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Natural disasters have multiple psychological effects including increased risk of suicide among victims. Reviews have shown that suicidal behaviours can be an aftermath of natural disasters. The present study attempted to identify the suicide-related risk factors after natural disasters. This study was a systematic review probing English language articles related to suicide and its risk factors after natural disasters and published between 1 January 1990 and 27 September 2018 in Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus, ProQuest and Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) databases. After reviewing and screening the collected studies by means of specific criteria, only 30 studies were qualified to enter the survey. It was found that most of these studies had investigated suicide after earthquake. Gender, age, serious mental disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), loss of family members, low economic status, low social support, and injury to the person and the family/relatives were identified as the most important risk factors for suicide after natural disasters. Women, adolescents, elderly, people with depression and PTSD, those suffer from low social support and parentless people were found to be among the ones being highly vulnerable to suicide after natural disasters. There is, therefore, a need for providing psychosocial support for these people after such disasters.

Although wet cupping has been a treatment for centuries, its mechanism of action is not well understood. Because the anatomical features of the wet-cupping area might play a role in its mechanism, we focus on the features of the interscapular area in which a common type of wet-cupping therapy (WCT), called Hijamat-e-Aam in Iranian medicine, is usually applied and discuss the possible relation of those features to the acupuncture meridians. We gathered and analyzed data from reliable textbooks on modern medicine with a focus on the anatomical features of the interscapular area, topics related to WTC in Iranian medicine, and acupuncture sources obtained by searching PubMed, Google-Scholar, and Science Direct. The interscapular area used for WCT was found to have special features: brown adipose tissue, immediate proximity to sympathetic ganglia, passage of the thoracic duct, two important acupuncture meridians, and proximity to the main vessel divisions carrying blood from the heart and the brain. These features indicate that the interscapular application of WCT not only discharges waste materials through a shifting of blood to the site after application of a traction force but also invigorates the body's metabolism, increases immunity, and regulates blood biochemistry, which are desired therapeutic effects of WCT.

Background:Engaged nurses have high levels of energy and are enthusiastic about their work which impacts quality of health care services. However, in the context of Iran, due to observed burnout, work engagement among nurses necessitates immediate exploration.Objectives:This investigation aimed to identify a suitable work engagement model in nursing profession in hospitals according to the hypothesized model and to determine antecedents and consequences related to work engagement among nurses.Patients and Methods:In this cross-sectional study, a questionnaire was given to 279 randomly-selected nurses working in two general teaching hospitals of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (Shiraz, Iran) to measure antecedents and consequences of work engagement using the Saks’s (2005) model. Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine the model fitness.Results:Two paths were added using LISREL software. The resulting model showed good fitness indices (χ2 = 23.62, AGFI = 0.93, CFI = 0.97, RMSEA = 0.07) and all the coefficients of the paths were significant (t ≥ 2, t ≤ -2). A significant correlation was found between work engagement and model variables.Conclusions:Paying adequate attention to the antecedents of work engagement can enhance the quality of performance among nurses. Additionally, rewards, organizational and supervisory supports, and job characteristics should be taken into consideration to establish work engagement among nurses. Further researches are required to identify other probable antecedents and consequences of nursing work engagement, which might be related to specific cultural settings.

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Nowadays, applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) have been introduced in different fields of medicine to provide more efficient medical services to the patients. A systematic mapping study was conducted to answer ten research questions with the purposes of identifying and classifying the present medical IoT technological features as well as recognizing the opportunities for future developments. We reviewed how cloud, wearable technologies, wireless communication technologies, messaging protocols, security methods, development boards, microcontrollers, mobile/IoT operating systems, and programming languages have been engaged in medical IoT. Based on specific inclusion/exclusion criteria, 89 papers, published between 2000 and 2018, were screened and selected. It was found that IoT studies, with a publication rise between 2015 and 2018, predominantly dealt with the following IoT features: (a) wearable sensor types of chiefly accelerometer and ECG placed on 16 different body parts, especially the wrist (33%) and the chest (21%) or implanted on the bone; (b) wireless communication technologies of Bluetooth, cellular networks, and Wi-Fi; (c) messaging protocols of mostly MQTT; (d) utilizing cloud for both storing and analyzing data; (e) the security methods of encryption, authentication, watermark, and error control; (f) the microcontrollers belonging to Atmel ATmega and ARM Cortex-M3 families; (g) Android as the commonly used mobile operating system and TinyOS and ContikiOS as the commonly used IoT operating systems; (h) Arduino and Raspberry Pi development boards; and finally (i) MATLAB as the most frequently employed programming language in validation research. The identified gaps/opportunities for future exploration are, namely, employment of fog/edge computing in storage and processing big data, the overlooked efficient features of CoAP messaging protocol, the unnoticed advantages of AVR Xmega and Cortex-M microcontroller families, employment of the programming languages of Python for its significant capabilities in evaluation and validation research, development of the applications being supported by the mobile/IoT operating systems in order to provide connection possibility among all IoT devices in medicine, exploiting wireless communication technologies such as BLE, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, NFC, and 5G to reduce power consumption and costs, and finally uncovering the security methods, usually used in IoT applications, in order to make other applications more trustworthy.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has somehow affected the lives of 80% of the world’s population. Iran has also experienced numerous outbreaks of this disease. The fifth wave having occurred in August 2021 was one of the most agonizing incidence of the pandemic in the country. The current study discusses the possible dimensions and causes of successive waves of COVID-19 in Iran, namely, the consequences of a significant delay in vaccination administration in due time, the collective overwhelming fallacy toward immunization, the polypharmacy controversy, inadequate community-based participation in risk reduction, and noticeable decrease in the public’s resilience. A variety of strategies have been recommended in the article to modify the principal challenges in order to help control the pandemic in the country.

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