The Impact of Lived-Experience Based Therapy and Cognitive-Behavior Therapy on Body Mass Index and Self-Esteem among Obese Women

Introduction: Culturally sensitive psychological intervention among individuals with obesity has gained major attention among experts in psychological fields. The current study was to examine and compare the impact of the Lived–Experienced Based Therapy (LEBT) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) on BMI and self-esteem among Iranian obese women in Esfahan City, Iran. Method: The study used quasi-experimental method with pre-test, post-test and 3-month follow-up. The study population consisted of all females with BMI above 30, in Esfahan. Overall, 45 women (M= 34.11, SD= 5.60) were purposefully selected and randomly divided into three study groups. The sample was selected using online and display ads. Both treatment groups received 8 sessions of specific interventions from April to June 2018, while the control group did not receive any therapies. Data were collected using the global formula calculating BMI and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965) and analyzed by SPSS-21 software. The ANCOVA and repeated measure ANOVA (i.e., Bonferroni test analysis) were used to compare three groups at three stages of pre-test, post-test and follow-up. Results: The results showed that BMI and self-esteem in both experiment groups were significantly improved at both post-test and follow-up, compared to the pre-test and control group (p<.001). However, there was no significant difference between the effectiveness of CBT and LEBT in both stages of post-test and follow-up. Conclusion: Both psychological therapies are effective to address low self-esteem and high BMI of obese women.Declaration of Interest: Non

Designing a development physical training model for students of Iranian medical sciences universities

Background and aims: The importance of developing physical training and the need to expand it among students increases when the social harms and anomalies observed in this space are carefully analyzed. Knowing the pattern and model governing this matter helps prevent social anomalies. Since no study was done to discover this model, the present research was conducted to investigate the design of the development model of physical training for students of Iranian medical sciences universities. Methods: This study was conducted with an exploratory-fundamental nature, a qualitative approach, and the foundation’s data strategy in 2021-2022. The data collection method was a semi-structured interview with 19 specialists and experts using purposeful sampling. The method of coding and forming concepts from the interviews was used to analyze the data. MAXQDATA2020 software was used to analyze the data. Then, the codes were categorized, and a conceptual model was presented. Results: The codes extracted from the interviews included 191 codes in 6 categories of causal conditions, central phenomenon, contextual conditions, intervening conditions, strategic conditions, and consequential conditions, as well as 38 components. Causal conditions include seven components and 27 codes; central phenomenon includes three components and 11 codes; contextual conditions include seven components and 36 codes; intervening conditions include eight components and 41 codes; strategic conditions include eight components and 43 codes and conditions a result includes five components and 24 codes. Conclusion: The developments of physical education and sports for students of medical sciences in Iran, taking into account its causes, axes, contexts, obstacles, and consequences, can inform the managers and planners of sports students of the Ministry of Health about its development process and trend. Students go to physical activity to prevent the wastage of available resources, including financial, human and physical, with careful planning and organization

Preventive Effect of Professional Fluoride Supplements on Enamel Demineralization in Patients Undergoing Fixed Orthodontic Treatment: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objective: The current study aimed to systematically review the randomized clinical trials assessing the preventive effect of professional fluoride interventions on enamel demineralization in patients undergoing fixed orthodontic treatment.Methods: The electronic search was performed in PubMed and Cochrane library in September 2021. No restriction was set on the publication date. Randomized clinical trials assessing the preventive effect of fluoride varnish, gel, mouthwash, and high-fluoride toothpaste on white spot lesions compared to the control group by clinical or radiographic methods in more than 10 patients were included.Results: A total of 7 articles consisting of 1418 participants were included. In 4 articles, fluoride varnish (contained a range of 1000-50 000 ppm fluoride) was applied multiple times (4-20 times) in test groups. Their results indicated that the test groups significantly had lesser new white spot lesions or advanced white spot lesions. One study used fluoride varnish only once at the beginning of treatment and reported no significant difference in white spot lesions compared to the control group. Application of high-fluoride toothpaste as well as fluoride mouthwash, also, showed significantly lower white spot lesions. Three studies were included in the meta-analysis and revealed that the relative risk of white spot lesions was 0.64 (95% CI = 0.40 to 0.89; P < .01) in favor of fluoride varnishConclusion: Multiple applications (4-20 times) of fluoride varnish or daily use of fluoride mouthwash or high-fluoride toothpaste seem to reduce white spot lesions in patients undergoing orthodontic treatment. However, single use of fluoride varnish was not effective. Further research is needed to establish the required number of fluoride applications for the prevention of white spot lesions during orthodontic treatment

Design and implementation of a combined observational and interventional study: Trends of prevalence, awareness, treatment and control hypertension and the effect of expanded chronic care model on control, treatment and self-care

BACKGROUND: Lack of information about hypertension leads to failure in detection, treatment and reduced estimation of this disease effects. So, a comprehensive study, named trends of prevalence, awareness, treatment and control hypertension among the adults in Isfahan, Iran (2001-2016) and evaluation of the effect of expanded chronic care model (ECCM) on control, treatment and self-care, has been designed. This study explains the aspects of design and methods of its implementation. METHODS: This study was conducted in four stages in 2014-2016. In the 1st&shy; stage, valid questionnaires were made to assess knowledge, attitude and practice, and self-care. In the 2nd stage, the status of prevalence, awareness, treatment and control and hypertension risk factors was assessed. In the 3rd&shy; stage, a two-group clinical trial was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of ECCM on hypertensive patients and their families. In the 4th&shy; stage, the results of hypertension prevalence and its risk factors in adults in 2016 were compared with two other studies undertaken in 2001 and 2007. RESULTS: To develop the questionnaire, face and content validity, internal and external reliability, and construct validity were examined. Prevalence, awareness, treatment and control of hypertension and risk factors among 2107 adult individuals were determined in Isfahan. In a clinical trial, 216 hypertensive patients were randomly assigned into intervention and control groups. Finally, a sample size of 8073 people was used to determine and compare the 15-year-old trend of hypertension and its affecting factors. CONCLUSION: It is obvious that the final findings of this study will play a key role in health and research policy and provide a suitable model for implementing appropriate interventional measures at the provincial and national levels.&nbsp;</p

A gap-filling algorithm selection strategy for GRACE and GRACE Follow-On time series based on hydrological signal characteristics of the individual river basins

Gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) are Earth’s gravity satellite missions with hydrological monitoring applications. However, caused by measuring instrumental problems, there are several temporal missing values in the dataset of the two missions where a long gap between the mission dataset also exists. Recent studies utilized different gap-filling methodologies to fill those data gaps. In this article, we employ a variety of singular spectrum analysis (SSA) algorithms as well as the least squares-harmonic estimation (LS-HE) approach for the data gap-filling. These methods are implemented on six hydrological basins, where the performance of the algorithms is validated for different artificial gap scenarios. Our results indicate that each hydrological basin has its special behaviour. LS-HE outperforms the other algorithms in half of the basins, whereas in the other half, SSA provides a better performance. This highlights the importance of different factors affecting the deterministic signals and stochastic characteristics of climatological time series. To fill the missing values of such time series, it is therefore required to investigate the time series behaviour on their time-invariant and time-varying characteristics before processing the series

Real-Time Tracking of Selective Auditory Attention From M/EEG: A Bayesian Filtering Approach

Humans are able to identify and track a target speaker amid a cacophony of acoustic interference, an ability which is often referred to as the cocktail party phenomenon. Results from several decades of studying this phenomenon have culminated in recent years in various promising attempts to decode the attentional state of a listener in a competing-speaker environment from non-invasive neuroimaging recordings such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). To this end, most existing approaches compute correlation-based measures by either regressing the features of each speech stream to the M/EEG channels (the decoding approach) or vice versa (the encoding approach). To produce robust results, these procedures require multiple trials for training purposes. Also, their decoding accuracy drops significantly when operating at high temporal resolutions. Thus, they are not well-suited for emerging real-time applications such as smart hearing aid devices or brain-computer interface systems, where training data might be limited and high temporal resolutions are desired. In this paper, we close this gap by developing an algorithmic pipeline for real-time decoding of the attentional state. Our proposed framework consists of three main modules: (1) Real-time and robust estimation of encoding or decoding coefficients, achieved by sparse adaptive filtering, (2) Extracting reliable markers of the attentional state, and thereby generalizing the widely-used correlation-based measures thereof, and (3) Devising a near real-time state-space estimator that translates the noisy and variable attention markers to robust and statistically interpretable estimates of the attentional state with minimal delay. Our proposed algorithms integrate various techniques including forgetting factor-based adaptive filtering, ℓ1-regularization, forward-backward splitting algorithms, fixed-lag smoothing, and Expectation Maximization. We validate the performance of our proposed framework using comprehensive simulations as well as application to experimentally acquired M/EEG data. Our results reveal that the proposed real-time algorithms perform nearly as accurately as the existing state-of-the-art offline techniques, while providing a significant degree of adaptivity, statistical robustness, and computational savings

Assessment of Mercury Intake through Consumption of Yellowfin Seabream (Acanthopagrus latus) from Musa Estuary

Abstract-Fish constitute a major part of people diet in southern Iranian cities due to the neighborhood of those cities to the Persian Gulf. Previous studies have demonstrated that Musa Estuary is polluted by mercury. Yellow sea bream is well distributed in this water body. To evaluate mercury level in this economically important fish a total number of 50 Yellowfin seabream were caught from 5 different creeks in Musa estuary including Zangi, Jafari, Petroshimi, Ghazaleh and Majidieh. The muscle tissues of the fish were digested and their Hg content was analyzed using atomic absorption spectrophotometer equipped with cold vapor system. Hg concentration in samples ranged from 0.44 to 1.46 mg/kg. In more than 88% of cases Hg concentration in fish exceeded the FAO/WHO permissible limit. The weekly mercury intake via fish consumption was estimated as 4.87 to 12.07 and 1.01 to 2.50 µg/kg body weight for children and adults respectively. The Estimated Weekly Intake (EWI) of mercury was higher than the Provisional Tolerable Weekly Intake (PTWI) for children. In addition, the calculated consumption limits of Yellowfin seabream for children and adults were 3 and 15 times per year respectively