopesticides were designed and fabricated using natural polysaccharides [gum arabic (GA)] and a co-stabiliser via flash nanoprecipitation (FNP) method to reduce the size of nanopesticides and enhance their foliar affinity and deposition. Various co-stabilisers were innovatively introduced into the FNP process; the synergy between GA and the co-stabiliser significantly reduced the particle size (111.5 nm), narrowed the size distribution (polydispersity index = 0.078), and enhanced the stability and release performance of the nanopesticides. Importantly, the downsized nanopesticides effectively improved retention on leaf surfaces, reducing pesticide loss. In addition, because of the excellent control capability of the FNP method, the particle size of the nanopesticides could be flexibly adjusted by modifying the flow-based process parameters. Nanopesticides with small sizes demonstrated good control efficacy against Tetranychus urticae, comparable to those of commercial emulsion in water formulations. This study provides an effective approach for enhancing the utilisation efficiency of pesticide droplets by reducing particle size to ensure sustainable agriculture.

Exploring Experiences and Asthma Management Among Middle Eastern Arabic-Speaking Migrants and Refugees with Asthma: A Qualitative Study.

Purpose: Effective asthma management relies on individuals' knowledge, inhaler technique, and perceptions of asthma and medications. Investigating barriers and enablers to optimal asthma management is vital. This research pursues a comprehensive understanding of asthma control, asthma-related experiences, perceptions, inhaler technique, and knowledge among Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern migrants and refugees living in Australia. Furthermore, it aims to explore the factors influencing optimal asthma management within this demographic. Patients and Methods: This study involved interviews with 17 participants, with nine identified as migrants and eight as refugees. All participants were Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern individuals residing in Australia and diagnosed with asthma. Interviews were thematically analysed, and findings were presented following the guidelines of the consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (COREQ). Results: The thematic analysis yielded five key themes: (1) asthma experiences; (2) participant perspectives on asthma; (3) asthma management; (4) asthma health literacy; and (5) strategies to overcome obstacles in asthma management. Some disparities were noted between refugees and migrants in terms of their comprehension and views on asthma, medications use, interactions with healthcare providers, and inhaler technique. Refugees experienced more psychological distress and lacked social support, while migrants were more concerned about long-term medication use and preferred specialised care. Conclusion: This research addresses a knowledge gap concerning asthma control among Middle Eastern immigrants. It provides insights into their beliefs and medication adherence. It underscores the importance of considering the unique characteristics of Middle Eastern migrants and refugees when delivering healthcare interventions to enhance overall health and medication adherence within these populations. To address these differences, the study recommends tailored education, specialised clinics, and culturally relevant asthma management plans to enhance self-management support for both groups. Future studies should explore the impact of modifying beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge regarding medications and asthma to enhance asthma management within this population.