Compliance to Antihypertensive Medication: A Tertiary Care Study

Hypertension is a global health problem and affects more than one billion people worldwide. Long term hypertension is associated with grave complications and therefore maintaining blood pressure within normal range is essential and ensuring patient's drug compliance is an important sector of patient care. Therefore, the purpose of our study was to find out the causes of poor compliance to antihypertensive medications. This cross sectional study was carried out in Medical Department of Ayub Teaching Hospital Abbottabad, Pakistan from 1st September 2017 to 30th October 2018. One hundred ninety three (193) patients were included through non probability consecutive sampling and were divided into two groups on the basis of compliance. The data was collected with the help of a structured questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS 20. Out of 193 hypertensive patients, 88(45.6%) were male while 105(54.4%) were females, with minimum age of 24 years and maximum age of 95 years and mean age of 61.98±12.81SD. Minimum duration of hypertension was 5 months and maximum was 30 years with mean duration of hypertension and standard deviation (SD) of 6.26±6.51 years. One hundred & Twenty (62.2%) patients were non-compliant, while 73(37.8%) were compliant to medication. Forgetfulness of medicine 85(70.8%) and non-affordability 62(52.5%) were the most common causes of noncompliance. This study documented a significantly higher proportion of medication non-adherence among hypertensive patients, with drug forgetfulness and affordability being found as the most common cause.

Impact of elevated carbon dioxide on soil heat storage and heat flux under unheated low-tunnels conditions

Suboptimal regimes of air and soil temperature usually occur under unheated low-tunnels during winter crop cycles. CO2 is one of the most important gases linked to climate change and posing challenge to the current agricultural productivity. Field experiment was conducted in unheated low-tunnels (10.0 m long, 1.5 m wide and 1.0 m high) during winter and spring periods to evaluate the increasing CO2 concentration (352, 709, 1063, 1407, and 1761 ppm) on net radiation budget, soil-air thermal regime and pepper plants growth development and yield. CO2 was injected into each hollow space of the tunnel double-layer transparent polyethylene covers. Recorded integral net longwave radiation increased from 524.81 to 1111.84 Wm(-2) on January when CO2 concentration increased from 352 to 1761 ppm. A similar trend was recorded on February. Moreover, minimum soil surface and air temperatures were markedly increased from -1.3 and -6.8 °C to 3.4 and 0.6 °C, when CO2 concentration increased from 352 to 1761 ppm. Additionally, soil heat flux as well as soil heat storage increased with increasing CO2 concentrations accordingly. Increasing the tunnel minimum air and soil temperatures with the CO2 concentration treatments 1063, 1407 and 1761 ppm reflected in a significant pepper yield (3.19, 5.06 and 6.13 kg m(-2)) due to the modification of the surrounding plants microenvironment and prevented pepper plants from freezing and the accelerated the plant growth. On the contrary, the drop of minimum air and soil temperatures to freezing levels with the CO2 concentration treatments 352 and 709 ppm resulted in the deterioration of pepper plants development during the early growth stages on January.