BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Warm-up prior to static stretching enhances muscle extensibility. The relative effectiveness of different modes of warm-up, however, is unknown. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of superficial heat, deep heat, and active exercise warm-up prior to stretching compared with stretching alone on the extensibility of the plantar-flexor muscles. SUBJ...

background: over recent decades, modern protocols of external beam radio¬therapy and radiation techniques such as intensity-modulated radiotherapy (imrt) have been developed. these methods are extremely sensitive to errors in treatment delivery, so that it is essential to apply a high resolution 3d dosimetry system that has high sensitivity and is capable of measuring and verifying the complex ...

Background: Women with preterm labor put in an arrest phase by tocolytic therapy, are at increased risk of recurrent preterm labor. The aim of this study is to evaluate vaginal progesterone suppositories as compared to intramuscular type in order to prevent preterm labor in women with episodes of threatened preterm labor. Methods: This prospective longitudinal...

Background  The aim of this study was determine the effect of kangaroo mother care (KMC) immediately after delivery on mother-infant attachment 3-month after delivery. Materials and Methods: In this RCT study, 72 mother-infant pairs were randomly divided in to kangaroo mother care and routine care groups.The intervention group received kangaroo mother care (KMC) in the first two hours post birt...

the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery (vrpspd) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem which addresses provided service to a set of customers using a homogeneous fleet of capacitated vehicles. the objective is to minimize the distance traveled. the vrpspd is an np-hard combinatorial optimization problem. therefore, practical large-scale instances of vrpspd...

conclusions the results confirmed that the total costs for non-alcoholic fatty liver among the iranian adult urban population alone exceeded 1 billion ppp$ per year. these costs can be saved or reduced by effective disease management and early prevention. objectives this study aims to estimate the diagnosis and treatment costs of non-alcoholic fatty liver. patients and methods this cross-sectio...

At times, despite an unripe cervix, induction of labor may be needed. In these cases, a safe and suitable method should be considered for cervical ripening and pregnancy termination. The aim of this study is the comparison of vaginal misoprostol with Foley catheter for cervical ripening and induction of labor. This randomized clinical trial was performed on 108 pregnant women who had referred t...

delivery of exogenous materials such as nucleic acids, peptides, proteins, and drugs into cells is an important strategy in modern cellular and molecular biology. recently, the development of gene carriers for efficient gene transfer into cells has attracted a great attention. furthermore, lack of effective drug delivery is one of the major problems of cancer chemotherapy. many physical methods...

objective: this study focused on the factors affecting the institutional delivery and delivery assisted by health professionals in urban slums. materials and methods: a semi-structured questionnaire was developed to collect information from women aged 15-49 who had at least one birth. totally 540 eligible women were interviewed. results: the results showed that around 20% of women delivered at ...