The relationship between body mass index and increased airway reactivity based on methacholine challenge test results

Introduction : According to the reports of the United States National Bureau of Statistics regarding the prevalence of obesity among adults and children and also asthma outbreak, the relationship between asthma and obesity in developed countries is taken into consideration. Aim : Relationship between body mass index and increased airway reactivity based on methacholine challenge test results. Material and methods : It was a retrospective cross-sectional study done on 256 patients who were referred to the lung clinic of the Imam Khomeini Hospital of Ahvaz with symptoms of hypersensitivity of the airways. The patients, who had normal spirometry, were examined by the methacholine challenge test and then they were divided in two groups with positive and negative test results. Results : The patients of this study were 12–84 years old and their average age was 36.3 ±12.1 years. Their mean body mass index (BMI) was 28 ±4.7 kg/m 2 in the group with positive methacholine and 26.7 ±4.9 kg/m 2 in the group with negative methacholine (p = 0.04). It was shown that there has been a statistically significant relationship between BMI and positive methacholine challenge test results (apart from confounding effects of other variables). It seems that the positivity rate of methacholine test rises by 1.06 with an increase in BMI by each unit (p < 0.05). Conclusions : According to the results of this study, it can be said that in high BMI there is a statistically significant association between gender (female) and a positive methacholine challenge test result; but there is no statistically significant association between the methacholine dose and BMI

Pattern of drug abuse in addicts self-referred drug rehabilitation centers in Khuzestan province – Iran, 2014–2015

Aim of the study : We aimed to determine the pattern of drug use and the affective demographic factors in addicts in self-referred drug rehabilitation centers in Khuzestan province. Material and methods : It was a cross-sectional descriptive and analytic study which has done on 4400 addicts in self-referred drug rehabilitation centers in Khuzestan province from March 2014 to March 2015. The collected data were analyzed in SPSS version 22 software. Mean and standard deviation were calculated for continuous variables and the frequency and percentage frequency were calculated for nominal and classified variables, and also t-test, χ 2 and ANOVA were used to examine the relationships between variables. The level of significance was considered less than 0.05. Results: Finding has shown that 97.5% were male. The average age of subjects was 38.21 ±10.52. Most consumable drug in these people was opium (50.6%) and the main way of drug use was smoking (69.4%). In terms of motivation of using drug, in men were enjoyment and in women family problems had the highest relative percentage. The majority of subjects (67.2%) had a history of drug abandonment. The reason of referring to rehabilitation centers for treatment, types of using drug and the number of drug using, was significant difference between males and females (p < 0.05). Conclusions : The results have shown that it is necessary to consider some issues including of provincial drug policy and increasing awareness at different levels of society and making appropriate cultural and sports spaces in order to achieve the primary preventive goals