This study investigated the principals' suspension threat as a correlate of students' academic engagement and adherence to school regulations in Uyo Local Government Area, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria using gender and age as predictor variables. Four research questions were raised. Ex-post facto research design was adopted. The population comprised 5200 senior secondary two students in the 14 public secondary schools in Uyo, from which a sample of 725 was derived using a multistage sampling approach. The researcher's developed 'Suspension and Students Engagement and Adherence Scale (S-SEAS), was used for data collection after face-validated by three experts. The content assessment reliability approach was used to test for S-SEAS reliability, and the data generated was calculated using Cohen's Kappa statistics, which resulted in the estimate of 0.87. The collated data was analyzed using percentages, charts, means, and graphs. Results revealed that males were the majority (58.1%) in the study, while in terms of age, those within 16 years of age were the majority (69.1%). The majority of the sample assessed were suspended, especially in the cadre of males and those within 17-20 years of age. The categories of suspension were mostly from the classes, followed by those suspended from the school. Majorly, the reasons for the suspension were lateness to school, insubordination, and violence-related issues in order of prominence. Results showed that the contribution of suspension to the students' academic engagement (SAE) was low (x̄=2.23). The extent to which suspension encourages male students' academic engagement was very low. It has been shown that the prevalence of utilization of suspension as a disciplinary approach in schools was high. The most often suspended set of students were the males, and those within 17-20 years of age experienced a greater number of suspensions. However, the effect of suspension was negative to the promotion of students' academic engagement but positive to students' adherence to school regulations. On the aspect of students' academic engagement, suspension affected the male more negatively than their female counterparts, and especially among the students aged 21 years and above. Concerning students' adherence to school regulations, suspension negatively influences older students (21 years and above). It is recommended, among others, that school managers (principals and teachers) should be strategic in understanding when, who, and how suspension should be administered to avoid its negative contributions in severing students' interest and student-staff relationships. Read more

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is still a major public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa, especially because of the risk of transmission of the infection from mothers to their babies at birth. This study set out to establish the level of sero-prevalence of HBV, maternal perception and THE relationship between maternal age, parity, and sero-status in Oyo State. A Descriptive cross-sectional design was used and consisted of 100 respondents for the questionnaire and 622 respondents for the laboratory. The HBV sero-prevalence came out to be 6.8%. There was a general lack of understanding of long-term effects and general epidemiological trends, although the respondents generally had an understanding of the transmission routes. There were significant correlations of HBV status with maternal age (p=0.002) and parity (p=0.019), with the highest prevalence being seen in women aged 35–44 and with five pregnancies. The investigation concludes that HBV is a persistent problem that needs to be addressed by enhancing routine antenatal screening, health education targeting mothers and strengthening vaccination programs to stop mother-to-child transmission. Read more

Early delivery of neonates and Reduction in birth weight according to researchers is mostly caused by Jaundice in neonates while yellowish color of the skin, yellowness of eye, and finger tips are its most common clinically visible symptoms as the age after birth increases. Jaundice results from high bilirubin levels and is a common condition particularly among neonates and persons with hepatic dysfunction. This paper reviews some physiological characteristics (e.g. yellowish color of the skin, gestation period, yellowness of eye, age of the child, weight of the child etc.) and established if the level of jaundice would have a negative effect on them. Statistical analysis shows the significant inverse correlation between bilirubin levels and both birth weight and gestation duration and suggests that a lower weight and infant birth is associated with high jaundice level. A regression analysis establishes the gestational age and chronological age as significant predictors of birth weight, with the bilirubin’s effect, though inversely related, having no statistical significance. Longer gestation and older age predict higher birth weight. Although bilirubin negatively impacts weight, it’s not a strong predictor in the model. Finally, the bilirubin level may not be clinically revealed immediately after delivery and also result to low birth weight, preterm delivery and their relationship if properly analyzed with hybrid machine learning tools, mathematical modeling and object oriented programming language, can serve as a building block for a model that would diagnose jaundice non-invasively. These findings from this research provide a fundamental basis for clinicians in the prediction and management of jaundice risk based on physiological characteristics Read more

Pulsars are old, stellar objects that emit electromagnetic radiations in a definite time interval, with a predictable smooth spin-down, predisposed to discrete fluctuations/glitches. The rotational frequency of pulsars decays with time as quantified by the breaking index, in which is now known to have a no consequence on other pulsar qualities like obliquity angle evolution or complex high order multiple structures but rather on its spin proportion. In the canonical model n=3, but observationally n3 in numerous cases. Showing that the canonical model requires modification. Using the Australian Telescope National Facility (ATNF). Pulsars catalog, we selected 208 pulsars with 670 glitches. We computed the breaking and observed that the breaking index is smaller for very young pulsars, which usually glitch more frequently than their older, more stable counterpart analysis. They have switched for over from times and also account for over 68% of the entire glitches in our population. A regression analysis shows that spin properties of pulsars are  65% correlated with n. implications of this result are discussed. Read more

This study sheds light on the prevalence of malaria and typhoid in children below the age of five in a hospital in Nigeria. This study aimed to determine the presence of malaria, typhoid and malaria-typhoid co-infection in children less than five years of age. In this community-based descriptive, quantitative and cross-sectional hospital-based survey, the blood samples of 125 children between 0 to less than 5 years (68 males and 57 females) were examined for the presence of malaria parasites and typhoid infection. Blood samples were collected using venepuncture. The malaria parasitaemia was detected using malaria microscopy on a thick blood film. Typhoid fever infection was detected using the Widal Agglutination Test. The chi-square test was used to compare the prevalence of malaria, typhoid fever and malaria/typhoid co-infections between male and female infected and uninfected participants and between children below 1 year and those 1 year and above. P-values less than 0.05 were considered significant. A prevalence of 47.2%, 32% and 16% were recorded for malaria, typhoid and malaria/typhoid co-infection respectively. A mean malaria parasite intensity of 56.8475 (±3.30177) was recorded. There was no significant difference between the prevalence of malaria, typhoid and malaria/typhoid co-infection between the genders and age groups. Also, there was no significant difference between the mean PCV of the infected (33.1610 (±0.80748) and uninfected (34.6667 (0.48441) (P> 0.05). These results underscore the importance of continued efforts to combat these diseases and improve the health and well-being of children in the region. Read more

This study was undertaken to investigate Nutritional counselling and family planning counselling methods among mothers in Cross River State, Nigeria. Two research questions and two null hypotheses were drawn to direct the variables under study, also relevant literature was reviewed in line with the research objectives with most of the reviewed study supporting the theoretical framework. Ex post facto design was adopted for the study. The selection was done through the sampling and purposive sampling techniques. The reliability estimate was established through sampling and the purposive sampling technique. The reliability estimate of the instrument was established through the Cronbach Alpha reliability method. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was the statistic analysis technique adopted to test the hypotheses under study. All hypotheses were tested using a .05 level of significance. From the data analysis, the researcher investigated the research and offered in agreement with the study that nutritional and rest and recreational counselling afford mothers the opportunity to survive the precarious time of pregnancy and delivery. The researcher admitted in the study that motherhood is the reproductive period for women whose age ranges from18 years to 49 years old. The researcher admitted that there is a vulnerable age for most mothers and reproductive-aged women. The researcher in consonance with Wilkinson (2010) that poor infant outcomes have been linked with poor maternal nutrition these include inadequate developmental trajectories, low birth weight, and an increased risk of developing chronic disease later in life. Gaston and Cramp (2011) as proffered by the researcher admitted that women who are unaccustomed to exercising prior to pregnancy would not likely engage in an active lifestyle or start exercising during pregnancy. Read more

Introduction: Breast cancer is the commonest cancer in women characterised by regional variation and late clinical presentation in low and middle-income countries including Nigeria. The present study was designed as a community-based cross-sectional study aimed at assessing knowledge, attitude and practices towards breast cancer screening among women of reproductive age (15 – 49 years) in Abia State. Methodology: Multi-stage sampling technique was used to sample the study participants. Eighteen communities were randomly selected from the three Senatorial Zones of Abia State and a total of 1176 women were studied, comprising 391 from Abia South, 393 from Abia Central and 391 from Abia North. A validated questionnaire was used to obtain information from the respondents who consented to the study. Data analysis was performed using descriptive technique and a Chi-square test was used to test for association in the data. Results: Only about half of the women (614: 52.2%) are aware of any breast cancer screening services. Only 26.7% showed good knowledge of signs and symptoms of breast cancer and 23.6% showed good Knowledge of Availability and Accessibility. Attitude is also a significant associating factor of uptake in this study (χ2=10.50, p=0.005) and those who showed a strong positive attitude were more likely to go for breast cancer screening uptake than any other group. On the other hand, 82.4% - 96.8% of the women that showed good knowledge of signs and symptoms of breast cancer and for availability or accessibility of the screening services had the uptake compared to only 4.3% obtained among the poor knowledge group. Though many were willing to be screened for breast cancer, those that expressed their readiness to be constantly going for breast cancer screening servicer were just 24.5%. Conclusion: Breast cancer screening is quite low among the study group possibly due to a low level of knowledge, poor attitude, and other associating factors. There is a need to adequately tackle these factors in order to achieve greater health free from breast cancer among women of reproductive age. Read more

This study investigated the utilization of contraceptives among female senior secondary school students in Andoni LGA of Rivers State. A descriptive survey design was adopted as the research design for this study. The population of the study comprised of one thousand, three hundred and nineteen (1319) female senior secondary school students in Andoni Local Government Area of Rivers State. A multi-stage sampling technique was adopted to select a sample of 496 for the study. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire with a reliability coefficient of 0.85. Data analysis was using statistical tools such as percentage, regression and chi-square. The findings of the study showed that the level of utilization of contraceptives among the respondents was 51.8%. The methods of contraceptives used include condom 105(42.2%), oral contraceptive pills 82(32.9%), withdrawal 39(15.7%), and intra uterine contraceptive device 23(9.2%). Age was found to have statistically significant relationship with utilization of contraceptives whereas religion and parents’ occupation were not. It was concluded that female senior secondary school students in Andoni LGA only had an average level of contraceptive utilization. Therefore, the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigerian should consider the rural areas particularly adolescents in their effort to increase contraceptive utilization by supplying free contraceptives to the rural areas time, youth friendly centres in and set up LGA this may help to fill the gap in utilization. Read more

Mental health challenges are becoming a major concern among university students who still have limited access to appropriate and affordable support due to barriers such as stigma, cost, and time limitations. Most of the digital tools available, such as Wysa and Woebot, are based on rigid rule-based logic and are incapable of understanding the contextual nuances of student-expressed emotional distress. For this system, a system-oriented, agile research methodology was used. Three public datasets the Mental Health Text Classification Dataset, the Reddit Depression Dataset, and the EmpatheticDialogues Dataset, were combined and balanced to create a training corpus of 24,000 labeled entries equally distributed across three emotional categories: depressive, anxious, and neutral. The Mental-BERT transformer model was trained on this corpus in five epochs with the help of Google Colab's GPU infrastructure. This classification model was then incorporated into a Flask web backend, together with the Groq API for conversational response generation, a PostgreSQL relational database for secure data persistence, and a web-based frontend consisting of a responsive chat interface with user authentication. After evaluating the fine-tuned Mental-BERT model on a test set of 3,600 samples that were not used during training, the overall classification accuracy was 96%. Also, the macro-averaged precision, recall, and F1-score were equally high at 96% across the three classes. We carried out a user study with 58 university students who gave a mean System Usability Scale score of 76.55 for MindBridge. That score belongs to the good usability category and is also above the industry average threshold of 68. More than 70% of participants graded the system as Good or Excellent. Empathy and conversational quality metrics showed that the respondents considered MindBridge a source of empathy and assistance, while the mean figure for perceived usefulness was 4.03 out of 5. All 16 automated system tests were successfully passed. Results show that using a domain-specific pre-trained transformer model alongside prompt-engineered large language model response generation and a hybrid safety architecture can lead to the development of a very accurate, usable, and empathetic mental health support system for university students. Read more

This study examines the effect of inflationary pressure and executive compensation on earnings management in Nigerian commercial banks. The study is motivated by the persistent concern that managerial incentive structures and macroeconomic instability may jointly influence financial reporting quality in emerging economies. Using an ex-post facto research design, the study employs balanced panel data from twelve listed deposit money banks over the period 2012–2022. Earnings management is measured using discretionary accruals derived from the modified Jones model, while inflationary pressure is proxied by the consumer price index inflation rate. Executive compensation is measured using directors’ remuneration scaled by firm performance indicators. The study applies the fixed effects regression model to control for unobserved heterogeneity across banks and over time, while interaction terms are included to capture moderating effects. The results reveal that executive compensation has a statistically significant positive effect on earnings management, indicating that higher remuneration incentives encourage discretionary financial reporting behavior. Inflationary pressure, however, shows a positive but statistically insignificant effect on earnings management, suggesting limited direct influence. Furthermore, the interaction between inflation and executive compensation is insignificant, implying that inflation does not significantly moderate the compensation–earnings management relationship. The model is jointly significant, confirming that the explanatory variables collectively influence earnings management behavior. The study concludes that earnings management in Nigerian commercial banks is primarily driven by internal incentive structures rather than macroeconomic conditions. The findings support agency theory and have implications for corporate governance reforms and executive compensation design. The study recommends stronger regulatory oversight of compensation contracts to reduce earnings manipulation incentives. Read more