Tehran University Medical Journal

Background: lumbar disc degeneration is a multifactorial degenerative disease which is affected by genetic inheritance and environmental factors. Type XI collagen is important for organization of the extracellular matrix and cartilage collagen construction. Rs1676486 is a SNP that causes the conversion of C-T, resulting in a change in the expression of the collagen 11 alpha chain. The T allele reduces the alpha 1 chain transcription of collagen 11 and ultimately leads to an imbalance in gene expression.
Methods: This study aims to determine the genetic variant of alpha1 type11 collagen is associated with the progress of intervertebral disc degeneration. All patients were selected from the AL-Zahra Hospital of medical university of Isfahan, Iran, between April 2016 and September 2017. SNP rs1676486 of alpha1 type11 collagen was genotyped in 100 patients and 100 healthy controls. The inclusion criteria for patients were: individuals who had typical clinical and imaging symptoms and signs of intervertebral disc degeneration. Exclusion criteria were: patients with trauma, metabolic and neuromuscular diseases, and congenital disorder of the spine. The Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood samples by a Whole Blood Genomic DNA Extraction Kit. The chi-square test and fisher’s exact test were evaluated to determine differences of genotype and allele distributions between intervertebral disc degeneration patients and healthy controls. To compare the relationship between genotypes and clinical features the Mann-Whitney U test was used.

Background: The risk of anesthesia increases with age, so it is necessary to choose a safe and effective method. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of intranasal fentanyl with intravenous fentanyl in patients undergoing cataract surgery.
Methods: This study was a triple-blind prospective randomized clinical trial (The patient, physician, and data analyzer were unaware of the patient grouping). The study was performed from April 2017 to March 2019 in Feyz Hospital, Isfahan, Iran. 90 patients over 18 years of age who were candidates for cataract surgery were included in the study and were divided in two groups receiving intravenous fentanyl (IVF) or intranasal fentanyl (INF). The dose of fentanyl in both groups was 1.5 μg/kg with a maximum of 100 μg. In the IVF group, 1 ml of normal saline was dripped into each nasal passage 10 minutes before surgery and intravenously fentanyl was injected 2 minutes before surgery. In the INF group, 1 ml of fentanyl was administered into each nostril 10 minutes before surgery and 2 ml of saline was administered intravenously two minutes before surgery.

Background: The preparedness and safety of hospitals in disasters are essential to maintain the health and survival of the community. Numerous studies have shown that the level of preparedness of Iranian hospitals is moderate and low. Lack of comprehensive hospital standards for disaster preparedness is one of the reasons. This study aimed to develop hospital accreditation standards for hospital disaster risk management.
Methods: This comparative study was conducted between April and September 2016. Hospital disaster risk management accreditation standards were extracted from the hospital accreditation standards of 11 countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Denmark and Iran. Overall, 27 hospital disaster risk management accreditation standards were introduced. The opinions of 22 disaster risk management experts were used to assess the content validity of the proposed disaster risk management accreditation standards.
Results: Differences were observed in the quality and quantity of those countries’ disaster risk management standards. The national accreditation standards of the United States, Australia, and Canada had comprehensive standards and covered all aspects of the disaster risk management cycle. Finally, 27 standards were proposed for developing Iranian hospitals’ disaster risk management accreditation standards. The CVI & CVR validity of the proposed standards were acceptable.
There were significant differences in the quantity and quality of hospital disaster risk management accreditation standards in selected countries. The most comprehensive standards belonged to the US National Standards (12 standards and 113 sub-standards), followed by the Australian and Canadian accreditation standards. The accreditation standards of the developing countries and Iran were not comprehensive and did not meet the international goals of disaster risk management. The proposed hospital disaster risk management accreditation standards had high content validity.
Conclusion: Disaster risk management accreditation standards in Iran and developing countries need to be revised and upgraded. Comprehensive standards based on international experiences and expert opinions were introduced in this study that can be used to develop hospital accreditation standards in Iran and other countries.

Background: Immunosuppressive drugs that are widely used to prevent acute and chronic organ rejections, predispose organ transplant patients to a variety of diseases including skin problems. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of skin lesions and to investigate their association with demographic characteristics in renal transplant patients.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 100 patients who were referred to the nephrology clinic of Baqiyatallah Hospital, Tehran, Iran and underwent kidney transplantation within a year (from the first working day of the Iranian Hijri calendar in April 2015 until the last working day in March 2016). Patients were referred to a dermatologist in case of any skin lesions. Patients' data were collected in a researcher-made questionnaire and were analyzed using SPSS software, version 18. The p values less than 5% were considered to be significant.

Background: Rheumatoid Arthritis patients are evaluated during treatment for various inflammatory factors such as C-reactive protein, Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate, and Disease Activity Score, and other immune system-related factors. In the follow-up of patients with rheumatoid arthritis, hematologic factors associated with the immune system especially Platelet to Lymphocyte Ratio and Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio are important. In this study, platelet to lymphocyte ratio and Neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio were compared in two groups of patients with and without ocular complications.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 246 patients with rheumatoid arthritis who were referred to the rheumatology clinic of Kermanshah from December 2018 to May 2019. This study was carried out in accordance with the approval of the ethics committee (IR.KUMS.REC1397.311) at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences. Of these patients, 191 had no ocular complications and 55 patients had ocular complications and were matched for age and sex. The blood samples were taken from patients and blood cell count was measured by Sysmex KX-21 hematology analyzer. The Spearman correlation test was used to evaluate the relationship between platelet to lymphocyte ratio and neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio in both groups of patients without ocular complications and with ocular complications. The Disease Activity Score was compared between the two groups using the Mann-Whitney test.

Background: Urinary tract infections are among the most common diseases in different communities and occur in all age groups. Failure to diagnose the disease correctly and promptly can cause complications such as damage to the urinary tract and kidney parenchyma, increased blood pressure, uremia. Also, in pregnant female patients It may lead to premature birth and even abortion. Therefore, correct and timely administration of antibiotics is very important in the treatment of patients. This study aimed to compare the results of antibiogram testing of patients with suspected urinary tract infections by both rapid and classical methods.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed from the beginning of March to the beginning of September 2019, on patients with urinary tract infection Who had been referred to Sina Hospital of Hamedan, Iran. Urine samples were collected 20 cc from patients. The test was performed directly at the same time with urine culture to determine antibiotic susceptibility. The agreement between the two methods was considered as a huge error, major error and minor error. Finally, the data were statistically analyzed with SPSS software version 16.

Background: Cataracts are the leading diseases that cause blindness. Cataracts can be treated with surgery. Pain, itching, burning, and a foreign body sensation in the eye are common ocular complaints of patients in recovery. In this study, we compared the effect of Ketorolac eye drops and naphazoline antazoline eye drops on reducing complaints of surgery.
Methods: This randomized clinical trial study was performed from February 2016 to March 2017 on patients who were candidates for cataract surgery at Feyz University Hospital in Isfahan, Iran.  In this study, 54 patients were enrolled in two groups receiving Ketorolac eye drops and naphazoline antazoline (NA) eye drops. After the operation, patients' ocular complaints such as burning, itching, pain, and severity were evaluated every 15 minutes in recovery and every half hour in the ward until discharge from the hospital.
Results: In this study, 54 patients in two groups of 27 were studied. In the post-anesthesia care unit, the burning sensation in the naphazoline-antazoline group was significantly lower than in the ketorolac group (P=0.02). Patients in the NA group had less foreign body sensation in the eye in recovery (P=0.97) and the ward (P<0.001) than in the ketorolac group. Mean Pain intensity in the recovery unit (P=0.39) and ward unit in the ketorolac group were less than NA (P<0.001). In the recovery unit in the NA group, the eye-burning sensation was significantly lower than in the ketorolac group. The foreign body sensation in the NA group was less than the ketorolac group but there was no significant difference between the two groups. In the NA group, itching of the eyes was less than in the ketorolac group.
Conclusion: It can be concluded that ketorolac drops have been more effective in reducing post-operative eye pain than NA and NA drops have been more effective in reducing burning, itching and foreign body sensation in the eyes than Ketorolac.

Conclusion: Lead poisoning could potentially damage liver function and elevate liver enzymes. Moreover, it can also affect the levels of TSH and levothyroxine. Understanding the exact mechanisms might help to control The hepatotoxic effects of lead in patients. Also, knowing the pattern of elevated liver enzymes and thyroid hormones changes might help discriminate lead poisoning with other differential diagnoses.

Background: Appendicovesical fistula in patients suffering from cystic fibrosis is a rare condition. Although this situation is so rare it should be considered in the differential diagnosis, dealing with a patient with cystic fibrosis and chronic abdominal pain with no response to primary management. To the best of our knowledge, this is the third case of appendicovesical fistula in a patient with cystic fibrosis.
Case presentation: In this paper, we are reporting a bladder lesion of a nine-year-old Iranian girl, a known case of cystic fibrosis, who was referred to pediatric urology clinic, Children’s Medical Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences. The girl is a known case of cystic fibrosis on regular follow-up who had chronic abdominal pain for about one year. While primary management had been failed for her, further workups were done by her pediatric pulmonologist. In her pelvic sonography, the radiologist reported a bladder lesion so she was referred to our clinic. Cystoscopy was done for her, but transurethral biopsy/resection was impossible according to the lesion location. The non-papillary nature of the lesion raised our concern about the possibility of genital rhabdomyosarcoma with bladder invasion. So, an Abdominopelvic CT scan and a pelvic MRI were also done for her. Intact uterus and vagina with an enhancing lesion at the dome of the bladder with some degree of inflammation/attachment around the adjacent GI tract were detected on her images. The urachal inflammatory/tumoral process could not be ruled out. So open surgical exploration was planned. During the attempt for surgical exploration and partial cystectomy, at the Children’s Medical Center in December 2021, we found that the mass, is actually her appendix which has invaded the urinary bladder, and presented as a bladder lesion.
Conclusion: Abdominal pain is a relatively common complaint of patients with cystic fibrosis. Every caregiver or physician should consider rare conditions, dealing with a cystic fibrosis patient whose abdominal pain does not respond to common management.

Background: Vitiligo is a skin autoimmune disease that affects 0.1% to more than 8% of people in the world. About 50% of patients develop the disease before the age of 20. In this disease, melanocytes are destroyed in the skin, mucous membranes and retina. As a result, white spots appear on different parts of the body. Studies have suggested the role of oxidative stress in vitiligo. Coenzyme Q10 is a specific lipophilic antioxidant. The aim of this study was to evaluate the therapeutic effect of coenzyme Q10 in patients with generalized vitiligo.
Methods: This study was a randomized, double-blind, clinical trial of patients with generalized vitiligo who had been referred to the dermatology clinics of Vali-e-Asr Hospital and Imam Reza Clinic in May-August 2016. The sampling method was random. Patients were treated with standard treatment, and the case groups in addition to standard treatment with tablets containing coenzyme Q10. Patients were evaluated for response at the first visit, 1 and 3 months after the start of treatment.

Results: The mean age of 50 patients was 26.2±4.3 years. The diameter of the largest depigmented patch decreased in both intervention (P=0.000) and control (P=0.001) groups during 3 months of treatment. The difference in the frequency of patients in the grade of repigmentation was significant at the end of the third month compared to the end of the first month of treatment in both intervention (P=0.01) and control (P=0.02) groups. At the end of the third month, the frequency of patients in both intervention group with 21 patients (76%) and the control group with 18 patients (72%) were more in grades 1 and 2, while at the end of the first month, the frequency of patients in both intervention groups with 23 patients (92%) and control with 23 patients (92%) was more in grades 0 and 1. Conclusion: Adjuvant therapy with oral coenzyme Q10 has no effect on improving depigment patch in vitiligo.

Background: Coronavirus in 2019 was recognized as one of the leading causes of death worldwide. According to reports, the mortality rate in people who need mechanical ventilation varies from 50 to 97 percent. The aim of this study was to evaluate the outcome of Covid-19 disease based on different characteristics in patients and mechanically ventilated variables.
Methods: This descriptive-analytical study was conducted on 160 patients with a definite diagnosis of Covid-19 who were under mechanical ventilation and admitted to the intensive care unit of Alzahra Hospital in Isfahan from March 2020 to March 2021. Data was collected by checklist. The checklist included demographic information, including age, gender, as well as information such as underlying diseases, disease outcome, length of hospitalization, etc. After collecting the data, they were analyzed in SPSS software version 22 and at a significance level of less than 0.05.

Results: In this study, the overall mortality rate among mechanically ventilated patients was 62.5%. The mean age of patients was 69.99±17.87 years and the mean duration of hospitalization in surviving patients was 15.47±11.73 days and for deceased ones was 55.21±69.14 days. The mean age of the deceased group (65.71±16.59) was significantly higher than the surviving group 53±21.17 was (P=0.0001). The length of hospital stay in the deceased group was significantly longer than the surviving group (P=0.005). As a result, ventilator mode and inotropic agent intake during treatment increased the chance of mortality in patients under mechanical ventilation (P=0.001). There was a significant relationship between underlying diseases of hypertension, kidney disease and autoimmune disease with mortality in patients (P<0.05). Conclusion: Various factors including the length of stay in the hospital, comorbidities such as hypertension, renal disease and autoimmunity may affect the outcome of critically ill ICU patients under mechanical ventilation. Patients who require long-term invasive ventilation and the use of inotropic drugs to maintain their cardiovascular status while hospitalized in the ICU are at higher risk for mortality.

Background: Prostate cancer (PCa) has been one of the most prevalent cancers in men in recent years. Multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mp-MRI) has been increasingly applied in the diagnosis, localization and staging of prostate cancer. This approach uses a combination of morphology information obtained from T2-weighted image along with at least two functional imaging modalities, such as diffusion-weighted (DWI), dynamic-contrast-enhancement (DCE), and magnetic-resonance-spectroscopy (MRS). This review gives a comprehensive overview of the theories and methodologies of the mp-MRI for diagnosing prostate cancer. The search was fulfilled using a list of search engines.
Methods: In this study, with a systematic review of studies conducted during February 2015 to October 2021, the role and potential of integrating the results of morphological and functional imaging in a multi-parameter approach were evaluated and the optimal combination was introduced. This article collected studies that have employed mp-MRI in prostate cancer including: peer-reviews, research articles, academic reports and conferences. This review has been studied from September 2016 to January 2022.

Results: According to the reported results, the optimum combination of T2-w, DWI and DCE in the mp-MRI approach provides the highest sensitivity and specificity in the diagnosis, localization and staging of prostate cancer. Applying the field strength of 3T versus 1.5T improves detection accuracy including improving sensitivity and specificity as well, and also the application of endorectal coils does not provide much advantage compared to pelvic phased-array coil in term of prostate cancer detection accuracy.  Conclusion: MP-MRI as a precision instrument plays a valuable role in the diagnosis of prostate cancer. The most suitable combination of the pulse sequences to achieve the goals of this approach is T2-w, DWI and DCE. This review is comprehensive overview covered previous articles of mp-MRI in prostate cancer for all the researchers in this field and expresses the positive and negative points of each modality. Moreover, this article reports the sensitivity and the Specificity of the recent researches.

Background: The gender of the baby is one of the risk factors for neonatal jaundice, but the difference in the severity of jaundice and its prognosis between the two sexes is not clear. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the severity, duration and prognosis of jaundice in both sexes.
Methods: The present study is a cross-sectional study that was performed on 2847 icteric neonates over 35 weeks admitted to Ghaem Hospital in Mashhad from May 2014 to May 2021. This study is done by available sampling. After confirmation of jaundice in infants, data were recorded using a researcher-made checklist including maternal demographic information (maternal age, mode of delivery), complete infant characteristics (age, birth weight, age at onset of jaundice, jaundice recovery age) and laboratory findings (Bilirubin, Indirect Coombs, direct Coombs, G6PD), and neonatal development up to two years of age was performed based on the Denver 2 test. Then data analysis was performed by SPSS software using Chi-square test and Student’s t-test.

Results: 1642 infants (57.7%) were boys and 1205 infants (42.3%) were girls. Mean and standard deviation of bilirubin in values less than 20 mg/dl in boys was 17.20±2.48 mg/dl and in girls was 16.54±2.80 mg/dl (P=0.000), birth weight was 3.16±0.49 (kg) for boys and 3.07±0.45 for girls (P=0.000). In two groups of male and female infants, age (P=0.004), direct bilirubin (P=0.001), direct and indirect Coombs (P=0.000), and G6PD enzyme deficiency (P=0.000) had a significant difference. Acute kernicterus was reported in 25 (2.03%) boys and 4 (0.46%) girls (P<0.001). In the two-year follow-up, 23 boys (1.9%) and 11 girls (1.28%) had developmental delay (P<0.05). Conclusion: The incidence of jaundice in male infants was higher than female infants, which is probably due to a higher prevalence of G6PD deficiency in boys. The severity of jaundice was higher in boys less than 20 mg/dl. Jaundice has a worse prognosis in male infants.

Background: Neonatal sepsis is a severe systemic bacterial infection that affects on premature neonates prognosis. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the short-term prognosis of neonate's infection.
Methods: The present study is a cross-sectional study that was performed on 729 neonates suspected of infection, in neonatal ward in Ghaem Hospital of Mashhad since May 2015 to May 2022 by available sampling. The data collection tool was a researcher-made checklist containing neonatal characteristics (gestational age, birth weight, first and fifth minute Apgar score, and neonatal status at discharge) and laboratory information (White Blood Cell, Platelet (PLT), C-reactive Protein, Blood culture, Cerebrospinal fluid culture). Infants with congenital infection, congenital anomaly and positive blood cultures without clinical and laboratory symptoms were excluded from the study. Neonatal prognosis was compared in terms of death or discharge among neonates with and without definitive infection. First, we described the results using statistical tables and graphs, and then, data were analyzed by Kolmogorov-Smirnov, T test and SPSS software, version 26 (IBM SPSS, Armonk, NY, USA). P<0.05 considered as significant.

Results: According to the results of this study, low birth weight and lower gestational age and lower Apgar score increase the risk of neonatal death. About one-fifth of infants died of definitive infection. The cases of death due to infection in the group of deceased infants were about 4 times higher than in the group of discharged infants. About one third of the babies with sepsis and half of the babies with meningitis died. Forty-four percent of infants with early sepsis and 40% of infants with late sepsis died. In cases of neonatal death due to sepsis, the most common gram-negative infectious agent was Acinetobacter and the most common gram-positive infectious agent was Enterococcus. Conclusion: Neonatal definitive infection worsens their prognosis. So, the risk of neonatal death increases by 5 times. The probability of death in meningitis is more than sepsis and in early sepsis is more than late sepsis and in sepsis due to gram-negative is more than gram-positive.