Gastric and esophageal cancers are as main cancers of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, which are associated with poor diagnosis and survival. Several efforts were made in the past few decades to finding effective therapeutic approaches, but these approaches had several problems. Finding new biomarkers is a critical step in finding new approaches for the treatment of these cancers. Finding new biomarkers that cover various aspects of the diseases could provide a choice of suitable therapies and better monitoring of patients with these cancers. Among several biomarkers tissue specific and circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) have emerged as powerful candidates in the diagnosis of gastric and esophageal cancers. MiRNAs are small noncoding single-stranded RNA molecules that are found in the blood and regulate gene expression. These have numerous characteristics that make them suitable for being used as ideal biomarkers in cancer diagnosis. Research has indicated that the level and profile of miRNA in serum and plasma are very high. They are potentially noninvasive and sensitive enough to detect tumors in their primary stages of infection. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the presence, absence, or deregulation of several circulating miRNAs (i.e., let-7a, miR-21, miR-93, miR-192a, miR-18a, and miR-10b for gastric cancer, and miR-21, miR-375, miR-25-3p, miR-151a-3p, and miR-100-3p for esophageal cancer) are associated with initiation and progression of gastric and esophageal cancers. The aim of this review is to highlight the recent advances in the roles of miRNAs in diagnosis and treatment of gastric and esophageal cancers.

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Background: Cancer is one of the most common diseases in children. Cancer in children can cause many problems for parents, and impose heavy care burden on them, which can lead to negative health consequences. The aim of this study was to determine caregiving burden and relevant influential factors among parents of children with cancer. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional descriptive study was done on 125 parents of children with cancer in oncology department of Shohada Hospital, Tehran, Iran, during March to August 2017. Caregiving burden was measured using the Caregiver Burden Scale. Descriptive statistics, independent-samples T test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson’s correlation analysis, and multivariate linear regression analysis (stepwise method) were used in data analysis with SPSS software (v.19). Results: The mean score of parents’ care burden was 52.76 ± 10.  Moreover, 17.6%, 71.2% and 11.2% of parents had low, moderate, and high care burden, respectively. Regression analyses indicated that the factors associated with care burden were cancer type (Acute myeloid leukemia (β=0.36, p<0.001) and Ewing sarcoma (β=0.16, p=0.007)), the number of hospitalization (β=0.38, p<0.001), duration of disease (β=-0.31, p<0.001), parent’s age (β=-0.29, p<0.001), parent’s income (β=-0.23, p<0.001), and child’s age (β=0.24, p<0.001). These variables accounted for 65% of the variance in care burden. Conclusion: The result of this study demonstrated that most of parents of children with cancer had moderate levels of care burden. Different variables increased care burden in parents. Therefore, planning for holistic interventions to reduce care burden in parents and improve quality of care is necessary.

Recently, cold atmospheric pressure plasmas (CAP) have emerged as a promising oncotherapeutic modality, through physical and chemical effects. Here, for the first time, A2780 CP and SKOV-3 cells, relevant to ovarian cancer and GCs as normal ovarian cells were evaluated through CAP directly, indirectly, and concomitant modality of plasma activated medium (PAM) with common drugs to overcome chemotherapy resistance in ovarian cancer. Our results confirm the high potential and the stronger selectivity of PAM in comparison to CAP for the selected cell lines and selectivity mechanism was related to the pH and concentration of H2O2, NO2 -, and NO3reactive species in the plasma stimulated medium. Compared to the combination of common carboplatin (CAR) and paclitaxel (PTX) chemotherapy treatments, the PAM-based treatment is very promising for ovarian cancer treatment. Our data verify that PAM alone and in combination with carboplatin sensitizes cancer cells to carboplatin, inhibits the SOD1 gene, and selectively induces apoptosis accompanied with high expression of p53, Bax, and activation of Caspase-3.

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The present study evaluated the opinions of physicians working in the emergency and trauma surgery departments of Vienna Medical University, in Austria, and Tabriz Medical University, in Iran, regarding the presence of patients’ relatives during resuscitation. In a descriptive-analytical study, the data obtained from questionnaires that had been distributed randomly to 40 specialists and residents at each of the participating universities were analyzed. The questionnaire consisted of two sections aimed at capturing the participants’ demographic data, the participants’ opinions regarding their support for the family’s presence during resuscitation, and the multiple potential factors affecting the participants’ attitudes, including health beliefs, triggers that could facilitate the procedure, self-efficacy, intellectual norms, and perceived behavioral control. The questionnaire also included a direct question (Question 16) on whether the participants approved of family presence. Each question could be answered using a Likert-type scale. The results showed that the mean scores for Question 16 were 4.31 ± 0.64 and 3.57 ± 1.31 for participants at Vienna and Tabriz universities, respectively. Moreover, physicians at Vienna University disapproved of the presence of patients’ families during resuscitation to a higher extent than did those at Tabriz University (P = 0.018). Of the studied prognostic factors affecting the perspectives of Vienna Medical University’s physicians, health beliefs (P = 0.000; B = 1.146), triggers (P = 0.000; B = 1.050), and norms (P = 0.000; B = 0.714) were found to be significant. Moreover, of the studied prognostic factors affecting the perspectives of Tabriz Medical University’s physicians, health beliefs (P = 0.000; B = 0.875), triggers (P = 0.000; B = 1.11), self-efficacy (P = 0.001; B = 0.5), and perceived behavioral control (P = 0.03; B = 0.713) were significant. Most physicians at Vienna and Tabriz Medical universities were not open towards family members’ presence during resuscitation.

Background:Considering the cognitive and linguistic complexity of discourse production, it is expected that individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) should face difficulties in this task. Therefore, clinical examination of discourse has become a useful tool for studying and assessment of communication skills of people suffering from TBI. Among different genres of discourse, persuasive discourse is considered as a more cognitively demanding task. However, little is known about persuasive discourse in individuals suffering from TBI.Objectives:The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of adults with TBI on a task of spoken persuasive discourse to determine the impaired linguistic measures.Patients and Methods:Thirteen TBI nonaphasic Persian speaking individuals, ranged between 19 to 40 years (Mean = 25.64 years; SD = 6.10) and 59 healthy adults matched by age, were asked to perform the persuasive discourse task. The task included asking the participants to express their opinion on a topic, and after the analysis of the produced discourse, the two groups were compared on the basis of their language productivity, sentential complexity, maze ratio and cohesion ratio.Results:The TBI group produced discourses with less productivity, sentential complexity, cohesion ratio and more maze ratio compared the control group.Conclusions:As it is important to consider acquired communication disorders particularly discourse impairment of brain injured patients along with their other clinical impairments and regarding the fact that persuasive discourse is crucial in academic and social situations, the persuasive discourse task presented in this study could be a useful tool for speech therapists, intending to evaluate communication disorders in patients with TBI.