Background: According to WHO statistics, close to 3 million deaths occur every year due to harmful use of   alcohol of which 3.2 lakh people are aged between 15-29 years. College students are more prone to experimenting and risk taking behavior. Keeping this in mind, our study was aimed to assess the alcohol use patterns and factors associated with alcohol consumption among college students. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted including college students from various streams in the South Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.  Data was collected from 1129 participants using a self-administered questionnaire consisting of 4 sections including socio-demographic details, alcohol use patterns, attitude towards alcohol consumption and media exposure. Results: Prevalence of alcohol consumption in the sample population was found to be 31% (348). Among the 348, 30.2% (105) reported that one of the reasons for the consumption of the first drink of alcohol was peer-pressure. Higher prevalence of alcohol consumption seen among the groups with higher media exposure and higher tolerance to alcohol advertising was found to be statistically significant. The study statistics show that 600(53.14%) participants were exposed to actors consuming alcohol in media more than 10 times in the past 30 days while only 320(28.34%) reported seeing warnings or health education material in the same duration. Conclusion: Considering the above findings, it is high time policy makers focused on using media for health promotion and health education, since it is proving to have the potential to influence the decisions and lifestyles of the future generations.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic led to the disruption of medical teaching nation-wide and pushed the institutions to explore the probable role of online teaching methods. The aim of this review is to identify the untested perspectives and help in strategizing based on evidence generation for the preparation for future. Methods: We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic and Meta-Analysis guidelines for reporting the present review. We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Embase databases for the articles published between April 2020 and October 2021 for studies on online medical education in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: We initially screened a total number of 1412 articles and finally recruited 45 articles for the analysis. Majority of the articles were from single institution, and reported the experience of the students and teachers on online teaching. The common teaching platform used such as Zoom and Google Meet were enumerated. Internet connectivity was the most reported challenge of online teaching. None of the selected articles reported on ethical issues related to online teaching. Conclusion: Even though there were some strong points reported for the successful implementation of e-learning, a more sustainable and well-informed plan should be devised for the future on online teaching.

Objectives: Data management and statistical analysis are integral parts of any research. But there is difficulty in cleaning, organizing, and maintaining data in a systematic and meaningful way for accurate analysis without any tool. Hence, there is a need to learn a tool such as SPSS, STATA, R, SAS and so many for understanding the data. This study focused on the impact of short-course training on STATA on healthcare eye professionals and found an improvement in their competency to use computer-based statistical software packages for data management and analysis and identify the major challenges for participants and suggestions to improve the training. Materials and Methods: We organized a 10-day short course on data management and data analysis using STATA. A pre and post-test evaluation was done every day to find the impact. The questionnaire covered several areas of research methodology from data management to statistics. Categorical data were described in frequency and percentage whereas continuous data was described in median and interquartile range (IQR). Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied to find out the significant improvement in the knowledge. Results: The 10 days cumulative median score for pre- and post-test was 43 (IOR = 39-47.5) and 72.5 (IOR = 69-77) respectively and was statistically significant (P = 0.012). Male participants, younger age groups, experience, and prior knowledge were identified as major determinants to improve the knowledge and performance in the usage of STATA. We observed that advanced training in the usage of STATA is highly beneficial to people interested/involved in research to gain autonomy in data management and analysis. Conclusion: The evaluation of the training confirms that hands-on training in the use of STATA software does have a significant impact on the knowledge, self-efficacy, and attitude of the learner. Since Stata is very user-friendly, we recommend that researchers and medical students should be offered a comprehensive training course in STATA.