Click on the title to browse this book

Background: Stress, anxiety, and depression are some of the most important research and practice challenges for psychologists, psychiatrists, and behavioral scientists. Due to the importance of issue and the lack of general statistics on these disorders among the Hospital staff treating the COVID-19 patients, this study aims to systematically review and determine the prevalence of stress, anxiety and depression within front-line healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients. Methods: In this research work, the systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression approaches are used to approximate the prevalence of stress, anxiety and depression within front-line healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients. The keywords of prevalence, anxiety, stress, depression, psychopathy, mental illness, mental disorder, doctor, physician, nurse, hospital staff, 2019-nCoV, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and Coronaviruses were used for searching the SID, MagIran, IranMedex, IranDoc, ScienceDirect, Embase, Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science (ISI) and Google Scholar databases. The search process was conducted in December 2019 to June 2020. In order to amalgamate and analyze the reported results within the collected studies, the random effects model is used. The heterogeneity of the studies is assessed using the I² index. Lastly, the data analysis is performed within the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software. Results: Of the 29 studies with a total sample size of 22,380, 21 papers have reported the prevalence of depression, 23 have reported the prevalence of anxiety, and 9 studies have reported the prevalence of stress. The prevalence of depression is 24.3% (18% CI 18.2–31.6%), the prevalence of anxiety is 25.8% (95% CI 20.5–31.9%), and the prevalence of stress is 45% (95% CI 24.3–67.5%) among the hospitals’ Hospital staff caring for the COVID-19 patients. According to the results of meta-regression analysis, with increasing the sample size, the prevalence of depression and anxiety decreased, and this was statistically significant (P < 0.05), however, the prevalence of stress increased with increasing the sample size, yet this was not statistically significant (P = 0.829). Conclusion: The results of this study clearly demonstrate that the prevalence of stress, anxiety and depression within front-line healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients is high. Therefore, the health policy-makers should take measures to control and prevent mental disorders in the Hospital staff.

Background: Curcumin is herbal compound that has been shown to have anti-cancer effects in pre-clinical and clinical studies. The anti-cancer effects of curcumin include inhibiting the carcinogenesis, inhibiting angiogenesis, and inhibiting tumour growth. This study aims to determine the Clinical effects of curcumin in different types of cancers using systematic review approach.Methods: A systematic review methodology is adopted for undertaking detailed analysis of the effects of curcumin in cancer therapy. The results presented in this paper is an outcome of extracting the findings of the studies selected from the articles published in international databases including SID, MagIran, IranMedex, IranDoc, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science (ISI). These databases were thoroughly searched, and the relevant publications were selected based on the plausible keywords, in accordance with the study aims, as follows: prevalence, curcumin, clinical features, cancer.Results: The results are derived based on several clinical studies on curcumin consumption with chemotherapy drugs, highlighting that curcumin increases the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiotherapy which results in improving patient’s survival time, and increasing the expression of anti-metastatic proteins along with reducing their side effects.Conclusion: The comprehensive systematic review presented in this paper confirms that curcumin reduces the side effects of chemotherapy or radiotherapy, resulting in improving patients’ quality of life. A number of studies reported that, curcumin has increased patient survival time and decreased tumor markers’ level.

Background: In all epidemics, healthcare staff are at the centre of risks and damages caused by pathogens. Today, nurses and physicians are faced with unprecedented work pressures in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in several psychological disorders such as stress, anxiety and sleep disturbances. The aim of this study is to investigate the prevalence of sleep disturbances in hospital nurses and physicians facing the COVID-19 patients. Method: A systematic review and metanalysis was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA criteria. The PubMed, Scopus, Science direct, Web of science, CINHAL, Medline, and Google Scholar databases were searched with no lower time-limt and until 24 June 2020. The heterogeneity of the studies was measured using I² test and the publication bias was assessed by the Egger’s test at the significance level of 0.05. Results: The I² test was used to evaluate the heterogeneity of the selected studies, based on the results of I² test, the prevalence of sleep disturbances in nurses and physicians is I²: 97.4% and I²: 97.3% respectively. After following the systematic review processes, 7 cross-sectional studies were selected for meta-analysis. Six studies with the sample size of 3745 nurses were examined in and the prevalence of sleep disturbances was approximated to be 34.8% (95% CI: 24.8-46.4%). The prevalence of sleep disturbances in physicians was also measured in 5 studies with the sample size of 2123 physicians. According to the results, the prevalence of sleep disturbances in physicians caring for the COVID-19 patients was reported to be 41.6% (95% CI: 27.7-57%). Conclusion: Healthcare workers, as the front line of the fight against COVID-19, are more vulnerable to the harmful effects of this disease than other groups in society. Increasing workplace stress increases sleep disturbances in the medical staff, especially nurses and physicians. In other words, increased stress due to the exposure to COVID-19 increases the prevalence of sleep disturbances in nurses and physicians. Therefore, it is important for health policymakers to provide solutions and interventions to reduce the workplace stress and pressures on medical staff.

The computational limitations of complex numerical models have led to adoption of statistical emulators across a variety of problems in science and engineering disciplines to circumvent the high computational costs associated with numerical simulations. In flood modelling, many hydraulic and hydrodynamic numerical models, especially when operating at high spatiotemporal resolutions, have prohibitively high computational costs for tasks requiring the instantaneous generation of very large numbers of simulation results. This study examines the appropriateness and robustness of Gaussian Process (GP) models to emulate the results from a hydraulic inundation model. The developed GPs produce real-time predictions based on the simulation output from LISFLOOD-FP numerical model. An efficient dimensionality reduction scheme is developed to tackle the high dimensionality of the output space and is combined with the GPs to investigate the predictive performance of the proposed emulator for estimation of the inundation depth. The developed GP-based framework is capable of robust and straightforward quantification of the uncertainty associated with the predictions, without requiring additional model evaluations and simulations. Further, this study explores the computational advantages of using a GP-based emulator over alternative methodologies such as neural networks, by undertaking a comparative analysis. For the case study data presented in this paper, the GP model was found to accurately reproduce water depths and inundation extent by classification and produce computational speedups of approximately 10,000 times compared with the original simulator, and 80 times for a neural network-based emulator.

Background: Despite many benefits of the physical activity on physical and mental health of patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), the activity level in these patients is still very limited, and they continue to suffer from impairment in functioning ability. The main aim of this study is thus to closely examine exercise’s effect on fatigue of patients with MS worldwide, with particular interest on Iran based on a comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods: The studies used in this systematic review were selected from the articles published from 1996 to 2019, in national and international databases including SID, Magiran, Iranmedex, Irandoc, Google Scholar, Cochrane, Embase, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science (ISI). These databases were thoroughly searched, and the relevant ones were selected based on some plausible keywords to the aim of this study. Heterogeneity index between studies was determined using Cochran’s test and I². Due to heterogeneity in studies, the random effects model was used to estimate standardized mean difference. Results: From the systematic review, a meta-analysis was performed on 31 articles which were fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The sample including of 714 subjects was selected from the intervention group, and almost the same sample size of 720 individuals were selected in the control group. Based on the results derived from this meta-analysis, the standardized mean difference between the intervention group before and after the intervention was respectively estimated to be 23.8 ± 6.2 and 16.9 ± 3.2, which indicates that the physical exercise reduces fatigue in patients with MS. Conclusion: The results of this study extracted from a detailed meta-analysis reveal and confirm that physical exercise significantly reduces fatigue in patients with MS. As a results, a regular exercise program is strongly recommended to be part of a rehabilitation program for these patients.