Protective Roles and Therapeutic Effects of Gallic Acid in the Treatment of Cardiovascular Diseases: Current Trends and Future Directions.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are serious life-threatening illnesses and significant problematic issues for public health having a heavy economic burden on all society worldwide. The high incidence of these diseases as well as high mortality rates make them the leading causes of death and disability. Therefore, finding novel and more effective therapeutic methods is urgently required. Gallic acid, an herbal medicine with numerous biological properties, has been utilized in the treatment of various diseases for thousands of years. It has been demonstrated that gallic acid possesses pharmacological potential in regulating several molecular and cellular processes such as apoptosis and autophagy. Moreover, gallic acid has been investigated in the treatment of CVDs both in vivo and in vitro. Herein, we aimed to review the available evidence on the therapeutic application of gallic acid for CVDs including myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury and infarction, drug-induced cardiotoxicity, hypertension, cardiac fibrosis, and heart failure, with a focus on underlying mechanisms.

Impact of educational intervention regarding COVID-19 on knowledge, attitude, and practice of students before dental school re-opening.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Lack of knowledge on COVID-19 among people and healthcare staff significantly impacts late management and its rapid transmission. Dental students must be aware of the exact preventive instructions due to their close contact with patients and clinical work in the dental setting during the pandemic. This interventional study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of designed educational content regarding COVID-19 on Iranian dental students' knowledge, attitudes, and practices at Alborz University of medical sciences. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 88 dental students were investigated in this study. Educational content was designed based on the clinical guidelines regarding COVID-19 in dentistry. The content was presented to dental students as a three-hour webinar. In addition, the online, validated questionnaire was obtained from the students as pre, post, and follow-up surveys. RESULTS: A statistically significant difference between students' knowledge, attitudes, and practices were obtained before and after the intervention and the follow-up survey. 48.58% improvement in knowledge score, 6.37% in attitudes, and 17% in practice scores were observed. CONCLUSION: Although this educational intervention significantly improved the knowledge, attitude, and practice of dental students, additional education and clinical training are mandatory for effective and safe dental practice management in future crises.

Mothers' knowledge and self-reported performance regarding the management of traumatic dental injuries and associated factors: a cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: Dental trauma is common among children. It has negative effects on a child's quality of life. Parental knowledge, especially among mothers is an important factor for the long-term success of this emergency. This study aimed to investigate mothers' knowledge and self-reported performance regarding the management of traumatic dental injuries and associated socio-demographic factors. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, 277 mothers of children (8-12 years) attending the pediatrics department of Alborz dental school were studied by convenience sampling. The participants completed a valid reliable questionnaire about the management of traumatic dental injuries. The predictor variables were the child's gender, maternal education and employment status, economic status, and accommodation status. The outcome variables were the mothers' knowledge about the management of traumatic dental injuries (Eight statements with 10 scores) and self-reported performance including four case scenarios of traumatic dental injury (Five questions with 7 scores). Data were analyzed by T-test or One-way ANOVA to test the within-group changes, Pearson's correlation coefficient and Linear multiple regression to examine the effect of predictor variables on maternal knowledge and self-reported performance. RESULTS: The mean score of mothers' knowledge was 3.43; SD = 1.58 (total score ranged from 0 to 10). The mean score of mothers' performance was 3.38; SD = 1.2 (total score ranged from 0 to 7). Mothers who work (p < 0.001) and mothers with high qualifications (p < 0.001) had higher knowledge. Furthermore, mothers who work (p = 0.011), mothers with high qualifications (p < 0.001), and those who have had previous experience with traumatic dental injuries (p < 0.001) had higher self-reported performance. The results of multiple linear regression analysis demonstrated the association between mothers' knowledge with mothers' education (ß = 0.22, p = 0.001) and mothers' employment status (ß = 0.15, p = 0.017), while there is a relationship between mothers' self-reported performance and mothers' education (ß = 0.27, p < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Since the means of mothers' knowledge and performance scores regarding dental trauma management, were less than half of the obtainable scores as well as mothers have a crucial role in the children's oral health, it is important to increase the mothers' knowledge and improve their performance in this context. Therefore, running educational programs is necessary for this respect.

Psychometric Properties of a New Questionnaire Assessing the Mothers' Knowledge and Perception about the Oral Health of Their School Children.

Objectives: The aim of the present study was to develop and evaluate the psychometric properties of an instrument in Persian to assess the mothers' knowledge, and perception about oral health of school children. Materials and Methods: A sequential exploratory mixed method design consisting of qualitative and quantitative phases was performed. We developed the questionnaire by inductive-deductive method, through a synthesis of literature review and a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. Face and content validity of the items were assessed by consulting a panel of 11 experts. In the quantitative phase, an exploratory factor analysis was performed using data from a cross-sectional study with a sample of 303 mothers. Reliability analysis with test-retest approach and Cronbach's alpha coefficient and intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was done. Results: Pre-final version of the scale consisted of 120 items extracted from the qualitative study and literature review. After content and face validity, 92 items were chosen with the greatest agreement between experts, with a content validity index (CVI) >0.8 and content validity ratio (CVR) of 0.59. The final questionnaire covered 62 items. The overall Cronbach's alpha was 0.94 and it ranged from 0.87 to 0.97 for the subscales. The ICC ranged from 0.91 to 0.98 (Cronbach's alpha ≥0.70). Conclusion: The present study introduced a valid and reliable questionnaire for assessment of the mothers' perception regarding school children's oral health. It can be used as a standardized measure for public health surveillance and evaluation of oral health promotion programs.

A survey on single and multi omics data mining methods in cancer data classification.

Data analytics is routinely used to support biomedical research in all areas, with particular focus on the most relevant clinical conditions, such as cancer. Bioinformatics approaches, in particular, have been used to characterize the molecular aspects of diseases. In recent years, numerous studies have been performed on cancer based upon single and multi-omics data. For example, Single-omics-based studies have employed a diverse set of data, such as gene expression, DNA methylation, or miRNA, to name only a few instances. Despite that, a significant part of literature reports studies on gene expression with microarray datasets. Single-omics data have high numbers of attributes and very low sample counts. This characteristic makes them paradigmatic of an under-sampled, small-n large-p machine learning problem. An important goal of single-omics data analysis is to find the most relevant genes, in terms of their potential use in clinics and research, in the batch of available data. This problem has been addressed in gene selection as one of the pre-processing steps in data mining. An analysis that use only one type of data (single-omics) often miss the complexity of the landscape of molecular phenomena underlying the disease. As a result, they provide limited and sometimes poorly reliable information about the disease mechanisms. Therefore, in recent years, researchers have been eager to build models that are more complex, obtaining more reliable results using multi-omics data. However, to achieve this, the most important challenge is data integration. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges in single and multi-omics data analysis of cancer data, focusing on gene selection and data integration methods.

The impacts of pill contraceptive low-dose on plasma levels of nitric oxide, homocysteine, and lipid profiles in the exposed vs. non exposed women: as the risk factor for cardiovascular diseases.

BACKGROUND: Consuming oral contraceptive pills is one of the methods for preventing pregnancy worldwide. As using the pills has always caused the greatest concern for the likelihood of developing cardiovascular diseases and also given the limited conducted studies in this regard, this study was carried out to determine the impacts of low dose birth control pills on plasma levels of nitric oxide, homocysteine, and lipid profiles in the exposed vs. non exposed women as the risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. METHODS: This was a combined cohort study conducted on 100 women, having the age range 20-35 years and normal menstrual cycles, referred to the health care centers in Yazd, Iran. The demographic data were obtained through face to face interviews performed by the researcher. Anthropometric indexes were measured and biochemical factors were determined by testing blood samples. Then, using SPSS 16 and statistical independent t-test and Chi- square, the data were analyzed. RESULTS: The mean ± standard deviations of plasma levels of homocysteine, nitric oxide, cholesterol, triglyceride, Low Density Lipoprotein, and High Density Lipoprotein levels in the group consumed low dose contraceptive pills were 3.84 ± 2.35 µmol/l, 181.36 ± 90.44 µM, 180.7 ± 38.28 mg/dl, 129.82 ± 47.92 mg/ dl, 101.42 ± 30.66 mg/dl, and 56.46 ± 8.42 mg/dl, There were significant statistical differences between those consuming the pills and those not consuming the pills regarding cholesterol (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Consuming Low Dose contraceptive pills can increase the plasma levels of cholesterol, triglyceride, and Low Density Lipoprotein levels; i.e. this condition is called dyslipidemia. On the other hand, there were no changes in the levels of homocysteine and nitric oxide in the healthy women consuming the pills; therefore, the pills may not develop cardiovascular diseases in healthy women. Accordingly, it is recommended that the health care providers prescribe the pills for the women with cautions.

Work-related Musculoskeletal Symptoms among Agricultural Workers: A Cross-sectional Study in Iran.

Objective: In Iran, as in most developing countries, agriculture is considered a hazardous industry. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) have been shown to be the most common occupational injury among farmers. The present study was carried out among agricultural workers of Fars province, Iran to determine the prevalence of musculoskeletal symptoms and to assess working postures and ergonomic working conditions to identify the major risk factors associated with MSD. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 1501 randomly selected Iranian agricultural workers with at least 1 year of job tenure. Data were collected using demographic/occupational questionnaire, Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (NMQ), Quick Exposure Check (QEC) technique, and ergonomic working conditions checklist. Results: The mean age of the participants was 41.39 ± 13.64 years. The results of NMQ showed the highest prevalence of MSD symptoms was related to lower back (59.3%), knees (36.9%), and upper back (36.6%). Indeed, the QEC score was high or very high (action levels 3 and 4) in 83.1% of the farmers. Moreover, the ergonomic working conditions checklist revealed that the participants' "working postures" index had the lowest mean, indicating poor ergonomic conditions, while "hand tools" had the highest mean, indicating proper ergonomic conditions. Conclusions: The results demonstrated the high prevalence of MSD symptoms among Iranian agricultural workers. Elimination of harmful working postures was recommended to improve working conditions.

MapReduce-Based Parallel Genetic Algorithm for CpG-Site Selection in Age Prediction.

Genomic biomarkers such as DNA methylation (DNAm) are employed for age prediction. In recent years, several studies have suggested the association between changes in DNAm and its effect on human age. The high dimensional nature of this type of data significantly increases the execution time of modeling algorithms. To mitigate this problem, we propose a two-stage parallel algorithm for selection of age related CpG-sites. The algorithm first attempts to cluster the data into similar age ranges. In the next stage, a parallel genetic algorithm (PGA), based on the MapReduce paradigm (MR-based PGA), is used for selecting age-related features of each individual age range. In the proposed method, the execution of the algorithm for each age range (data parallel), the evaluation of chromosomes (task parallel) and the calculation of the fitness function (data parallel) are performed using a novel parallel framework. In this paper, we consider 16 different healthy DNAm datasets that are related to the human blood tissue and that contain the relevant age information. These datasets are combined into a single unioned set, which is in turn randomly divided into two sets of train and test data with a ratio of 7:3, respectively. We build a Gradient Boosting Regressor (GBR) model on the selected CpG-sites from the train set. To evaluate the model accuracy, we compared our results with state-of-the-art approaches that used these datasets, and observed that our method performs better on the unseen test dataset with a Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) of 3.62 years, and a correlation (R2) of 95.96% between age and DNAm. In the train data, the MAD and R2 are 1.27 years and 99.27%, respectively. Finally, we evaluate our method in terms of the effect of parallelization in computation time. The algorithm without parallelization requires 4123 min to complete, whereas the parallelized execution on 3 computing machines having 32 processing cores each, only takes a total of 58 min. This shows that our proposed algorithm is both efficient and scalable.

Perception of Iranian Mothers About Oral Health of Their School-Children: A Qualitative Study.

OBJECTIVES: Oral health is an important aspect of general health and well-being for children. Understanding the viewpoint of mothers about children's oral health provides a basis for the development of interventions to improve oral care and disease prevention. The purpose of this study was to explore the perception of Iranian mothers regarding the oral health of their children. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This descriptive qualitative study was the first phase of an exploratory mixed method design and collected data from April to May 2015 in Tehran, Iran. The qualitative data were collected through seven focus group discussions and three semi-structured interviews. The participants were 58 Iranian women who had a first grader. Data were analyzed using conventional content analysis. RESULTS: The main themes identified from the data were: (I) the definition of oral health, (II) the importance of maintaining oral health and dental treatment, (III) the effect of nutrition on children's oral health, (IV) the role of oral health behaviors, (V) the causes of dental caries and malocclusion/crowding, (VI) the symptoms and causes of gum disease, (VII) the causes of halitosis. CONCLUSIONS: According to the mothers' perception, the main factors influencing children's oral health were: nutrition and oral health behaviors such as daily tooth brushing and flossing. The results of this study can be used to develop a model of oral health education and a prevention program for improving oral health among Iranian school-children.

A Descriptive Study of Occupational Health Services in Self-employed Enterprises (Nanoscale Enterprises), Shiraz, Iran.

BACKGROUND: This study was conducted with aim of providing an overview of the current status of occupational health services and identifying the most common harmful agents at workplaces of Iranian self-employed enterprises (Nano-Scale Enterprises). METHODS: A cross-sectional study was performed among a random sample including 1,758 employees engaging in self-employed enterprises with 5 and less employees. RESULTS: Coverage of occupational health surveillance was very poor, annual health examinations were been conducted only for 64 (3.64%) of males and 31 (1.76%) of females, and occupational health trainings were not included of the services at all. Personal Protective Equipment were available in 462 (26.3%) of the enterprises. only in 0.4% of the enterprises working processes were been equipped by a local exhaust ventilation system. Difficult postures were the most common (81.5%) adverse working conditions. CONCLUSION: This study revealed a poor level of the implementation of occupational health services in Iranian self-employed enterprises. Based on the findings, providing basic training on the occupational health, more enforcing in conduction of health examinations and providing PPE, and taking appropriate strategies aimed at eliminating or minimizing work environment harmful agents are the major factor that should be considered to improve the level of occupational health services among the studied enterprises.

Restrictive Pattern of Pulmonary Symptoms among Photocopy and Printing Workers: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

BACKGROUND: According to the growth of photocopier usage in workplaces, the potential risk of occupational exposure to the airborne chemicals has been raised up. Hence, monitoring the photocopy worker's respiratory functions seems to be necessary. We aimed to evaluate the respiratory health on photocopy and printing workers so that a reliable description can be made about their occupational hygiene. METHODS: This study was performed in Shiraz, southwest Iran in 2014 and a group of 150 photocopy and printing workers were surveyed as exposed group in addition to a group of 114 office staff as unexposed group. The respiratory standard questionnaire was used to evaluate the prevalence of respiratory symptoms among the selected staff. Pulmonary function indexes including VC, FVC, FEV1 and the FEV1/FVC ratio were calculated. Finally, t-test, Chi Square and multiple logistic regressions were conducted. RESULTS: VC, FVC and FEV1 in photocopy and printing workers were lower than the unexposed group of which these differences for FVC and FEV1 were statistically significant (P<0.05). Moreover, the prevalence of all respiratory symptoms, except the shortness of breath, in exposed group was more than the unexposed group and the prevalence of coughing and wheezing was statistically significant (P<0.05). There was a significant difference in respiratory symptoms (cough and wheezing) between two groups after controlling for confounding variables, OR: 2.61 (95% CI: 1.21, 5.62) and 2.92 (95% CI: 1.25, 6.84), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of excess respiratory symptoms along with pattern of pulmonary restrictive sings in photocopy and printing workers revealed that the workplace conditions can result in occupational respiratory diseases.

Occupational Safety and Health Measures in Micro-scale Enterprises (MSEs) in Shiraz, Iran.

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to determine the extent of implementation of occupational safety and health measures in micro-scale enterprises (MSEs) and to assess the prevalence of occupational injuries and accidents and its relationship with occupational safety and health measures provided in the MSEs. METHOD: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 595 of MSEs. An index called the Safety and Health Requirement Index (SHRI) was created and used to calculate the percentage of provided occupational safety and health measures. The relationship between the SHRI and the occurrence of occupational accidents and injuries was investigated with the independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA. RESULTS: The mean SHRI score was 60.43%, which was categorized into moderate level. Of the 30.9% of enterprises that had experienced accidents and injuries, the most common types of injuries were musculoskeletal disorders and cuts, and the least common types were pulmonary and hearing problems. Results of one-way ANOVA revealed a statistically significant relationship between the mean SHRI score and industrial branch, enterprise size, and type of accident and injury. The independent samples t-test showed that the occurrence of occupational accidents and injuries was not significantly influenced by provided health and safety measures in MSEs. CONCLUSION: Given the high percentage of enterprises with very poor to poor levels for the SHRI and the high prevalence of occupational accidents and injuries among the studied MSEs, feasible protective strategies and job safety training programs are required to promote occupational health and safety in the studied MSEs.