Social Determinants of Health

  Background: Setting research priorities is a scientific process to allocate resources to the best use. In low- and middle-income countries, allocation of limited resources to fundamental issues is more important. So, the present study was conducted to determine social health research priorities.

  Methods: In the first step, important issues and research topics of social health were extracted from documents and studies conducted at the national level.

In qualitative phase, reciprocating questionnaires were sent and interviews were conducted with experts and stakeholders, social health issues (as members of Delphi). In the next step, the research topics extracted were discussed in small groups (suggested by Council on Health Research for Development) to score the proposed priority topics by Delphi members. Finally, the list of priorities (titles that acquired more than 80% of the total score) was sent to Delphi members for final approval.

  Results: During the study, 220 topics were obtained in four research domains: “description of the problem and its consequences”, “cause finding”, “intervention to eliminate or reduce problems”, and “Management-Policymaking”. Finally, 30 of these topics remained as priority topics. High priority research topics in social health were equity, happiness, economics, and ethics, respectively.

  Conclusion: The findings provide a list of research priorities that help researchers carrying out studies that will have the greatest social health impact. Some targeting areas such as happiness and ethics were identified as less attended subjects that need more investment in research policies, management, and governance.

Keywords: Priority Setting; Research Priorities; Social Health

Background: During the past two decades, a great deal of research has been conducted on developing affective norms for words in various languages, showing that there is an urgent need to create such norms in Persian language, too. The present study intended to develop a set of 362 Persian words rated according to their emotional valence, arousal, imageability, and familiarity so as to prepare the ground for further research on emotional word processing. This was the first attempt to set affective norms for Persian words in the realm of emotion.

  Methods: Prior to the study, a multitude of words were selected from Persian dictionary and academic books in Persian literature. Secondly, three independent proficient experts in the Persian literature were asked to extract the suitable words from the list and to choose the best (defined as grammatically correct and most often used). The database normalization process was based on the ratings by a total of 88 participants using a 9-point Likert scale. Each participant evaluated about 120 words on four different scales.

  Results: There were significant relationships between affective dimensions and some psycholinguistic variables. Also, further analyses were carried out to investigate the possible relationship between different features of valences (positive, negative, and neutral) and other variables included in the dataset.

  Conclusion: These affective norms for Persian words create a useful and valid dataset which will provide researchers with applying standard verbal materials as well as materials applied in other languages, e.g. English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.

Background and aim: Neonatal hypothermia is a major risk factor for mortality after delivery. This study aims to identify the risk factors associated with transition in hypothermia state with new definition of hypothermia states.

Methods:  Four hundred and seventy nine (479) neonates hospitalized in NICU of Valiasr in Tehran, Iran in 2005 participated in this study. The rectal temperature of neonatal was measured immediately after delivery and every 30 min afterwards, until neonates became normal.

Results: The mean weight of neonatal was 2580±882.9 g and mean of delivery room temperature was 29.2±1.45 °C. Most of the neonatal were mild hypothermia. There were significant associations between weight of neonatal, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and Apgar score with hypothermia state (P<0.05).  Death of neonatal was related to hypothermia state.

Conclusion: The findings of this study indicated that a major risk factor for hypothermia was low weight of neonatal.

Abstract

  Background: Academic burnout is the state of negative emotions and low motivation in one’s education. Understanding the status of academic burnout is the primary step to make proper decisions. The present study, therefore, was conducted to investigate comparative degrees of academic burnout among medical students in their first five semesters of medical education at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

  Methods: In the present cross-sectional study, a total of 525 medical students at the School of Medicine filled out the Persian version of Maslach Burnout Inventory – Student Survey from January 15 to February 5, 2016. Chi-square, Mantel-Haenszel, and Kruskal–Wallis tests were run in SPSS for data analysis. P-value<0.05 was considered significant.

  Results: Based on the collected data, it was shown that 49.2% of the participants were male and 50.8% were female. Only 8 (1.5%) participants were married. No statistically significant difference was observed between the variables investigated and academic burnout (P>0.05). It was also observed that only four (0.8%) medical students (all new-comers) were in low academic burnout group and 521 (99.2%) were categorized in medium academic burnout group. Finally, it was found that academic burnout of the students increase as their educational level advance, making the first-semester students having the lowest and fifth-semester students the highest academic burnout indices (P<0.001).

  Conclusion: It is concluded that, from among the variables studied, only students’ educational level made a difference in medical students’ academic burnout.

Keywords: Academic efficacy; Burnout; Cynicism; Exhaustion; Medical Students

In the early 1970s 15% of all Iranian Medical Graduates (IMG) left Iran and migrated to the United States(1, 2)^, while 50.000 villages in Iran had no health coverage(3). The initiation of the Department of Community Medicine in Shiraz Medical School was based on the gross misdistribution of health care facilities in Iran, when at the time 70% of population was residing in rural communities and almost 90% of all health facilities were concentrated in Tehran and larger cities (3). The main reason why Shiraz was among the institutions in Iran that initiated this endeavor was the fact that at the time, up to 90% of its medical graduates was deployed in Western countries, particularly the United States (2, 3). 

The present article was written under the pretext of World Health Day 2016 to attract the attention of society and health policy makers toward this issue. Due to the importance of this issue, WHO is marking World Health Day, April 7th, by calling for action on beating diabetes. Diabetes is a chronic disease that occurs either when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or when the body cannot effectively use the insulin it produces. Insulin is a hormone that regulates blood sugar. Hyperglycemia, or raised blood sugar, is a common effect of uncontrolled diabetes and, over time, leads to serious damage to many of the body's systems, especially the nerves and blood vessels (1). In 2014, 8.5% of adults aged 18 years and older had diabetes. In 2012, diabetes was reported to be the direct cause of 1.5 million deaths and high blood glucose was the cause of another 2.2 million deaths (2).