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Validation of an asthma knowledge questionnaire.

Asthma is responsible for much morbidity and mortality, which might be decreased by increasing parental and patient knowledge about asthma. This report describes the development and validation of an asthma knowledge questionnaire for use in the assessment of asthma knowledge. Two groups of respondents were examined. One group was designated 'high knowledge' and the other 'low knowledge'. The questionnaire had a maximum possible score of 31. The mean score of 69 'high' knowledge parents was 25.3 (median 25, range 18-31). By contrast, the mean score of 69 'low' knowledge parents was 13.0 (median 13, range 0-21). The difference between the two groups was statistically significant (P less than 0.0001). The questionnaire results were reproducible (tau = 0.94, P less than 0.01). Demographic characteristics such as education and socio-economic status were not important confounding variables. Face and content validity of the questionnaire were based on reference to published experience. Concurrent validity was demonstrated by the ability of the questionnaire to distinguish low from high knowledge parents. The questionnaire should prove to be a valuable research tool for the assessment of asthma knowledge either as part of an educational intervention or in a clinical situation.

Asthma

Knowledge on the Haemophilia Care Among Healthcare Providers in Tanzania: A Multicenter Cross-Sectional Study.

BACKGROUND: Haemophilia is a rare inherited bleeding disorder associated with recurrent bleeding, disability, and mortality when diagnosis and management are delayed. In low- and middle-income countries, limited diagnostic capacity, access to treatment and gaps in Healthcare Providers' (HCPs') knowledge are major contributors to morbidity and mortality. In Tanzania, the recent improvement in haemophilia services highlights the need for systematic evaluation of HCPs' knowledge and clinical practices. OBJECTIVE: The study assessed the knowledge of haemophilia care among healthcare providers in Tanzania. METHODS: A multicenter hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted among HCPs in tertiary and regional hospitals in Tanzania. A structured self-administered questionnaire assessed knowledge on haemophilia, including the pathophysiology, clinical features, diagnosis, treatment, and complications. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS statistics version 27. RESULTS: Among 799 HCPs assessed (50.9%) aged 20-29 and (59.2%) males. Nurses were the majority (31.8%), and 75.2% had &#x2264;5 years' experience. Overall haemophilia knowledge was high (median 83.3%, IQR: 75.9-88.9), strongest performance in general knowledge and weakest in treatment (68.2%, IQR: 54.5-77.3). Most respondents identified haemophilia as inherited (95.6%), non-infectious (93.7%), and recognized prolonged bleeding after injury or circumcision as key-symptoms (>90%). Knowledge varied by cadre, department, and experience (p<0.05); physicians and specialists scored higher than nurses, while health attendants scored lower. CONCLUSION: Healthcare providers demonstrated fairly adequate general knowledge of haemophilia. However, gaps remain in understanding genetic inheritance, acquired haemophilia, and modern treatment strategies, with knowledge variation by cadre, department, and experience, highlighting the need for targeted education across all HCPs groups.

Tanzania

University students and AIDS: knowledge, attitudes and behavioral adjustment.

This study addresses the relations between AIDS-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavior change among university students. A questionnaire covering such issues and personal background variables was administered to 750 students at the University of Zagreb. Over-all, 62.7% of the knowledge items were answered correctly, while functional, self-protective aspects of knowledge proved to be much better than general knowledge. On the average, attitudinal responses were moderately liberal. Both self-reported change in risk-reduction behavior and personal concern due to the appearance of AIDS were very small. Correlations of risk-reducing behavior with permissive (.15) and restrictive (.14) attitude orientations and with general and functional knowledge (.08) were modest. The level of personal concern correlated neither with permissive attitudes nor with functional knowledge, while it correlated negatively with restrictive attitudes (-.20) and with general knowledge (-.08). Substantial association was only established between functional knowledge and permissive (.51) and restrictive attitude orientations (-.23). It is concluded that, in addition to knowledge and attitudes, a number of factors which restrain desired behavioral adjustment should be considered in anti-AIDS campaigns, such as perceived level of exposure to HIV in a particular environment, young age-specific illusion of invulnerability, peer norms, and others.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

[Pregnant women's knowledge about HIV and AIDS].

This investigation is based upon information from 820 pregnant women who replied to a questionnaire about AIDS during the period 17.4.1989-14.7.1989. The questions included sources of information, knowledge about routes of infection and risk groups and the extent of spread of infection and disease in the population. 95% agreed to participate. Knowledge had been obtained primarily via the electronic media, while the health services had limited significance. The employment of sources of information depended on age and occupation. Apart from knowledge about the risk involved in breast feeding, the women were, in general, well informed about routes of infection. Knowledge about risk groups and the current extent of spread of infection was, on the the other hand, deficient. Defective knowledge was concentrated in groups which may be characterized by age (less than 24 years) and occupation (trained and untrained workers and the group of "other occupations"). Information obtained from health staff was connected with better knowledge about the extent of spread of infection. The majority of women desired routine information about AIDS in connection with antenatal control. Prophylactic measures should be based, among other things, on knowledge about development in the knowledge in the population and its employment of sources of information, so that specific information may be directed to certain groups of the population by using the most frequently employed and most effective routes of information. The knowledge of population groups, the attitudes and behaviour should be followed continuously.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

Knowledge and belief in nutrition.

In a nutrition questionnaire, subjects have been given the options of answering questions with yes, no, or don't know. From these responses it has been possible to calculate the levels of their "correct knowledge," their "perceived knowledge" (that is the knowledge that each subject believed he had) and the "accuracy of knowledge". Questions about common nutritional problems were given to physicians, medical students, nurses, and theology students. All groups had a high level of "perceived knowledge," generally greater than 80% for the questions asked, but the accuracy of the knowledge was alarmingly low. The highest level was in physicians, in whom 79% of the perceived knowledge was accurate, but in theology students only 36% of the perceived knowledge was accurate. Two thirds of the "knowledge" of nutrition held by theology students was therefore false by current scientific standards. These findings have implications for future nutrition education.

Educational Measurement

Attitudes, knowledge and blood glucose control.

The hypothesis that management-related diabetes knowledge and attitudes may be more directly related to diabetic control than general knowledge of or general attitude towards diabetes is examined. Sixty Type 1 diabetic patients were studied using an itemized knowledge questionnaire and an attitude scale measuring a general attitude to diabetes but containing a previously defined subgroup of items concerned with attitudes to management. A significant linear correlation was found between management-related knowledge (r = -0.39; p less than 0.01) and HbA1c. However, knowledge of insulin, diet, footcare, and glucose monitoring were not significantly correlated with HbA1c, poor control being associated with both very low and very high knowledge status. A significant linear correlation was found between management-related attitudes (but not general attitude) and HbA1c (r = -0.47; p less than 0.01). The multiple regression correlation between HbA1c and both management knowledge and attitudes was -0.51. Most (63%) of the association between knowledge and HbA1c was attributable to attitude. This study provides support for education strategies based upon achieving improved patient attitudes and motivation rather than comprehensive knowledge as the most effective way of improving patient diabetic control.

Adolescent

Oral health knowledge and habits of senior elementary school students.

Despite improvements in children's dental health, and significant resource allocation to health education programs, few recent studies have investigated the associations of oral health knowledge, behaviors, and status. This study of 11-year-old children (N = 6,329) in northeastern Ontario used a supervised self-complete questionnaire and a clinical examination to gather baseline data on, and test associations of, caries and periodontal knowledge, self-reported oral health behaviors and source of knowledge, and oral health status. Results show the children had poor knowledge of caries preventive measures such as water fluoridation, dental sealants, and choice of snack foods. Periodontal knowledge was better, but children confused plaque and calculus. Respondents claimed good oral health habits, with 73 percent claiming to brush at least twice daily, 88 percent claiming to use toothpaste, 42 percent claim to floss at least twice weekly, and 84 percent claiming an annual dental visit. Children with the best knowledge claimed dentist and school as the sources. High knowledge was associated with good oral health habits (P less than .001) and low DMFT score (P less than .001). Good habits were not related to DMFT score (P = .1095). Logistic regression showed high knowledge was associated with English cultural status, urban school area, good habits, having a dental sealant, and attending a fluoride-rinse school (P less than .05). Findings suggest a need to reinforce caries preventive teaching, to investigate the effect of cultural status, dental experience, and residence status on oral health knowledge, and to further test the efficacy of different oral health education programs delivered by different sources.

Analysis of Variance

Differences in the technical and applied nutrition knowledge of older adults.

Although elder adults are much more knowledgeable about nutrition than ever before, diet behavior is not consistent with nutrition knowledge. One of the reasons for this inconsistency may be that the ability to apply technical nutrition knowledge is still inadequate. To test the hypothesis that technical nutrition knowledge is superior to applied nutrition knowledge, 96 volunteer seniors were given technical nutrition knowledge tests associated with heart disease, cancer, and high blood pressure. After the technical knowledge tests, subjects were asked to choose from among pairs the item that contained: (a) cholesterol, (b) more saturated fat, (c) more polyunsaturated fat, (d) substances that help to lower blood cholesterol, (e) more fiber, and (f) less sodium. Results support the notion that, in general, elder ability to apply nutrition knowledge is not as adequate as their technical nutrition knowledge.

Aged

"Desktop knowledge": a new focus for medical education and decision support.

Physicians today are faced with "data overload" and, paradoxically, "information underload"--the inability to locate pertinent, needed knowledge in a sea of data with which they are inundated. Increasingly, the professional functions of the physician are becoming focused on the desktop workstation, in terms of its ability to provide "windows" into local databases and knowledge resources, and to serve as an access port to other networked resources. A challenge we now face is to develop means for structuring the vast potentially available knowledge resources in such a manner that access to pertinent knowledge can be facilitated, and to develop acceptable interfaces to the knowledge resources so that a user can effectively navigate through them. The complexity of this task is due to the nature of the knowledge resources--knowledge can be in a variety of forms, ranging from textual and pictorial material, to structured representations, to more dynamic embodiments in the form of procedures. In the Decision Systems Group we have focused on the development of a prototype desktop knowledge management environment known as Explorer-2, with the objective of providing a consistent interface for access to a wide variety of knowledge. Our accomplishments to date encompass the incorporation into the Explorer-2 environment of adaptations of textbook chapters and books, image data bases, simulations, and expert systems. Navigational aids are provided by a semantic net browser using both MeSH and augmented taxonomies and by a graphical overview map.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Artificial Intelligence

BioMedGraphica: An All-in-One Platform for Joint Textual Biomedical Prior Knowledge and Numeric Graph Generation.

Multi-omic data analysis is essential for scientific discovery in precision medicine. However, translating statistical results of omic data analysis into novel scientific hypothesis remains a significant challenge. Human experts must manually review analysis results and generate new hypothesis based on extensive and inter-connected biomedical prior knowledge, which is subjective and not scalable. While large language models (LLMs) can accelerate the discovery, their reasoning improves when grounded in structured, auditable and comprehensive biomedical prior knowledge. Biomedical knowledge, however, is scattered across heterogeneous databases that use diverse and inconsistent nomenclature systems, making it difficult to integrate resources into a unified format for scalable analysis. This fragmentation limits the ability of AI systems to fully leverage biomedical data for scientific discovery. To address these challenges, we developed BioMedGraphica , an all-in-one platform that harmonizes fragmented biomedical resources by integrating 11 entity types and 30 relation types from 43 databases into a unified knowledge graph containing 2,306,921 entities and 27,232,091 relations. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a novel Textual-Numeric Graph (TNG) data-structure for multi-omics data analysis. In TNG, textual information captures prior biological knowledge (e.g., transcription start sites, functions, mechanisms), while numeric values represent quantitative biomedical features, and the integrated relations can help uncover mechanisms. By bridging prior knowledge with user-specific data, TNG is a novel and ideal data-structure for the development of graph foundation models, with the potential to improve prediction performance and interpretability, while also augmenting LLMs by supplying graph-structured mechanistic context to strengthen reasoning. The details for BioMedGraphica code can be accessed by github link: https://github.com/FuhaiLiAiLab/BioMedGraphica and BioMedGraphica knowledge graph data can be downloaded from huggingface dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/FuhaiLiAiLab/BioMedGraphica.

biomedical knowledge graph

Perceived and actual knowledge of diet by individuals with non-insulin-dependent diabetes.

A study was conducted to investigate both the perceived and actual knowledge of diet by 101 individuals with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM). A survey instrument was developed containing three sections: perceptions of diet knowledge, demonstrated knowledge of diet, and demographic information. Perceived and actual knowledge of diet in the study group were compared with the following variables: years of education, types of diabetes regimen, participation in care, recency of dietary instruction, understanding of diet, and levels of self blood glucose monitoring (SBGM). Analysis indicated significant differences for knowledge and levels of education, perceptions and knowledge and recency of instruction, perceptions and knowledge and understanding of diet, and perceptions and self blood glucose monitoring. A positive linear relationship was noted between perceptions and actual knowledge of the diabetic diet.

Adult

Spouse similarities in high blood pressure knowledge: implications for control of high blood pressure.

This study describes the general knowledge about high blood pressure of husbands and wives using data from all 1,260 white spouse pairs from the 1982 Connecticut Blood Pressure Survey and examines the relationship between high blood pressure knowledge and control of hypertension. We found the average level of knowledge to be high; about 70% of the items were answered correctly. The correlation between spouses' knowledge about high blood pressure was significantly high (r = .41). Multiple regression analysis was used to control for other variables that might influence the spousal correlation in knowledge. When controlling for education, age, socioeconomic status, and hypertension status of both spouses, the correlation between spouses' knowledge remained significant (r = .24). Respondents' knowledge and spouses' knowledge about high blood pressure were significantly related to high blood pressure control among hypertensive persons, particularly to being aware of hypertension and being in current treatment.

Adolescent

[Attitude and knowledge on AIDS at a maternity unit in Santiago de Chile].

An inquest to determine the degree of knowledge they have, was done among 27 physicians (obstetricians-gynecologist), 36 midwives and 47 assistants of infirmary in a maternity of Santiago. The following items where included: definition of concept, general knowledge, ways of transmission, prevention and treatment, communication and educational means, recommendations, comments, suggestions and specific knowledge. We proved that even though the general knowledge is apparently good for physicians, midwives and assistants of infirmary, they don't have adequate knowledge of the mechanisms of transmission of AIDS, of its prevention and no specific knowledge. They do have wrong ideas upon the topic. This lack is evident in assistants of infirmary and in a less degree in midwives and physicians. Considering that the group to be studied works in the specific health area dealing with gynecology and obstetrics, it is expected that they have a high grade of knowledge in relation with AIDS, due to the fact that they are a group of high risk in getting the disease and that they are a multiplicator factor of education among the population. This makes necessary to give periodic training courses and to reinforce the knowledge of such personnel.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

Knowledge, attitude, and outlook toward dentistry: their affect on sealant use and other related variables.

The dentist's knowledge about sealants, his attitude about the efficacy, safety, and cost effectiveness of sealants, and his general outlook towards dentistry as a profession were examined in a recent nationwide study of sealant use. Thirty-five hundred general dentists and 500 pediatric dentists were surveyed by a mail questionnaire with a response rate of 37.6% for generalists and 61.2% for pediatric dentists. Numerous moderate correlations were found. Both groups' Knowledge and Attitude scale scores were moderately correlated with sealant use as measured by the respondents' estimation of the percentage of their patients, age 18 and under, receiving sealants. Moderate correlations for both dentist groups also surfaced between Attitude and Knowledge as well as Attitude and Outlook but not between Knowledge and Outlook. Attitude in both groups correlated moderately with respondent scales entitled Preventive Orientation, Patient Influence, and Auxiliary Factors. For generalists, knowledge also correlated moderately with Sealant Awareness and Patient Influence while, for pediatric dentists, knowledge correlated moderately with Patient Influence only. While there was no significant difference between generalist and pediatric dentist outlook scale scores, pediatric dentists showed a significantly more positive attitude and greater knowledge about sealants than did generalists. It was suggested, therefore, that improvement of practitioners attitude and knowledge about sealants might influence sealant use.

Attitude of Health Personnel

Heuristic determination of quantitative data for knowledge acquisition in medicine.

Knowledge acquisition for medical knowledge bases can be aided by programs that suggest possible values for portions of the data. The paper presents an experiment which was used in designing a heuristic to help the process of knowledge acquisition. The heuristic helps to determine numerical data from stylized literature excerpts in the context of knowledge acquisition for the QMR medical knowledge base. Quantitative suggestions from the heuristics are shown to agree substantially with the data incorporated in the final version of the knowledge base. The experiment shows the potential of knowledge base specific heuristics in simplifying the task of knowledge base creation.

Artificial Intelligence

The role of teacher knowledge in elementary physical education instruction: an exploratory study.

The purpose of this study was to describe how providing teachers with research based knowledge about developmental throwing can influence teachers' observational interpretations and their students' practice patterns. Eight kindergarten classroom teachers with high generic teaching skill competence taught a 6-week overhand throwing unit to the children in their intact classes. Prior to the unit, four of the teachers were randomly assigned to a 4-hour knowledge training program. The other four teachers served as a comparison group (underwent no knowledge training). During the unit, data from stimulated recall interviews were used to describe and compare the thoughts and knowledge concepts expressed by the two groups of teachers. The throwing practice experienced by the children in the knowledge-trained and comparison teachers' classes was videotaped and analyzed for frequency of opposite foot stepping. The knowledge acquired during training was associated with different patterns of skill observation. The knowledge concepts the teachers acquired during training formed the basis of many of their thoughts and were reflected in the instructional procedures implemented. The knowledge-trained teachers' classes demonstrated more than twice as many opposite foot throws during the unit than the comparison teachers' classes.

Achievement

Tacit nursing knowledge: an untapped resource or a methodological headache?

Nursing education in the United Kingdom currently draws heavily upon Schön's concept of the reflective practitioner, and Benner's concept of the expert. It is claimed that experienced practitioners are unable to articulate all they know, and that their knowledge is of a qualitatively different type from that learned by beginners. Schön states that professional education gives privileged status to systematic, preferably scientific, knowledge, that technical knowledge drives out the artistry and competence of skillful practice, and that knowing that takes precedence over knowing how. In the first part of this paper, various writers on the subject of expert, tacit knowledge are discussed. Second, the paper examines the implications of expert knowledge for nursing research. Certainly it may be considered a methodological headache, since if expert knowledge is tacit it cannot be researched by exclusively verbal methods such as questionnaires; open-ended discussion may be appropriate, or perhaps participant observation. Nor will the findings be neat and easily analysed. But tacit knowledge is also an untapped resource for co-operative enquiry between researcher and practitioner, and nursing research has an important role in enhancing the knowledge creation capacity of practitioners.

Education, Nursing

Reuse of knowledge represented in the Arden syntax.

Knowledge Data Systems is building a medical expert system for monitoring clinical events. This system uses the Arden syntax as a knowledge representation. Having encoded may different types of rules in the Arden syntax, we have noticed a number of shortcomings of the syntax. Many of these shortcomings originate from Arden's procedural orientation, from its failure to separate factual medical knowledge from knowledge of how the medical facts should be applied to a particular clinical situation. The absence of this separation leads to redundancy of knowledge and to difficulties in knowledge reuse. We suggest that standards for representing medical logic preserve this separation to engender knowledge reuse. We propose a general framework for representing medical logic which supports both knowledge sharing and reuse.

Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted