Journal of School of Public Health and

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Awareness regarding incidence pattern of disease is an important issue for researchers. To explore seasonal pattern of TB in Iran we decided to do this study. This study have been done as an ecologic study .all notified TB cases during 1997 to 2001 have been included in this study .all data have been processed and analyzed by the Cosinor analysis method. We found 59756 registered TB cases during above mentioned years. TB in this 5 year period has seasonal pattern (amplitude=11.73% ,acrophase=13 June(85.23) , p<0.000) . Frequency of TB cases evaluated by sex in this model and found that there is seasonality by sex too (p<0.000) , but different amplitudes found for female and male(13.35%, 10.5%) and point estimate of acrophase for them were consequently 18 June and 8 June . When we evaluate this pattern among smear positive and smear negative cases found that smear positives have seasonal pattern (p<0.000) . Association of TB frequencies in quarters and mean temperature of each quarter have been evaluated by ANOVA in different 4 temperature groups(p< 0.020) ,and a significant difference have been found between 10-20 and 20-30 temperature groups(p<0.051) . According to this study there is a seasonal pattern in TB notification (incidence) in Iran which should be notified in population based studies and surveys in this regards. Comments: We recommend performing more studies on patterns of pulmonary disease, other relevant factors on TB involvement and also laboratory circulation to clarifying cause of existing seasonality

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  Background and Aim: Investigation of seasonal suicide might help in learning about the etiology of suicide committers’ behavior. Literature search indicates that a large number of preliminary studies have been carried out on this subject, in many of which seasonal and climatological aspects of suicide have been investigated. In the present study, the seasonal and time pattern of suicide incidence in Iran was determined based a systematic review.

  Materials and Methods : Search was performed in the national databases, namely, SID, Iranmedex, Magiran and Medlib, as well as international databases such as PubMed, Scopus and Google scholar, using such keywords as Iran/Iranian, seasonality and suicide. The technical quality of papers was assessed using checklists. Data of each of the preliminary studies were extracted in terms of general variables and such specific variables as season, month, hour, weekdays and climatic conditions.

  Results: Of a total number of 49,522 documents obtained from a primary electronic search, eventually 32 papers were included in this study. The highest numbers of suicides committed were 7 and 8 in summer and spring, respectively. Similarly, among the primary studies that had reported only the monthly occurrence of suicide, the highest rate in 7 cases was spring and 7 in summer. In most of the studies (8 cases) the highest number of suicides had taken place between 1:00 and 6:00 PM.

  Conclusion: These findings indicate that suicide occurrence in Iran has a seasonal pattern, most cases committed being in spring and summer.