Otitis media with effusion (OME) is a very common condition seen in children, and is the commonest cause of hearing loss in an infant. It is also a fairly common condition encountered by the family practitioner, and often the family practitioner is the first doctor the parents bring the child to. Otitis media with effusion is a simple condition but, if left undiagnosed or untreated, can lead to preventable long-term consequences. Hence, a high index of suspicion is necessary, early and accurate diagnosis, prompt treatment, with close follow-up is of essence. The epidemiology, aetiological factors, clinical presentations, diagnosis, various medical and surgical options, cost-effectiveness of therapy and the impact of OME on the child's development are discussed.
Molecular typing with IS6110 was applied to Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from all parts of Malaysia. The degree of clustering increased with patient age, suggesting that reactivation may contribute to clustering. Identical banding patterns were also obtained for isolates from widely separate regions. Therefore, the use of clustering as a measure of recent transmission must be treated with caution. Strains related to the Beijing family were common in Peninsular Malaysia but were less common in Sabah and Sarawak, while a distinct group of strains comprised nearly 40% of isolates from East Malaysia but such strains were rare in Peninsular Malaysia. Single-copy strains, common in South and Southeastern Asia, constituted nearly 20% of isolates from the peninsula but were virtually absent in East Malaysia. The marked geographical difference in the prevailing strains indicates not only a restricted dissemination of M. tuberculosis but also a considerable degree of stability in the banding patterns.
In the past year, stool specimens of 1,732 alien laborers were examined for intestinal parasites. There was no significant difference in the positive rate between males and females. All alien laborers were examined in 3 hospitals and the positive rates were 24.8% (191/769), 13.6% (109/804) and 12.6% (20/159). Broken down by nationality, the positive rates in laborers from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia were 23.9% (192/803), 20.3% (62/305), 12.1% (60/498) and 4.8% (6/126) respectively. Of all alien laborers, 17.2% (297/1,732) had single infections of parasites and 1.3% (23/1,732) had multiple infections. Opisthorchis viverrinii was the most prevalent parasite found in infected alien laborers. 91.5% of alien laborers were aged from 21 to 40-years-old and had positive rates of parasites reaching 91.0%. The time of arrival in Taiwan had an effect in all alien laborers examined for parasites. The positive rate in laborers arriving during April to June was 22.7% which was significantly higher than the 16.3% for laborers arriving in other months.
Automatic estimation of a speaker's age is a challenging research topic in the area of speech analysis. In this paper, a novel approach to estimate a speaker's age is presented. The method features a "divide and conquer" strategy wherein the speech data are divided into six groups based on the vowel classes. There are two reasons behind this strategy. First, reduction in the complicated distribution of the processing data improves the classifier's learning performance. Second, different vowel classes contain complementary information for age estimation. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients are computed for each group and single layer feed-forward neural networks based on self-adaptive extreme learning machine are applied to the features to make a primary decision. Subsequently, fuzzy data fusion is employed to provide an overall decision by aggregating the classifier's outputs. The results are then compared with a number of state-of-the-art age estimation methods. Experiments conducted based on six age groups including children aged between 7 and 12 years revealed that fuzzy fusion of the classifier's outputs resulted in considerable improvement of up to 53.33% in age estimation accuracy. Moreover, the fuzzy fusion of decisions aggregated the complementary information of a speaker's age from various speech sources.
Dietary supplements use is relatively widespread in some countries but knowledge of supplements consumption in Malaysia is limited, more so among adolescents. This study aimed to investigate the determinants of dietary supplements use among Malaysian adolescents using multiple logistic regressions analysis. Data from the Malaysia School-based Nutrition Survey 2012 based on a 2-stage stratified sampling was used. The prevalence of vitamin/mineral supplements and food supplements intake among adolescents was 54.1% and 40.2%, respectively. Usage was significantly higher among younger adolescents and among boys. Dietary supplements were also taken mostly by those who thought they were underweight. The most common vitamin/mineral supplements and food supplements consumed were vitamin C and bee products. The main reason for taking supplements was parents' instruction. These findings can be useful for developing health communications on supplement use targeted to adolescents and their parents.
The objectives for this study were to assess Oral Health Related Quality of Life (OHRQoL) in young people aged 15-25 who sought orthodontic treatment, and to measure the association between orthodontic treatment need (using the IOTN), sex, age and education level, and oral health related quality of life (OHRQoL).
The influence of age on various histological types of breast cancer at both age <50 years and >50 years to simulate menopause was studied retrospective from 2002 to 2004 in Malaysia. One hundred and fifty five cases were reviewed. Ninety two cases recorded at age <50 years, 60 (65.2%, 95%CI: 54.6 - 74.8%) were infiltrating ductal carcinoma in 11(12.0%, 95% CI: 6.1-20.4%), ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) in 9 (9.8%, 95% CI: 4.6-17.8%), medullary carcinoma in 6 (6.5%, 85%CI: 2.4-13.6%), invasive lobular carcinoma in 4 (4.3%, 95%CI: 1.2-10.8%), mucinous carcinoma and poorly differentiated carcinoma in 2 cases (2.2%, 95%CI: 0.3-7.6%). At >50 years of age, 63 cases were recorded. Forty seven (74.6%, 95%CI: 62.0- 84.7%) cases were of infiltrating ductal carcinoma, ductal carcinoma in situ in 9 (14.3%, 95%CI: 6.7-25.4%), mucinous carcinoma in 5 (7.9%, 95%CI: 2.6-17.6%), medullary carcinoma (8.5%) and papillary carcinoma in 1 case each (1.6%, 95%CI: 0.0-8.5%). Infiltrating ductal carcinoma was the commonest histology at both age <50 years and >50 years.
Like other nations experiencing rapid industrialization, urbanization and a nutrition transition, there is concern in Malaysia of a possible escalation in the prevalence of overweight and obesity. In 1996, the National Health and Morbidity Survey reported a 16.6% and 4.4% prevalence of overweight and obesity, respectively. In the following decade, there have been several national and community surveys on overweight and obesity in Malaysia. The objective of this systematic review is to describe the trend from 1996 to 2009 in the prevalence of overweight and obesity in adults in Malaysia nationally and by gender, age and race. Results indicate that there has been a small rise in overweight adults in the years 1996, 2003 and 2006 (20.7%, 26.7% and 29.1%) and a much more dramatic increase in obesity in 1996, 2003, 2004 and 2006 (5.5%, 12.2%, 12.3% and 14.0%). Evidence showed a greater risk for overweight and obesity among women compared with men. Based on the highest-quality studies, overweight and obesity levels were highest among adults 40-59 years old. Overweight levels were highest among Indians, followed by Malays, Chinese and Aboriginals, with less consistency across studies on the order of risk or obesity by ethnicity.
A retrospective study was conducted to investigate 183 serologically-confirmed cases of dengue fever (DF) admitted from October 2004 to March 2005 in a large hospital in Pahang. Clinical and laboratory features, progress and outcome of these patients were analysed in order to identify risk factors associated with development of dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) and dengue shock syndrome (DSS). Individually, we found that older patients, secondary dengue infection, high baseline haematocrit levels, low platelet levels and prolonged activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) ratio were significant associations with bleeding tendencies. Of these risk factors, haematocrit and APTT ratio were two independent significant risk factors on multivariate analysis. Older patients with primary infection and younger patients with secondary infection had significant bleeding tendencies. We also verified the validity of the haematocrit levels suggested as cut-off levels for plasma leakage for the Malaysian population by Malaysian Clinical Practice Guidelines for Dengue Infection in Adults (2003).
This study was carried out to determine the association between body mass index and age related cataract among patients attending eye clinic. We conducted a case control study. The outcome of clinical eye assessment determined the patient's status. Mean body mass index among the cases was shown to be higher (25.4 +/- 4.5) than the control group (24.4 +/- 3.9) (p < 0.01). Crude analysis showed that only obese respondents were 2.4 times more likely to develop age related cataract, however this association was not seen in the multivariate analysis after adjusting for other determinants (aOR 1.81; 95% CI 0.91 - 3.62). We conclude that there is no association between body mass index and age related cataract.
Study site: Eye clinic, University Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Lack of awareness of signs and symptoms and risk factors of oral cancer can lead to late presentation of the disease that contributes to poor survival of patients who contract it. This study aims to determine the level of awareness regarding oral cancer in adult patients attending School of Dental Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia.