Tehran University Medical Journal

Background: Renal artery stenosis (RAS) is a known cause of secondary hypertension and renal failure. The most patients with renal artery stenosis are asymptomatic. So, the exact prevalence of this disease is unknown. The gold standard of diagnosis of RAS is renal angiography that is an expensive somewhat hazardous procedure and may revealed nothing. The aim of this study was to develop a simple risk model score to predict significant RAS based on known risk factors. This may enable us to select patients with high probability of having RAS to perform angiography.
Methods: A total of 4177 patients whom underwent renal angiography from April 2001 to March 2016, were randomly assigned to a development and a validation dataset in ratio of 2:1 respectively. The clinical and laboratory data of patients were analyzed by multivariate regression analysis. The factors of female sex, history of hypertension and glomerular filtration rate were determined as predicting factors and they were assigned a weighted integer, the sum of the integers was a total risk score for each patient. This model was examined at validation set.
Results: We retrospectively evaluated all patients undergoing renal artery angiography since 15 years ago. We extracted all risk factors of RAS including age, sex, height, weight, and history of diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia. We also looked at coronary or peripheral vascular diseases and presence of heart failure. The age of patients was 63.5±11.2 years and 40% of the patients were female. The significant RAS was defined as 70% or more narrowing of renal artery. The prevalence of renal artery stenosis was 14.4% and 13.5% in development and validation dataset respectively. The area under curve and confidence interval for final mode in development dataset was 67.9% (65.0-70.8%). The rates of RAS increased with increasing risk score. In 1402 patients in validation dataset the model showed good discrimination power (cstatistic= 0.76)
Conclusion: This model simply assesses the risk of RAS using available information. This model can be used both in clinical and research purposes. The power of model for diagnosis of RAS is estimated to be 72.6% (68.8%-76.4%).

The vagus nerve (VN), the longest cranial nerve and an essential part of the parasympathetic system, connects the central nervous system to respiratory, cardiovascular, immune, gastrointestinal, and endocrine systems and is involved in the maintenance of homeostasis by controlling these systems. Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is related to any method that would stimulate the vagal nerve via electrical stimulation. VNS is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatment for medication-resistant depression, drug-resistant epilepsy, and migraine. However, VNS has also been studied for various other conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease and tinnitus, by targeting the VN in the neck and ear. Currently, there are two methods for VNS: a) invasive-VNS (iVNS), which requires surgical implantation of a pulse generator under the anterior chest wall, that is linked through a wire to an electrode cuff that wraps around a cervical vagus nerve, b) non-invasive transcutaneous VNS which is separated into cervical transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation (ctVNS) and auricular transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation (atVNS). The non-invasive transcutaneous VNS techniques are well tolerated and have no significant side effects, making them effective in clinical research for brain diseases. Because with these newer methods, the electrical stimulation is carried out through the skin.
The results of this study were collected using the advanced search in Scientific Information Database (SID), Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus between 2011 to 2021. Out of 671 articles surveyed, we used 53 articles in the study after the evaluation. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Keyword Searching was carried out through the MeSH database. VNS has been shown to alter neural activity in multiple areas of the brain related to the regulation of the affective states. However, the precise mechanism of VNS action on the clinical consequences is still unknown. This study aimed to review the therapeutic effect of both methods of VNS in neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders such as depression, migraine, seizure, tinnitus and Alzheimer's disease and discuss several hypotheses on the mechanism of VNS, as a new approach, in the treatment of such disorders. It considers that a brain-mapping approach is needed to discover the therapeutic mechanisms of VNS in brain diseases.

Methods: The present study was a semi-experimental pre-test-post-test intervention study with a control group. A study was conducted among 67 people operating room staff working in Imam Ali and Imam Hassan hospitals in Bojnord city in September 2023 In this research, the demographic check list and the Connor and Davidson standard resilience questionnaire were used to collect information. The educational intervention was also implemented using the “SeRenE” Stoic education package. This training package includes 4 exercises, which were used only 3 exercises per day and for 6 consecutive days (45 minutes per day) due to the resilience variable. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS version 24 and at a significance level of 0.05. Results: Based on the results, the total resilience score increased after the Stoic training (72.03±8.31) and showed a statistically significant difference with the control group (65.03±11.16) (P>0.05). The results showed that after Stoic training, mean of subscales of competence, trust in one’s instincts, tolerance of negative affect, positive acceptance of change and secure relationships, control as well as the total score of resilience increased in the training group. Although the mean score of spiritual influences dimension increased after the training, this increase was not statistically significant (P=0.097). Conclusion: The findings show that Stoic training had a positive effect on various aspects of resilience among operating room staff, whose effects are more obvious in some subscales such as trusting individual instincts, tolerance of negative emotions, and positive acceptance of change. In general, the results showed that people's resilience increased after Stoic training. It is recommended to include Stoic training programs in the training of health personnel and caregivers.