Sharif Digital Repository

Smoking is known as a major cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and hence immediate and effective interventions are required for its elimination. This study aimed to collect valid data with regard to cigarette smoking in adult population of north of Iran for policy making by a meta-analysis of the documents of national non-communicable disease risk factors surveillance system. We investigated relevant evidences by searching in published and non-electronic databases. Data were extracted based on variables such as year of the study, sex, age group and prevalence of smoking habit. Based on results of heterogeneity, we applied fixed or random effects model to estimate the... 

Background: Genetic heterogeneity of a cancer tumor that develops during clonal evolution is one of the reasons for cancer treatment failure, by increasing the chance of drug resistance. Clones are cell populations with different genotypes, resulting from differences in somatic mutations that occur and accumulate during cancer development. An appropriate approach for identifying clones is determining the variant allele frequency of mutations that occurred in the tumor. Although bulk sequencing data can be used to provide that information, the frequencies are not informative enough for identifying different clones with the same prevalence and their evolutionary relationships. On the other... 

Background: Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in the ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM) gene. A-T patients manifest considerable variability in clinical and immunological features, suggesting the presence of genetic modifying factors. A striking heterogeneity has been observed in class switching recombination (CSR) in A-T patients which cannot be explained by the severity of ATM mutations. Methods: To investigate the cause of variable CSR in A-T patients, we applied whole-exome sequencing (WES) in 20 A-T patients consisting of 10 cases with CSR defect (CSR-D) and 10 controls with normal CSR (CSR-N). Comparative analyses on modifier...