Statistics

Background & Aim: Durum wheat is an economically important and regularly eaten food for  billions of people in the world. In the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), genbanks are using Focused Identification of the Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) to find out and quantify relationships between agro-climatic conditions and the presence of specific traits. Hence, the study is aimed to investigate the predictive value of various types of long-term agro-climatic variables on the future values of different traits. Method: Ordinary multiple linear regression with stepwise variable selection method on the complete data set, and multiple linear regression models with predictors selected by penalized methods with mean square error cross-validation as a model selection criterion, are used to analyze 238 durum wheat landraces. Each of the models are fitted on Days to Heading and Days to Maturity response variables with 57 predictor variables, independently. Ordinar...

Socio-demographic and clinical factors have been known to affect the time to microvascular complications and survival probabilities of diabetes mellitus patients. The objective of this study was to identify risk factors and estimate average survival times for the time to the development of microvascular complications of diabetic patients under follow up at Ayder referral hospital from February 2011 to January 2014. A retrospective follow up study was conducted on diabetic patients during this treatment period of 3 years. Using simple random sampling a total of 277 patients were included in the study. Cox and Weibull proportional hazards models were used to identify risk factors for the time to microvascular complications. Results showed that the prevalence of microvascular complication during the follow up period in the studied population was 42.6% and was more prevalent in women. The estimated overall median survival time was 425 days. Factors associated with increased risk of microvas-cular complications among the sampled diabetes mellitus patients as identified by the Weibull model were older age (HR=1.025, 95% CI: 1.008-1.043, p=0.003), female sex (HR=1.531, 95% CI: 1.063-2.206, p=0.002), Type 2 diabetes (HR=2.320, 95% CI: 1.121-4.799, p=0.023) and fasting blood sugar (FBS) (HR=1.006, 95% CI: 1.003-1.008, p=0.0000). The results suggest strongly that to minimize the risk of diabetic complications it is necessary to treat blood glucose aggressively.