BACKGROUND Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancers affecting women worldwide. The main objective of this study was to assess and compare research activity in breast cancer in Arab countries with non-Arab Middle Eastern countries. METHODS Publications about "breast cancer" as a research topic were retrieved using the ISI Web of Science database. Analysis was confined to origin...

Russian ( ), Persian ( ) and Siberian ( Acipenser gueldenstaedtii A. persicus A. ) sturgeons are closely related ‘Ponto-Caspian’ species. Investigation of baerii their population structure is an important problem, the solution of which determines measures for conservation of these species. According to previous studies, ‘baerii-like’ mitochondrial genotypes were found in the Caspian Sea among 3...

BACKGROUND Obesity is a serious worldwide medical condition, considered by some researchers as one of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century. The main objective of this study was to assess the quantity and quality of obesity-related research from Arab countries and compare it with that from non-Arab Middle Eastern countries. METHODS Original scientific articles or reviews...

Although much has been written about the Gulf conflict, comparatively little attention has been paid to the medical aspects of the conflict and to the overall balance between the costs and benefits. As the situation continues to evolve in Iraq it becomes clearer that some of the short term effects of the war given so much publicity will be overshadowed by the medium and long term adverse conseq...

In this paper I present the prepositional system of Persian. I show that Persian prepositions can be divided into three classes (Class 1, Class 2a and Class 2b) which exhibit distinct syntactic behavior. Then I examine the question of the categorial status of Class 2 prepositions and demonstrate that they are not to be regarded as nouns. Finally I present the extended PP projection of Persian s...

In order to facilitate sentiment analysis of Persian text, we’ve designed and implemented an algorithm which aims to detect words with negative polarity. Currently most sentiment analysis algorithms depend mainly on polarity datasets. However, since negative prefixes in Persian are only attached to a semantically positive base (shaghagi, 2002), we have incorporated a negative prefix detection t...

This paper introduces PersPred, the first manually elaborated syntactic and semantic database for Persian Complex Predicates (CPs). Beside their theoretical interest, Persian CPs constitute an important challenge in Persian lexicography and for NLP. The first delivery, PersPred 11, contains 700 CPs, for which 22 fields of lexical, syntactic and semantic information are encoded. The semantic cla...

BACKGROUND There is a lack of comparable data on physical activity, sedentary behavior, and dietary habits among Arab adolescents, which limits our understanding and interpretation of the relationship between obesity and lifestyle parameters. Therefore, we initiated the Arab Teens Lifestyle Study (ATLS). The ATLS is a multicenter collaborative project for assessing lifestyle habits of Arab adol...

Because of the scarcity of observational data, existing estimates of the heat and water budgets of the Persian Gulf are rather uncertain. This uncertainty leaves open the fundamental question ofwhether this water body is a net heat source or a net heat sink to the atmosphere. Previous regional modeling studies either used specified surface fluxes to simulate the hydrodynamics of the Gulf or pre...