International Journal of Preventive Medicine
Volume:11 Issue: 5, May 2020

Almost all religions recommend periods of fasting. Many adult Muslims fast during the holy month of Ramadan each year. Ramadan fasting as a type of intermittent fasting is a non‑pharmacological intervention refining the overall health. This year, Ramadan is coincided with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19) outbreak making it one of the most challenging fasting periods for Muslims in the world. There is no solid direct evidence to suggest any adverse effect of Ramadan fasting during the COVID‑19 pandemic in healthy individuals. However, there are exemptions in Ramadan Fasting and those at risk of health issues should not fast. COVID‑19 is a new disease and there is limited studies concerning its risk factors. The purpose of this review was shedding more light on the potential mechanisms involved in influence of practice of fasting in all forms, including Ramadan fasting on the vulnerability to infection.

Aggressive behaviors have increasing trend in children and adolescents all over the world. This study aimed to perform a systematic review on the association between screen time activities and aggressive behaviors.

A systematic search was conducted through PubMed, Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), and Scopus, until 2017. Moreover, related unpublished studies (grey literature, thesis project and congress paper), considered for further data availability. Data extraction and quality assessment conducted by two independent experts.

Through searching processes, 4381 publications were found, from them. 483 papers were from PubMed database and others were from ISI/WOS (1724) and Scopus (1938). Following the excluding of non‑relevant and duplicated studies, 19 studies remained for further analyzing. Findings of the present study showed that children and adolescents who share most of their time for watching of television are at greater risk for violent behaviors including physical fighting, victim and bully.

This review found that children and adolescents who share most of their time for watching of television are at greater risk for violent behaviors including physical fight, victim and bully.

The present study aims to evaluate self‑management status in Iranian patients with hypertension and its relationship with social determinants. Setting and Design: This study was carried out in 2017‑2018 in health care centers affiliated with Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

A total of 240 patients with hypertension, who referred to health care centers of Tabriz, were invited to fill out the self‑management (researcher made) and social determinants of health questionnaires. Statistical Analysis: Spearman correlation was used to determine the relationship between self‑management score and its items with items of social determinants of health questionnaire. Also, Pearson correlation Student t‑test was used.

In this research 197 patients were studied. Mean age of the participants was 56.6 ± 10.1 years. The mean ± SD (standard deviation) of self‑management score was 81.51 ± 13.16. The correlation coefficient of self ‑management with financial ability of securing the education expenses, nutrition and fruits, and health care expenses were 0.228 (P = 0.001), 0.149 (P value <0.05), and 0.28 (P < 0.001) respectively. Also, the correlation coefficient of age with self‑management was − 0.206 (P value = 0.004). Item level analysis showed strong significant associations between social determinants and three items related to lifestyle and two items related to monitoring of blood pressure (BP) at home.

Overall self ‑management status of the patients was very good. Health centers that plan self ‑management support programs for patients should consider the social determinants of life style modification and monitoring of BP at home by hypertensive patients.

Today, cardiovascular disease is one of the main causes of mortality and disability in most developed and developing countries. The prediction of the major causes of deaths all over the world at all ages shows that 61% of deaths are due to chronic diseases, of which 30% is due to cardiovascular disease. The aim of this study was to assess the cost‑utility analysis of atorvastatin for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases using the Markov model.

Markov model with a lifetime horizon was developed to evaluate economic and health outcomes for atorvastatin drugs for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases for a cohort of 1,000 patients. The effectiveness indicator in this study was quality‑adjusted life‑years (QALYs); robustness of results was examined by one‑way and probabilistic sensitivity analysis.

The results showed that the use of atorvastatin compared to no drug intervention was highly cost‑effective with USD173 per additional QALY. The results of one‑way and probabilistic sensitivity analysis confirmed the results of this study. The findings of this study also showed that the highest cost items were hospitalization costs in the cardiac care unit (CCU). Also, the highest cost items in para‑clinical services were related to echocardiography costs, and troponin constituted the largest cost of laboratory tests.

Based on the results of this study, it is recommended that cardiologists use atorvastatin in the prevention of cardiovascular disease