Search results

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the planned pre-electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) family teaching on depression, anxiety and stress of caregivers of patients with mental disorders receiving ECT.

In this quasi-experimental study, 130 participants were randomized allocated into intervention or control groups. The planned family teaching program consisted of four 90 min sessions held during four weeks. Assessments occurred at pre-intervention (one week before the first session), and post-intervention (one months after the four session). Data were collected using demographic questionnaire and Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21). Mean comparisons were performed using Student’s t-test while effect sizes were estimated by Cohen’s d coefficient. The significance level was considered less than 0.05.

The mean scores of the depression, anxiety and stress levels in the intervention group were significantly reduced compared to the control group (p=0.001).

The family pre-ECT teaching intervention and counseling decreased the depression, anxiety and stress level of family caregivers of patients with mental disorders receiving ECT and the maintenance of other favorable conditions at baseline. These results suggest that even a short-term educational intervention for family members of patients received ECT can improve emotional outcomes of treatment in the family.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the meshless local exponential basis functions (MLEBF) method to the case of nonlinear and linear, variable coefficient partial differential equations (PDEs).

The original version of MLEBF method is limited to linear, constant coefficient PDEs. The reason is that exponential bases which satisfy the homogeneous operator can only be determined for this class of problems. To extend this method to the general case of linear PDEs, the variable coefficients along with all involved derivatives are first expanded. This expanded form is evaluated at the center of each cloud, and is assumed to be constant over the entire cloud. The solution procedure is followed as in the former version. Nonlinear problems are first converted to a succession of linear, variable coefficient PDEs using the Newton-Kantorovich scheme and are subsequently solved using the aforementioned approach until convergence is achieved.

The results obtained show good performance of the method as solution to a wide range of problems. The results are compared with the well-known methods in the literature such as the finite element method, high-order finite difference method or variants of the boundary element method.

The MLEBF method is a simple yet effective tool for analyzing various kinds of problems. It is easy to implement with high parallelization potential. The proposed method addresses the biggest limitation of the method, and extends it to linear, variable coefficient PDEs as well as nonlinear ones.

The purpose of this paper is to present a simple meshless solution method for challenging engineering problems such as those with high wave numbers or convection-diffusion ones with high Peclet number. The method uses a set of residual-free bases in a local form.

The residual-free bases, called here as exponential basis functions, are found so that they satisfy the governing equations within each subdomain. The compatibility between the subdomains is weakly satisfied by enforcing the local approximation of the main state variables pass through the data at nodes surrounding the central node of the subdomain. The central state variable is first recovered from the approximation and then re-assigned to the central node to construct the associated equation. This leads to the least compatibility required in the solution, e.g. C0 continuity in Laplace problems.

The authors shall show that one can solve a variety of problems with regular and irregular point distribution with high convergence rate. The authors demonstrate that this is impossible to achieve using finite element method. Problems with Laplace and Helmholtz operators as well as elasto-static problems are solved to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. A convection-diffusion problem with high Peclet number and problems with high wave numbers are among the examples. In all cases, results with high rate of convergence are obtained with moderate number of nodes per cloud.

The paper presents a simple meshless method which not only is capable of solving a variety of challenging engineering problems but also yields results with high convergence rate.