Galen Medical journal
Volume:5 Issue: 3, 2016

Botanicals are used traditionally for treatment and prevention of the liver diseases. In the past decades, the use of herbal remedies for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has become more popular. This study was conducted to determine the efficacy of herbal medicines used for the treatment of NAFLD in clinical trials. This research was carried out by searching through the studies done on human beings, which have been reported from 1966 to Feb. 2016 and recorded in Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, Pub Med, and Scopus. Some medicinal herbs have been evaluated in human trials. A scientific evaluation of these manuscripts can give an insight into the ideas of the past: it might well be valuable in finding new data on the clinical use of the herbal medicines for the treatment of NAFLD and should lead to future opportunities to investigate their potential medicinal use.

Oligomenorrhea (defined as infrequent menstrual flow at intervals of 36 days to 6 months or 5–7 cycles in a year) is mostly managed with hormone therapy; however, there is an increasing demand for alternative medicine treatments in this field. This study is designed to evaluate the efficacy of Sesamum indicum L. in inducing menstrual bleeding in women with oligomenorrhea.
A single-blind clinical trial was performed on 56 cases of oligomenorrhea, admitted to Beheshti hospital clinic. Patients randomly received treatment for a week either in the sesame or progesterone group and then were followed for 8 weeks. Menstrual bleeding occurrence, waiting period, volume of blood flow, severity of pain, uterus temperament, menstruation in the next episode and side effects were assessed by interview.
Twenty-seven patients (mean age 29.42 ± 8.99 years) and 29 patients (mean age 26.63±5.63 years) were enrolled in the sesame and progesterone groups, respectively. Seventy and two percent and 93.10% of the patients in the sesame and progesterone groups experienced menstrual bleeding (P=0.012) on an average of 10.38 and 11.88 days (P>0.05) respectively. Volume of blood flow and severity of pain were not increased in both groups. Fifty percent and 6% of the patients in the sesame and progesterone groups experienced on-time menstruation in the next (drug-free) episode of menstruation, respectively (P= 0.016).
Although the rate of bleeding following sesame consumption was lower than progesterone-treated group, it seems that the response rate is high enough to suggest more assessments in the future; moreover, in the sesame group, the rate of menstruation in the next drug-free episode was significantly higher than the progesterone group. Therefore, sesame, as a well-tolerated, partially effective choice in inducing and maintaining regular bleeding, could be considered in the patients who are not suitable candidates for hormone therapy.

Equity of access to health care services is one of the main goals of health system. Equity in resource distribution in health section constitutes one of the main dimensions of the equity. The aim of the study is determining how doctors, paramedics and hospital beds are distributed in Iran.
This analytical study was conducted in Iran. Data on 2006-2013 were collected from Statistics Center of Iran and Iran Ministry of Health and Medical Education. After determining the population of 31 provinces and number of physician, paramedics and hospital beds in them, the equal distribution of these facilities and personnel were analyzed using Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient. Stata 12 and DASP2.2 were used for analyzing Gini index.
The total number of physicians, paramedics and hospital beds were 37,000, 217,000 and 138,000, respectively in 2013. Tehran as the capital of Iran had the highest percentage of beds among all provinces. The number of physicians, paramedics and hospital beds per 10,000 population of the country were 5.6, 31.3 and 18.5, respectively for 2013. The calculated Gini coefficients for each of them were 0.47, 0.39 and 0.58, respectively.
According to Gini coefficients, physicians, paramedics and hospital beds have an unequal distribution throughout the country. However, these distributions are different in different provinces. We recommend creating a comprehensive and continuous monitoring system for equitable allocation of health care resources.

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is a hallucinogenic drug of abuse which is the most popular drugs in the world and has been shown to induce apoptosis in kidney cells. As Pentoxifylline (PTX) increases cAMP and reduces tumor necrosis factor-α, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of PTX on kidney damage induced by acute administration of MDMA in the male rat.
Thirty adult male Wistar rats were randomly divided into five groups: control group (without any intervention), MDMA as sham group (the group received 7.5 mg/kg MDMA three times at every two hours for one day), E1 ( received 100 mg/kg PTX a week before MDMA administration), E2 ( received 100 mg/kg PTX Just in the time of the third injection of MDMA ) and E3 ( received 100 mg/kg PTX followed by one dose of MDMA) groups. At the end of experiment period, kidneys were removed and prepared for H&E staining, TUNEL and western blot techniques.
Histopathological studies showed significantly decrease in the kidney cells damage, in the E1 group compared to MDMA group. The number of TUNEL-positive cells was increased significantly in MDMA group. A significant difference was revealed in the mean number of TUNEL-positive cells between the rats treated with PTX before MDMA administration and MDMA group. Expression of active caspase-3 was significantly increased in the MDMA group. While PTX treatment when administrated before MDMA injections could significantly decrease the caspase-3 activity.
The PTX can substantially reduce the severity of lesions in the kidney following administration of MDMA.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is one of the most important causes of death in the world and the affected patients, in addition to physical problems, experience various psychological problems, especially symptoms of depression such as hopelessness, isolation, and social isolation. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of grouptherapy intervention to improve the quality of life and hope in women with HIV.
In this study, 24 HIV-positive patients were selected based on the hope scale and quality of life (QOL) inventories and were randomly divided into two experimental and control groups. Intervention based on hope therapy protocol was executed on the experimental group for eight weeks. Post-tests were taken for both groups after intervention. For data analysis, multivariate analysis of covariance was used.
The results showed that there were significant differences in psychological health (t=-5.491, P Covariance analysis indicated that hope therapy significantly increases hope in HIV- positive patients and can improve their quality of life (QOL) in the both psychological health, social relationships dimensions.

The present study was conducted aimed to determine the relationship between body image and sleep quality in patients with congestive heart failure.
In this descriptive-correlational study, which was conducted in 2015, 290 patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) were recruited using the simple random sampling method. Data were collected by demographic information form (including age, sex, marital status, economic, and education level), as well as medical form (including history of hypertension and drug use, family history of heart disease and depression, physical activity and history of special disease), Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ-34) and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Data was analysis by SPSS 20.0 along with descriptive and inferential statistics tests (Generalized Linear Models with Bonferroni correction).
Based on the results, only 48 patients with PSQI mean score of 4.31 (SD: 0.94; 95%CI: 4.03-4.58) had a good level of sleep quality. The mean score of the BSQ for the studied patients was equal to 122.47 (SD: 19.157; 95% CI: 122.25124.68).
The sleep quality and body image of the patients with CHF were weak. Therefore necessary to do an intervention to remove the background of sleep disorders in these patients as well as conducting a more detailed experiment to determine the exact relationship between these variables.

Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC) is the second most common malignancy of the respiratory tract. Recently, researchers believe that thioredoxin system is effective in the cancerization of some tissues. Thus, this study has been conducted with the aim of measuring of thioredoxin reductase (TrxR) enzyme activity and tissue distribution in the pathologic specimens of patients with laryngeal SCC.
This study was performed on 40 pathologic blocks (20 healthy and 20 tumoral) from 20 patients with laryngeal SCC who were candidates for laryngectomy surgery. The TrxR enzyme activity was measured by the commercial kit. Also, the tissue distribution of TrxR was determined by immunohistochemical staining and the percentage of staining cells (SC%) and staining intensity were calculated. Data were analyzed by using SPSS13 and significant level was set at P≤0.05.
The average the TrxR enzyme activity in the healthy and tumoral tissues was 0.004±0.003µM/min/ml and 0.006±0.003µM/min/ml, respectively (ranged 0.0009 to 0.0104 vs. 0.001 to 0.011 ). However, there was no relationship between the TrxR enzyme activity in the tumoral and healthy tissues (P=0.084). The total score of IHC staining in the healthy tissue was 4.45±1.09 whereas the total of these scores in the tumoral tissue 6.25±0.63. The both scores of SC% and staining intensity in the tumoral tissue was significantly higher than the healthy tissue (P Based on the results, although the TrxR enzyme activity has not the significant differences in tumoral tissue compare to healthy tissue, but the tissue distribution in tumoral tissue was higher than healthy tissue.