Arch Iran Med
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Breast cancer is the major cause of death from cancer among women around the world. Given the drug resistance in the treatment of this disease, it is very important to identify new therapies and anticancer drugs. Many studies demonstrated that hypericin could induce apoptosis in different cancer cell lines; however, the underlying mechanism is not well understood yet. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the anticancer effect of hypericin in two breast cancer cell lines, one with wild type P53 and the other with mutant P53. ⋯ The results of this study demonstrated that hypericin's apoptotic and cytotoxic effects on cancer cells may be mediated via P53 overexpression, cell cycle arrest and the subsequent apoptosis. Therefore, it is of great importance to consider that hypericin would have better impact on cells or tumors with wild type P53.
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Chronic infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV), can now be safely treated with oral, well-tolerated medications with >90% success rates, however, currently <5% of the infected individuals have been diagnosed and <1% have received treatment. This is believed to be due to the complicated, time-consuming and expensive disease management processes that require several referrals to specialized laboratories and hospital-based clinics, and also the epidemic of HCV infection among populations who have low uptake for evaluation, appointments, and treatment. ⋯ Furthermore, successful implementation of this policy requires acceptability from the perspectives of healthcare providers, target populations, and policymakers. In this letter, we discuss the current applicability, acceptability, and cost-effectiveness of POC policy for the management of HCV infection.
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The theory if self-efficacy is the central concept of social cognitive theory with emphasis on the constructs of efficacy expectation, outcome expectation. Efficacy expectation is defined as the person's confidence to carry out a specific behavior. Outcome expectation is beliefs that carrying out a specific behavior will lead to a specific outcome. While the benefit of measuring outcome expectations has been established, there has been no large scale within the Iranian context. The purpose of this study is to examine the reliability-validity of the Persian version of the Perceived Therapeutic Efficacy Scale (PTES). ⋯ Our study demonstrated good convergent validity, factor structure and internal consistency in a sample of 160 Iranian adults with T2DM. Therefore, the Persian version of the scale is a valid and reliable instrument and can be used in research and clinical settings.
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Afghanistan is one of the low-income countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region with young population and myriad of healthcare needs. We aim to report the burden of diseases and injuries in Afghanistan between 1990 and 2016. ⋯ Despite improvements in certain health indicators, our study suggests an urgent intervention to improve health status of the country. Peace and safety by means of stopping the conflict and terrorism are the mainstay of all other health interventions. Improving health infrastructures, boosting maternal and child health (MCH), battling infectious diseases as well as chronic disease risk factor modification programs can help to decrease burden of diseases.
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The goal of many observational studies is to estimate the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome after adjustment for confounders, but there are still some serious errors in adjusting confounders in clinical journals. Standard regression modeling (e.g., ordinary logistic regression) fails to estimate the average effect of exposure in total population in the presence of interaction between exposure and covariates, and also cannot adjust for time-varying confounding appropriately. ⋯ Causal methods overcome these limitations. We illustrate three causal methods including inverse-probability-of-treatment-weighting (IPTW) and parametric g-formula, with an emphasis on a clever combination of these 2 methods: targeted maximum likelihood estimation (TMLE) which enjoys a double-robust property against bias.