Archives of Advances in Biosciences

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer among children. Despite recent treatment advances, about 80 percent of patients indicate resistance to treatment and the relapse remains a significant clinical problem. Apoptotic-resistant leukemia cells exhibit an unusual response to the NF-κB pathway; therefore, inhibiting this pathway can sensitize resistant cells to treatment. IKK-NF-kappaB signaling is an important factor in carciogenesis and a potential target for cancer treatment. Therefore, in this study, the mRNA expression of targets of NF-κB signaling including IKKalpha, IKKbeta and also NF-κB were analyzed, using the real time-PCR in the face of the combined effect of Curcuma longa and prednisolone in the ALL cell line of NALM-6. Results of the study showed significant downregulation of three genes after combination Curcuma longa (5 µg/ml) and prednisolone (1 μM) in comparison with the single agents alone. These findings unveiled the synergistic effect of Curcuma longa and prednisolone on IKKα and IKKβ downregulation and NF-κB inhibition that can be considered as a new approach in the ALL treatment of resistance to chemotherapy.

Diarrhea is one of the gastrointestinal diseases that some reasons associated with an inappropriate of antibiotics treatment and, increased antibiotic resistance, has led to problems in the health system which vary in different societies. Control and resolution of this problem is necessary and the acquisition of a new group of antimicrobial compounds has been mentioned. So, this study aimed to determine the antibacterial activity of aqueous and alcoholic extracts of pomegranate seeds (Punica granatum) on common gastrointestinal producing bacteria. The antibacterial property of aqueous and alcoholic extracts of Punica granatum seeds against 100 bacteria was considered. Fifty and three isolates of E. coli, 19 isolates of Shigella sonneii, 8 isolates of Shigella flexneri, 5 isolates of Shigella dysentery, 7 strains of Proteus vulgaris, 5 isolates of Proteus mirabilis and 3 isolates of Citrobacter fraundii gathered from patients with diarrhea during July 2015-August 2016. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of various concentrations (mg/ml) of the extracts was used as an index of antimicrobial activity. The minimum inhibitory concentration of aqueous extract vs. ethanolic based on mg / ml were following: E. coli (75 vs 37.5), Shigella sonnei (37.5 vs., 18.75), Shigella flexneri (18.75 vs., 9.37), Shigella dysentery (18.75 vs., 9.37), Proteus vulgaris (18.75 vs., 9.37), Proteus mirabilis (9.37 vs., 9.37) and Citrobacter fraundii (150 vs., 75), respectively. The aqueous and alcoholic extracts had inhibitory effects on the studied bacteria, which affects the concentration of the substances used. Maybe, these inhibitory effects against each bacterium depend on effective substances and the type of the solvent properties. It is suggested to extract new antimicrobial compounds by chromatography to gain new antimicrobial agents.

     Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees which permit the representation the non-tree-like events. It is NP-hard to construct an optimal rooted phylogenetic network from a given set of rooted triplets. This paper presents a novel algorithm called RPNCH. For a given set of rooted triplets, RPNCH tries to construct a rooted phylogenetic network with the minimum number of reticulation nodes that contains all the given rooted triplets. The performance of RPNCH algorithm on simulated data is reported here.

Endometriosis is considered as a multifactorial disease that affects up to 10% of all women of fertile age. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is one of the most important activators of angiogenesis. VEGF is known to be a key molecule in the pathogenesis of endometriosis. A great number of studies have referred to genetic polymorphisms as a factor that contributes to the development of endometriosis. The present study was aimed to find out the frequency of the VEGF -1154G/A polymorphism and its relationship with endometriosis risk in Iranian women with endometriosis.This study involved 175 patients with endometriosis and 131 healthy controls. Following extraction of genomic DNA from patients and controls, genotyping of the -1154G/A polymorphism of the VEGF gene were performed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis. Multivariate analysis was used to examine the association between the risk of endometriosis and VEGF -1154G/A polymorphism. There was statistically a significant difference in the frequency of the -1154G/A polymorphism between patients and the controls. The percentage distribution of the three -1154G/A genotypes was (GG 3.4%, GA %46.8%, AA 49.7%) in endometriosis patients.

Conclusion: Data supports the hypothesis that angiogenesis is of pivotal importance in the development of endometriosis. Our study indicates that there is significant association between the VEGF gene -1154G/A polymorphism and the risk of endometriosis in North West of Iran.

Translating medical texts is a very risky and important task because these texts deal with human life and any mistake in their translation can be life threatening. However, physicians, as well as medical translators, do this task and believe that the quality of their translation is more better than one performed by the medical translators but due to lack of time, they have to employ medical translators for doing this task. The aim of this study was to assess the quality of medical translations performed by the two groups of medical translators and physicians using House's model. For this purpose, the book "Bate's Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking" written by Fiona R. Prabhu and Lynn S. Bickley published in 2003 (ST) and its two versions of Persian translation performed by two groups of medical translators (TT1) and physicians (TT2) were analyzed according to the steps described in the House's model and the mismatches (overt and covert errors) were determined. Then the translations were classified as over or covert translations and the reasons were described. The results show that neither medical translators (with English knowledge and translating skills) nor physicians (with Medical knowledge) can perform a high quality translation of medical texts alone and without cooperation with the other group. It was concluded that for presenting a high quality translation, medical translators and physicians should have cooperation with each other and a team of medical translators and physicians is required.   

This study aims to examine the effect of shift work on overweight and obesity, hypercholesterolemia and GHQ score (GHQ-28) as an indicator of psychological well-being in subjects working in petrochemical industry sited in Mahshahr, west of Iran. In This longitudinal study, population consisted of 2493 (1321 day workers and 1171 shift workers) whose mean ages were 46.18 years for day workers and 45.53 years for shift workers, during a four years period (from 2008 to 2011). All workers were investigated by Persian version of General Health Questionnaire-28 (GHQ-28) as screen tool. The serum cholesterol, height and weight were measured with definitions of hypercholesterolemia as serum total cholesterol 220 mg/dl, overweight and obesity as body mass index (BMI) 25 kg/m^{2 .}A conditional joint random effects models approach was applied to explore the effect of shift working on multivariate responses over this period of time. Shift work was significantly associated with GHQ score and BMI. Results indicated that the shift workers had about 0.65 higher mean scores of GHQ than the day workers and 0.18 higher BMI (95% CI 0.17 to 1.14) and (95% CI 0.05 to 0.27), respectively. Shift work did not show significant relationship with hypercholesterolemia (95% CI -0.27 to 0.009). The results of the present study suggest that shift work may be directly responsible for increased body fatness and is associated with psychological problems.

Background and Objectives:

Religious orientation is one of the factors influencing behavior and cognition.Considering the necessity of recognizing the factors affecting students' religious orientation, the present study has investigated the relationship between religious orientation and emotional intelligence components in students of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.

Materials and Methods :

The design of this research is descriptive-correlational. The statistical population consisted of all medical students of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. In this study, a sample size of 63 students were studying (girls = 32, boys = 31 ), who were selected by random sampling. In the present study, the confidentiality and all ethical principles are observed. Also, the authors of the article have not reported any conflicts of interest. The tool for collecting information was Alport Religious Orientation Questionnaire and Bar-An Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire. Data were analyzed using SPSS software and descriptive statistical methods (mean and standard deviation) and regression analysis.

Result:

The findings of this study indicate that external and internal religious orientation has a significant effect on the components of emotional intelligence at 5% level.The value of this coefficient in this research is 0.19, in fact, students' religious orientation has 19% ability to predict the components of emotional intelligence.

Conclusion:  

The results of this study showed that religious orientation can play an effective role in predicting students' emotional intelligence.Students with a high religious orientation are flexible, tolerant of stress and high happiness. They have a high responsibility in social situations.

Using health-related websites and their information increasingly develops and some concerns on its quality arise as well. Different factors affect the quality of health websites which visual structure is one of the most important factors. The aim of the current study is to explain the role of health websites` visual structure in users’ views on their quality and reliability as well as its role in obtaining health information by users. Furthermore, the need for a comprehensive guideline for designing such websites is discussed. The review showed that health website’s appearance has an important role in users view on its credibility. Furthermore, it was revealed that there is no comprehensive national or international guideline to health websites design. Considering the importance of visual structure of health websites, there is an emergent need to develop a national guideline to obviate the problems of non-consistent, poor or personalized design of health websites.