Asked to choose between MBBS & sports, Sift Kaur Samra from Punjab refused to lay down arms, wins World Cup medal

 Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

 

First-year MBBS student Sift Kaur Samra won her first individual World Cup medal on Sunday as her family watched with pride from the gallery at the ISSF tournament in Bhopal. For the 22-year-old, the podium finish came on the back of a very tough decision – choosing between two targets, her education and her passion.

The tournament dates clashed with her first-year MBBS exams. She says she requested her college to hold the exams separately for her so that she could represent the nation but it was turned down. Asked to choose between the scalpel and her rifle, she chose the sport. “And I’ll stick to my guns till the 2024 Olympics,” she told TOI.

Samra shot her way to a bronze in the women’s 50m rifle 3-position, taking India’s medal tally to seven and ensuring second place for the country.

Her happiness is tinged with concern for her MBBS, though. That she cracked NEET while keeping her sights on the bullseye is exemplary, but juggling the two proved tough.

“I am not able to manage shooting with MBBS. Before coming here, I requested my college to hold separate exams for me, but they refused. They went on suggesting that I should repeat the first year,” said Samra, a student of Government GGS Medical College, Faridkot, Punjab.
“I met a couple of ministers and other influential people to help me but to no avail,” said Samra, who is the first shooter in her family.

She said she was about to quit the sport last year. “After being selected for MBBS, I had made up my mind to give up shooting. However, a national championship was being held in Bhopal, so I told myself I’ll call it quits after the tournament. I set a national record and life changed. I realised that I should not leave shooting,” said Samra.

So what of her medical course? “I haven't thought about it. I have no idea whether my college will consider me for a separate exam. I do not know what will happen about my academics,” she said, adding in the same breath: “I have set my sights on the next Olympics. I’ll give MBBS a thought only after that.”

The Punjab girl does not like pistols. It’s rifles for her.
On Sunday, as the reigning national champion, Samra began on a strong note in the qualification of the women’s 3P with 588 points, securing the second spot after China’s Zhang Qiongyue (594). Samra displayed excellent consistency in the finals to secure a bronze after she shot 403.9 in the top-eight ranking round. Zhang defeated Aneta Brabcova of the Czech Republic 16-8 for the gold.

Samra said that it was a big day for her. “I have played world cups and have been a regular part of the Indian team but there was no individual medal to my name. Today, I have made it and I am happy.”

 

People Who Have These ‘Big Five’ Personality Traits are Happier Throughout Their Lives

 (Source: https://www.healthline.com/health-news)

New findings indicate that emotional stability was the most powerful predictor of overall satisfaction with life and career. Santi Nuñez/Stocksy

• A new study suggests that people who scored high on surveys measuring openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability tended to report greater overall work, social, and life satisfaction.
• Furthermore, the team noted that the link between these personality traits and life satisfaction was stable across the lifespan.
• These personality traits are known collectively as the Big Five.

People who are emotionally stable, conscientious, and agreeable may experience more satisfaction with their lives, according to new research.

The report, published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, evaluated how the Big Five personality traits — emotional stability, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness — correlated to work, social, and life satisfaction across the adult lifespan.

Past researchTrusted Source has found that people with certain personality traits, like extroversion, are generally happier than others, however, until now it’s been unclear if this remains the case as people get older.

According to the findings, despite changes in living environments and experiences, the Big 5 personality traits continue to be strongly associated with life satisfaction across the lifespan.

“The personality traits remained equally relevant to life, social or work satisfaction across the adult lifespan, or became even more inter-connected in some cases for work satisfaction,” Manon van Scheppingen, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Tilburg University and one of the study’s co-authors, told Healthline.

 

Women have higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery than men

 (Source: https://www.news-medical.net/news)

Compared with men, women continue to have a roughly 30-40 percent higher risk of dying following coronary artery bypass surgery, according to a large study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The analysis showed that, without adjusting for differences in age and other health factors that influence risk, the female bypass patients had a 2.8 percent rate of death during or soon after surgery, compared with 1.7 percent for male patients, a nearly 50 percent difference that only dropped 10-20 percent after accounting for these factors.

The study, which appears Mar. 1 in JAMA Surgery, was based on data from nearly 1.3 million bypass surgeries performed in the United States from 2011 to 2020. It confirms the findings of studies based on surgery data from prior decades.

Doctors perform about 370,000 coronary artery bypass graft surgeries in the U.S. every year. Over the past few decades, advances in surgical techniques and overall care have brought improved outcomes from these surgeries.

However, since the 1990s, studies of these surgeries have been finding evidence that, compared with male patients, female patients tend to have worse outcomes. Female bypass surgery patients on average are older and more likely to have chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. But even when researchers adjust their analyses to take these factors into account, women still appear to have worse outcomes on average.

One of the big questions for the field has been whether these sex differences in outcomes, first observed more than 30 years ago, have continued in recent years as surgical techniques and surrounding care have improved. To answer this question, Dr. Gaudino and colleagues-;including surgeons in the U.S., Canada, and Austria-;analyzed bypass surgery cases from 2011-2020 in the Adult Cardiac Surgery Database, which is maintained by the Chicago-based Society for Thoracic Surgeons. The database covers a large proportion of U.S. bypass surgeries, and also includes data from medical centers abroad.

The analysis included a total of 1,297,204 bypass surgeries, of which 317,716 were in women. The main outcome measures were "operative mortality"-;death during surgery or within the 30 days following surgery-;and a composite measure defined as operative mortality or a major post-operative complication, such as stroke or kidney failure.

Without adjusting for differences in age and other health factors that influence risk, the investigators found that female bypass patients had a 2.8 percent rate of death during or soon after surgery, compared with 1.7 percent for male patients; and a 22.9 percent rate of the composite measure compared with 16.7 percent for male patients. Even after adjustment for male/female differences in those risk factors, being female appeared to bring a significantly higher risk of death or major complications. For mortality, being female was associated with a 28 percent to 41 percent higher risk depending on the year of surgery during the covered period. For the combined outcome measure, being female was associated with a 2 percent to 9 percent higher risk. There was no significant trend for either measure during the analyzed period.

The findings underscore the importance of determining why women have worse outcomes for this relatively common surgery, said Dr. Gaudino, who is also director of the Joint Clinical Trials Office at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian.

"We're clearly missing something here, and that means we need more data on women-;data on the physiology of their coronary artery disease and how it tends to differ from men's, and data on their responses to different treatments and surgical techniques," he said.

To that end, he and his colleagues are planning a clinical trial exclusively in female patients, to see if the use of multiple coronary artery bypasses during surgery improves outcomes over single-artery bypasses.