Tehran University Medical Journal

Head injury is one of the most important types of injury and is responsible for most of the deaths due to trauma. Low-income and middle-income countries face with more risk factors, but they still lack adequate health-care capacity to deal with complications. Trauma literally means the damage and injury, and head injury was defined as physical damage to the brain or skull caused by external forces. Head trauma is an important event. Anyone can fall including toddlers, adults and elders. There are several mechanisms for head injury, including motor vehicle accidents, falls, assault and violence. After the motor vehicle accidents, fall is the second most important cause of head injury. Deaths from falling in countries with lower socioeconomic conditions are higher. To collect the information for this study, the PubMed, Scopus and Google Scholar databases were used. Sixty-four related articles were reviewed from 1980 to 2018. The keywords including "head injury", "head trauma", "brain damage", "fall mechanism", "Iran" and "epidemiology" were used to search the articles. According to the findings of this review fall is the second most common head injury mechanism in Iran. The fall mechanism is more common in the age group of young children and elderly. Also, the incidence of fall mechanism is more in males with head injury than women. In most other countries in the world, fall is the first and the second head injury mechanism. Also, falling from lower altitudes is a more common mechanism than a fall from higher altitude in injury to the head. Falling from lower level is a more common mechanism than fall from higher level in head injuries. In addition, the outbreak of the fall mechanism in children and the elderly with head injuries is more. Despite the efforts that have been made in the past years to determine the pattern of epidemiology of head trauma and its results in Iran, there is not enough information on fall-related head injury. Considering that the head traumatic injury is one of the most common and most dangerous outcomes of fall, the purpose of this review study is to investigate epidemiologic fall-related head injury.

Currently, there are about 37 million people worldwide living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) /AIDS, with an estimated two million new cases per year globally. According to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), only 75% of the population with HIV know their status. Initially, HIV infection was associated with significantly increased rates of mortality and morbidity. However, the rapid advances in treatment and the advent of different classes of antiretroviral drugs over time have led to change the face of HIV/AIDS from a deadly infection to chronic and manageable disease. There is strong evidence that HIV-infected patients undergoing antiretroviral therapy have longer lives and are less likely to transmit infection to their sexual partners. Since the introduction of zidovudine in 1987 as the first antiretroviral drug, significant strides have been made in antiretroviral therapy. The introduction of potent antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV infection has been one of the significant events in the evolution of modern medicine. Antiretroviral therapy refers to the use of drugs in the treatment of HIV. Generally, these drugs are categorized based on the steps of the HIV life cycle suppressed by them. There are six main classes of antiretroviral agents including nucleoside/ nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors, fusion inhibitors, co-receptor inhibitors, and integrase inhibitors. Combination antiretroviral therapy should be considered for HIV patients to achieve the highest viral suppression rate, and to reduce the risk of resistance development and morbidity and mortality associated with AIDS. Achieving and maintaining HIV viral load suppression among treated patients has remarkably increased over the last years due to the development of potent and well-tolerated agents which can be co-formulated as a once-daily single-tablet or fixed-dose combination for simplification. However, there are some limitations preventing patients to benefit from this treatment. The main goals of HIV therapy in the future are to overcome the limitations of current treatment, including side effects. This review will provide an overview of advances in the current antiretroviral drugs by focusing on their pharmacokinetics, mechanism of action, dosing recommendations, and adverse events for each drug class.