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The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak is becoming pandemic with the highest mortality in patients with associated comorbidities. These RNA viruses containing 4 structural proteins usually use spike protein to enter the host cell. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) acts as a host receptor for the virus. Therefore, medications acting on renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system can lead to serious complications, especially in patients with diabetes and hypertension. To avoid this, other potential treatment modalities should be used in COVID-19 patients with associated comorbidities.Background Wound healing is a process that has three overlapping inflammatory, proliferative, and reconstruction phases. Silicone gel and Contractubex (onion extract gel) are two main topical agents used for the prevention and treatment of hypertrophic scars. This clinical trial study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of onion extract and silicone gel on hypertrophic scars of the upper extremity and compare it to non-treated patients. Methods This randomized, double-blind, parallel, clinical trial was done on 120 male patients who had undergone upper extremity sharp injury repair. Patients were assigned to three groups, i.e., Silicone gel (Kelo-cortTM; WA, USA) (group 1; 40 patients), Onion extract (ContractubexTM, Merz Pharma, Frankfurt, Germany) gel (group 2; 40 patients), and No Intervention (group 3; 40 patients), using drawing sealed envelopes and a computer-based table of randomization. Data were recorded using the Vancouver scale in each visit by two surgeons who were blinded to the study groups. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 22.0. (Armonk, NY IBM Corp). Data were compared using the ANOVA test. A P-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results Vascularity (p=0.200), pliability (p=0.058), pigmentation (p=0.701), and height (p=0.438) as subjective scar parameters were approximately similar in post-upper extremity sharp injury wound hypertrophic scar among the three groups. Conclusion Vascularity, pliability, pigmentation and height, as subjective scar parameters, were not statistically different in post-upper extremity sharp injury wound hypertrophic scar among the groups. Even though onion extract gel and Silicone gel show preventive effects in the literature, especially in burns wounds, further studies are recommended to be conducted to prove the topical effects of above-mentioned gels in patients.Background Psoas major (PM) is a challenging muscle from the functional and anatomical point of view. The dysfunction of this muscle can result in low back pain (LBP). This study aimed to assess the intrarater reliability of ultrasound imaging (USI) of PM muscle thickness in subacute LBP patients and healthy participants without LBP in rest and during muscle contraction conditions. Methods PM thickness was measured in all lumbar segments (L1-L5) using a USI device in 10 healthy and 10 subacute LBP participants. The intrarater data were assessed on the same day with 1- hour interval and after 7 days. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), standard error of measurement (SEM), minimal detectable change (MDC), and independent t test were used for analyses. Significant level was set at 0.05. Results PM thickness in all lumbar levels had excellent reliability (ICC range 80-98) for both groups and conditions. SEM (0.42- 2.29) and MDC (1.16-6.34) were low, and PM thickness was greater than rest in contraction condition. There were no significant differences between the 2 groups in PM thickness. Conclusion The USI demonstrated good intrarater reliability for assessing PM thickness in patients with subacute LBP. The thickness of PM in patients with subacute LBP was similar with that in healthy participants.This debate article highlights that to perform efficiently and meaningfully, the structure and organization of a health system need to be adjusted to its philosophy, mission, and expected duties. Development of the required organizational structure, in line with the objectives and strategies of the national health policy are fundamental principles of healthcare stewardship. Despite several reforms and initiatives in the course of the last few decades, the Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MoHME), as the steward of the health system in Iran, has not been performing efficient enough to respond to serious emerging challenges. In order to move in line with sustainable health development agenda and reach universal health coverage (UHC), we advocate fundamental structural and institutional reforms within the MoHME in Iran.Background Due to the law for the fifth development plan and Iran's 20- year economic perspective, Centers of Excellence (COEs) were expected to upgrade the level of research and education besides improving infrastructures in Iran. This study is aimed to analyze the current state of national centers of excellence and designing a future roadmap. Methods In this qualitative study, data was gathered by reviewing relevant national & international literature and upstream documents, interview with experts, and focused group discussions with stakeholders. Finally, a roadmap was prepared for approval. Results Lack of common understanding of the COEs definition, lack of clear professional orientation for each center, lack of mandate and commitment in using COEs in the health system and community health promotion, weakness in enticing elites, and unresponsive to basic needs of the country were five major challenges COEs encountered. The consensus prospective vision for centers of excellence was developed based on the establishment and management of special institutions of thought and technology in centers of excellence to advise health policymakers and provide the highest level of the regional and global position. Conclusion Despite over a decade of development of medical COEs, their goals have not been reached yet. Enactment of designed roadmap and its subprojects in the Supreme Council of Centers is the primary steps for functional improvement of COEs.Background The emergence of web 2.0 and development of social media have strongly affected sharing, collaborating, connecting, and evaluating in academic setting. This study aimed to provide a clear image of faculty members' activities at Iran University of Medical Sciences (IUMS) and the way they communicate with the academic world in ResearchGate (RG). Methods In this altmetrics study, we surveyed the presence and activity of IUMS faculty members in RG and compared the data with those derived from Google Scholar and Scopus. The Spearman's correlation coefficient was used to detect the correlation between RG variables and the 2 mentioned databases. The significance level was set at α = 0.01. Data were statistically analyzed using the Microsoft Excel 2013 and SPSS 22.0 software. Results The results demonstrated 439 (45%) faculty members of IUMS had RG profiles, and the School of Medicine with 287 researchers had the largest contribution. Overall, 14 971 documents were shared, 91% of which were journal articles. The average RG score was 15.26 ± 9.28, of which 94% was acquired from publications. This indicates a positive and strong correlation between RG variables and Scopus and Google Scholar indicators, while the RG indicators were more correlated with Google Scholar than Scopus. Conclusion Due to the essential role of self-archiving in the visibility, citation rate, and creation of further international collaborations, it is recommended that Iranian scholars consider using the Academic Social Networks like RG to enhance their online international contributions.Background The Hoveyzeh cohort study (HCS) is a population-based cohort study that conducted in Hoveyzeh County (South-west Iran). HCS focus on common chronic diseases, disorders and risk factors of NCDs in the Arab ethnicity. Methods A total number of 10009 participants (35-70 years old) were recruited in this prospective cohort study from May 2016 to August 2018. The HCS data were gathered by trained interviewer through interviewer-administered questionnaires. Also anthropometric measurements, physical examinations, clinical assessments, ophthalmology evaluation, auditory examinations, respiratory and cardiovascular assessments was conducted by means of standard instruments. Biological samples including blood, urine, hair, and nail collected and stored in the biobank. Results The overall participation rate was 82.7%. The prevalence of obesity was 27.4% in males and 47% in females. Cigarette smoking prevalence was 20.9% (40.6 % in men and 7.6 % in women). Prevalence of major non communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, cardiac ischemic, myocardial infarction and stroke was 22.2%, 26.4% 31.9 %, 13.6%, 1.85% and 1.6% respectively. Conclusion Considering the high prevalence of obesity and smoking in the population of Hoveyzeh and since the important role of these risk factors in development of common non communicable diseases, this issue should be taken into consideration and the necessary interventions in this context must be considered to modify lifestyle. The HCS is the only comprehensive cohort in the region, enabling it to provide valuable evidence about NCDs for a wide geographical area covering millions of people in both Iran and Iraq.Background Breast cancer is one of the most causes of death in women. Early diagnosis and detection of Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (IDC) is an important key for the treatment of IDC. Computer-aided approaches have great potential to improve diagnosis accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning-based method for the automatic classification of IDC in whole slide images (WSI) of breast cancer. Furthermore, different types of deep neural networks training such as training from scratch and transfer learning to classify IDC were evaluated. Methods In total, 277524 image patches with 50×50-pixel size form original images were used for model training. In the first method, we train a simple convolutional neural network (named it baseline model) on these images. In the second approach, we used the pre-trained VGG-16 CNN model via feature extraction and fine-tuning for the classification of breast pathology images. Results Our baseline model achieved a better result for the automatic classification of IDC in terms of F-measure and accuracy (83%, 85%) in comparison with original paper on this data set and achieved a comparable result with a new study that introduced accepted-rejected pooling layer. Also, transfer learning via feature extraction yielded better results (81%, 81%) in comparison with handcrafted features. Furthermore, transfer learning via feature extraction yielded better classification results in comparison with the baseline model. Conclusion The experimental results demonstrate that using deep learning approaches yielded better results in comparison with handcrafted features. selleck Also, using transfer learning in histopathology image analysis yielded significant results in comparison with training from scratch in much less time.Background Successful aging is a prominent and worldwide theme in gerontology. However, until recently, only few studies were conducted about successful aging in Iran. This study examined whether a healthy lifestyle could predict successful aging among older Iranians. Methods This cross sectional and descriptive study included 975 older Iranians who were selected through a multistage cluster-quota method from the health centers of Shiraz, Iran. A 5-part questionnaire, including demographic characteristics, the Seniors' Healthy Lifestyle, Barthel Index, the Diner Life Satisfaction and Quality of Life, was used to collect the data. A logistic regression analysis was used in data analysis; data were analyzed using SPSS 21; and significance level was set at α = 0.05. Results The prevalence of successful aging among older Iranians was calculated at 24.0%. Results of multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that age (95% CI = 1.129- 1.702 and OR = 1.352), gender (95% CI = 0.412-0.764 and OR = 0.687), education level (95% CI = 1.