The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of auricular acupressure on reducing obesity in adult women with abdominal obesity.
The study design was a non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest design. Participants were 58 women, aged 20 years or older, assigned to the experimental group (n=30) or control group (n=28). Auricular acupressure using vaccaria seeds was administered to the experimental group. The sessions continued for 8 weeks. Outcome measures included body weight, abdominal circumference, and body mass index, body fat mass, body fat percentage, triglyceride, total cholesterol, low density lipoprotein cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, and serum glucose.
Women in the experimental group showed significant decreases in body weight (t=6.19,
Results show that auricular acupressure using vaccaria seeds was effective in decreasing body weight, abdominal circumference, body mass index, and triglyceride levels in adult women with abdominal obesity.
The purpose of this study was to develop a scale to evaluate empowerment in woman with breast cancer and to examine the validity and reliability of the scale.
The development process for the initial items included a literature review, interviews, and construction of a conceptual framework. The identified items were evaluated for content validity by experts, resulting in 3 factors and 48 preliminary items. Participants were 319 women with breast cancer recruited to test reliability and validity of the preliminary scale. Data were analyzed using item analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, criterion related validity, internal consistency and test-retest reliability.
The final scale consisted of 30 items and 3 factors. Factors, including 'intrapersonal factor' (14 items), 'interactional factor' (8 items), and 'behavioral factor' (8 items), were drawn up after confirmatory factor analysis. Goodness of fit of the final research model was very appropriate as shown by χ2/df=1.86, TLI=.90, CFI=.92, SRMR=.06, and RMSEA=.05. Criterion validity was evaluated by total correlation with the Cancer Empowerment Questionnaire .78. Cronbach's alpha for total items was .93 and test-retest reliability was .69.
Findings from this study indicate that the scale can be used in the development of nursing interventions to promote the empowerment of women having breast cancer.
This study was conducted to examine the effect of oral care with an aroma solution on oral status and oral cavity microorganism growth in elderly patients with stroke.
A non-equivalent control group, with a pretest-posttest design was used in this study. The participants were assigned to the experimental group (n=30) that received oral care with an aroma solution or the control group (n=31) that received 0.9% saline solution. To identify the effect of the experimental treatments, objective/subjective assessments of oral status and oral cavity microorganism growth were performed using the oral assessment guide, oral perception guide, and oral swab culture. Data were analyzed using Chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, and t-test with the SPSS version 21.0 program.
The objective oral status was significantly lower in the experimental group than in the control group (t= -3.64,
These findings indicate that special mouth care using an aroma solution could be an effective oral health nursing intervention for elderly patients with stroke.