| Kourosh Holakouie-Naieni | 2 Articles |
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<b>Objectives</b>
<p>The purpose of the current study was to determine the upper threshold number of cases for which pertussis infection would reach an outbreak level nationally in Iran.</p></sec>
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<b>Methods</b>
<p>Data on suspected cases of pertussis from the 25<sup>th</sup> February 2012 to the 23<sup>rd</sup> March 2018 from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Iran was used. The national upper threshold level was estimated using the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) method and the Poisson regression method.</p></sec>
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<b>Results</b>
<p>In total, 2,577 (33.6%) and 1,714 (22.3%) cases were reported in the Spring and Summer respectively. There were 1,417 (18.5%) and 1,971 (25.6%) cases reported in the Autumn and Winter, respectively. The overall upper threshold using the EWMA and the Poisson regression methods, was estimated as a daily occurrence of 8 (7.55) and 7.50 (4.48–11.06) suspected cases per 10,000,000 people, respectively. The daily seasonal thresholds estimated by the EWMA and the Poisson regression methods were 10, 7, 6, 8 cases and 10, 7, 7, 9 cases for the Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, respectively.</p></sec>
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<b>Conclusion</b>
<p>The overall and seasonal estimated thresholds by the 2 methods were similar. Therefore, the estimated thresholds of 6–10 cases in a day, per 10,000,000 people could be used to detect pertussis outbreaks and epidemics by health policymakers.</p></sec>
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<b>Objectives</b><br/>
Identification of the causal impact of self-esteem on smoking stages faces seemingly insurmountable problems in observational data, where self-esteem is not manipulable by the researcher and cannot be assigned randomly. The aim of this study was to find out if weaker self-esteem in adolescence is a risk factor of cigarette smoking in a longitudinal study in Iran.<br/><b>Methods</b><br/>
In this longitudinal study, 4,853 students (14–18 years) completed a self-administered multiple-choice anonym questionnaire. The students were evaluated twice, 12 months apart. Students were matched based on coarsened exact matching on pretreatment variables, including age, gender, smoking stages at the first wave of study, socioeconomic status, general risk-taking behavior, having a smoker in the family, having a smoker friend, attitude toward smoking, and self-injury, to ensure statistically equivalent comparison groups. Self-esteem was measured using the Rosenberg 10-item questionnaire and were classified using a latent class analysis. After matching, the effect of self-esteem was evaluated using a multinomial logistic model.<br/><b>Results</b><br/>
In the causal fitted model, for adolescents with weaker self-esteem relative to those with stronger self-esteem, the relative risk for experimenters and regular smokers relative to nonsmokers would be expected to increase by a factor of 2.2 (1.9–2.6) and 2.0 (1.5–2.6), respectively.<br/><b>Conclusion</b><br/>
Using a causal approach, our study indicates that low self-esteem is consistently associated with progression in cigarette smoking stages.
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