Isaac Dialsingh

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

Background Crime has been described as a public health issue in Trinidad and Tobago, a small developing nation. COVID-19 restrictions, aimed at maintaining public health safety by limiting disease spread, may have negatively impacted crime rates due to an alteration of social and economic conditions. This study evaluates the implications of these r...

Fan support has long been stated as one of the major contributors to the home advantage which football teams enjoy across Europe; whereby fans motivate the home team to increase performance levels, and in some cases, inadvertently cause referees to subconsciously make decisions in favour of the home team. With the naturally created experimental des...

Objectives We sought to determine the baseline demographic and clinical characteristics of patients with Chronic Venous Disease (CVD) across the Caribbean, and to evaluate patients’ compliance to conservative therapy and the effectiveness of such therapy in reducing patients’ CVD symptoms. Method Patients were enrolled into the VEIN Act Program, a...

The rise of online social networks (OSNs) has caused an insurmountable amount of interest from advertisers and researchers seeking to monopolize on its features. Researchers aim to develop strategies for propagating information among users within an OSN that is captured by diffusion or influence models. Within the last decade, influence models have...

Objectives: Antibiotic resistance (ABR) is a growing public health issue globally. This study aimed to ascertain the public’s knowledge of antibiotic resistance and to determine any associated demographic factors. Method: A cross-sectional survey was undertaken in Trinidad using a modified version of a World Health Organization questionnaire. Five...

Nonmonetary indicators of poverty are increasingly being used by themselves or in conjunction with monetary indicators to measure poverty levels as previous constructs based solely on monetary indicators are being deconstructed. This is predicated on the notion that low income by itself is insufficient to measure poverty. Despite this general move...

Pregnancy Knowledge Attitudes Practices Global health a b s t r a c t Objective: Mosquito-borne diseases continue to pose a threat to Latin America and the Caribbean. Zika virus disease entered the Caribbean in 2013 with increased reporting of cases across the region in 2016, affecting more than 50 countries. This study aimed to ascertain the knowl...

Pregnancy Knowledge Attitudes Practices Global health a b s t r a c t Objective: Mosquito-borne diseases continue to pose a threat to Latin America and the Caribbean. Zika virus disease entered the Caribbean in 2013 with increased reporting of cases across the region in 2016, affecting more than 50 countries. This study aimed to ascertain the knowl...

The efficiency of a statistic determines its efficacy. In stratified random sampling, many estimators for the population mean has been proposed. In this paper, we propose two new estimators both of which are combined ratio/product estimators. We refer to our estimators as mixture estimators. We derive the mean square errors (MSEs) up to the first o...

Objective Health system resilience and resilience of a country include the capacity of health personnel, institutions, and populations to prepare for and effectively respond to crises. This study investigates the knowledge and attitudes of the public concerning Ebola Virus Disease in Trinidad and Tobago. Design and Methods A cross sectional study...

Objectives To review the modified Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale used in an accident and emergency department in Trinidad and Tobago. Design and Methods A cross-sectional study was carried out. Times from assignment of triage category to being seen by a physician were collected from the patient notes on the days of presentation and compared to t...

Preterm neonatal mortality contributes significantly to the high incidence of death among children under five years of age. Neonatal mortality also serves as an indicator of maternal health in society. The aim of the study is to examine the risk factors for preterm neonatal mortality at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Mount Hope Women’s...

Abstract Objectives: To ascertain patients’ satisfaction with staff and facilities at an accident and emergency department. Design and Methods: A cross-sectional study was undertaken during all shifts and on all days except Sundays at an A&E department. A previously validated questionnaire was used to conduct interviews. Results: Two hundred patien...

Currently, evidence concerning electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use in the West Indies is unavailable. This study examines the prevalence and associated factors of e-cigarette use in young Trinidadian adults, 6 years after e-cigarettes were introduced in Trinidad. Young adults between the ages of 18 and 40 years were surveyed from May–June 2016....

Innovation can enhance economic success for companies and countries alike. This study identified innovation drivers for beverage manufacturing companies in the developing nation, Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). Factor analysis using principal components analysis was applied to self-reported data from 14 beverage manufacturers, organising 10 influencing...

This paper examines the conduct of fiscal policy in the Trinidad and Tobago economy over the period 1970 to 2014, with the main focus being on the cyclical patterns of government expenditure with respect to output and natural gas rents. We find evidence that fiscal policy in Trinidad and Tobago is procyclical with output and natural gas rents. Last...

Advances in Genomics have re-energized interest in multiple hypothesis testing procedures but have simultaneously created new methodological and computational challenges. In Genomics for instance, it is now commonplace for experiments to measure expression levels in thousands of genes creating large multiplicity problems when thousands of hypothese...

Short title: Phase Contrast Urine Microscopy compared to urine cultures 26 27 Indexing words: 28 Phase contrast microscopy 29 Bacteriuria 30 Point of care devices 31 Gold Standard 32 33 Synopsis: A study that supports the use of phase contrast microscopy as a reliable test with high 34 sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive valu...

Abstract Objective: The main objective of this paper is the estimation of age at death using subjective dental data. This is particularly useful in developing and under developed countries. Methods: This study provides a framework for the estimation of age at death using very subjective measurements of the teeth using (i) Generalized Linear Models...

The successive loss of the outermost pixel values or frames in the digital representation of handwritten digits is postulated to have an increasing impact on the degree of accuracy of categorizations of these digits. This removal of frames is referred to as trimming. The first few frames do not contain significant amounts of information and t...

Background. Dengue continues to pose a public health problem globally. Objective. To review factors associated with patients who died from dengue in Trinidad. Methods. A retrospective case note review of hospitalized patients who died during 2001 to 2010. Results. A total of 23 cases were identified: 13 males, 10 females—12 East Indians, 9 Africans...

The present investigation proposed a generalized linear model with the aim at finding an effective statistical model for human age estimation at death using solely dental data.

Background: Alzheimer’s disease is most common among the dementias and is characterized by gradual declines in functional and cognitive abilities. Caregivers including family members play a key role in providing critically needed care for these patients. Objective: This study compared the knowledge and attitudes of pre-healthcare and non-medical un...

In high dimensional testing problems π0, the proportion of null hypotheses that are true, is an important parameter. For discrete test statistics, the p-values come from a discrete distribution with finite support and the null distribution may depend on an ancillary statistic such as a table margin that varies among the test statistics. Methods for...

Objectives . The objectives of the study were to measure actual BMI in patients attending chronic disease clinics in health centres and to relate this to the patients’ own perceptions of their body image and the need to lose weight. Study Design . A cross sectional study. Methods . The actual BMIs in patients who attended chronic disease clinics in...

To achieve a more efficient use of auxiliary information we propose single-parameter ratio/product-cum-mean-per-unit estimators for a finite population mean in a simple random sample without replacement when the magnitude of the correlation coefficient is not very high (less than or equal to 0.7). The first order large sample approximation to the b...

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are common. Rapid diagnosis is beneficial. At present laboratory culture is the gold standard. This can take up to 48 hours to a result. Urine cultures have been plagued by scientific inaccuracies as well as time-burdened delay, It is verifiably an impure gold standard. During this time delay patients with alternativ...

Abstract Simultaneous inference was introduced as a statistical problem as early as the mid- twentieth century, and it has been recently revived due to advancements in technology that result in the increasing availability of data sets containing a high number of variables. This paper provides a review of some of the significant contributions made...

Short-term sea level variability is investigated by analytical methods to ascertain whether there is a link between peak tidal residuals in the Gulf of Paria (GoP), Trinidad, and peak river outflowfromthe Orinoco on the Venezuelan mainland. Analysis of tidal data suggests that although the Orinoco delta fronts the Atlantic ocean, significant volume...

Aim: This paper aims to determine the difference between the health and social conditions of women who had their first pregnancy as teenagers (13-19 years old) and those who had their first pregnancy during post-adolescence (20-41 years old). Materials and Methods : The results were based on a structured, 60-item interview schedule with 132 cases (...

The objective of this study was to conduct a survey and determine the barriers to implement performance-based management in pharmacies in Trinidad. PBM is defined as "a systematic approach to performance improvement through an on-going process of establishing strategic performance objectives, measuring performance, collecting, analyzing, reviewing,...

Abstract Background In Trinidad and Tobago, nanomedicines are not in current use and as a result, the awareness of nanomedicine among doctors may to be limited. This study looks at the awareness among doctors of the use of nanomedicines as well as their risk taking behavior and their likeliness to prescribe these. The study was conducted at the San...

The emergence of the green economy represents the next stage in the evolution of the environmental sector. Its growth is in step with increasing public awareness of environmental impact 1 . At its most basic level, the green economy is the clean energy economy, consisting primarily of four sectors: renewable energy (e.g. solar, wind, geothermal); g...