Package for Authors


Research/Original Articles


Estimating effective reproductive number of COVID-19 in Shiraz, Iran

Reza Taherian, Soheila Khodakarim, Hamid Alavi Majd, Abbas Alipour

Archives of Advances in Biosciences, Vol. 14 No. 1 (2023), , Page 1-5
https://doi.org/10.22037/aab.v14i1.39403

Introduction: COVID-19 is an infectious disease that first reported in Wuhan, China on 31 December 2019. After about 3 years later, it is still one of the main health problems all over the world. The goal of this study is to estimated reproductive number parameter to understand the speed and dynamic of the disease in Shiraz, Fars province of Iran.


Materials and Methods: Case-pairs of infector-infectees were obtained by a brief phone interview with COVID-19 confirmed cases. Considering time between symptom onsets of infector-infectees as serial interval (SI); Best possible distribution was fitted to this data. To estimate reproductive number ( ), it is assumed that  is linked to daily incidence ( ) and SI distribution.


Results: Gamma distribution with mean of 4.610 and standard deviation of 5.746 was fitted on SI data. Using this distribution and ,  was estimated. The  values range from 0.730 (95% CI: 0.713, 0.747) to 2.181 (95% CI: 2.183, 2.224).


Conclusion: low  values in some periods of time, indicates that preventive measures was effective in Shiraz, Fars province of Iran. to control the disease,  should decrease to below 1 which it is happening at the end of the study.

Review Article


An integrative review of multistage clinical trials

Seyedeh Zahra Amini, Nezhat Shakeri

Archives of Advances in Biosciences, Vol. 14 No. 1 (2023), , Page 1-7
https://doi.org/10.22037/aab.v14i1.39531

Introduction: Clinical trials have long been vital to advancing how to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases. However, traditional clinical trials can be difficult and slow. With application to precision medicine, new concepts in clinical trial design increase the speed and flexibility of clinical trials, increasing the likelihood that a trial will benefit the most people who participate.


 


Methods: In today's world, with the change in lifestyle, we are facing the spread of various diseases. and doctors make many treatment decisions in different stages of the disease.   In practice, these multiple treatment decisions are how doctors treat, but statistically, this is a dynamic treatment regimen (DTR ). Effective DTRs can be developed and studied in clinical trials called sequential multiple Assignment randomized trials (SMART).


 


Results: A total of 29 studies were extracted from reliable databases and websites, and we reviewed research related to SMART.


 


Discussion: In this research, we first introduced SMART and then compared SMART and several RCT plans. By doing these comparisons, we showed more the unique features of SMART in the family of RCT designs and we also examined the researches related to the topic of SMART.


 


Conclusion: Considering that most experiments are done in one step and ignore the intermediate events and focus on the final event. Introducing SMART plans and the concept of DTRs is important for researchers and clinical colleagues, as treatment guidelines must encompass entire treatment regimens to be useful to clinicians and patients.