Search

Background: Preventing violence is important especially in the Middle East, where many countries are struggling with violence. Knowing the affecting factors could help public policy makers to decrease violence level. Thus, this study is aimed to analyze health and other socio-economic factors that could affect interpersonal violence in middle eastern countries., Methods: From international organization databases, we collected the panel data of Middle Eastern countries from 1990 to 2016 on prevalence of interpersonal violence as dependent variable and per capita income, life expectancy, democracy index (DI), urbanization and unemployment as explanatory factors. Several panel data diagnostic tests were performed for selecting a suitable model of estimation. The variables were entered in the model in logarithmic form. Because of heteroscedasticity, cross-sectional dependence and serial correlation of residuals, feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) was used for estimation of mentioned model using Stata 14.2., Results: The means of interpersonal violence prevalence and life expectancy were 2462.2 (SD = 232.4) per 100000 population and 73.5 (SD = 4.5) in the Middle East, respectively. Urbanization (β = -0.0925, P < 0.01), life expectancy (β = -0.0362, P < 0.01), per capita income (β = -0.0046, P < 0.01), unemployment (β = 0.0007, P < 0.01) and democracy (β = -5.83e-06, P < 0.01) had significant relation with interpersonal violence., Conclusion: Life expectancy as a proxy for health is one of the main predictors of interpersonal violence, as literature supports. That is, if a society is healthier, the burden of interpersonal violence will be lower. Thus, health policy makers should consider health status as a preventive factor of violence, which is stated in health as a bridge for peace by the world health organization., (© 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.)

Background: Recent evidence from prospective cohort studies show a relationship between consumption of dairy foods and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). This association highlights the importance of dairy foods consumption in prevention of these diseases and also reduction of associated healthcare costs. The aim of this study was to estimate avoidable healthcare costs of CVD and T2D through adequate dairy foods consumption in Iran., Methods: This was a multistage modelling study. We conducted a systematic literature review in PubMed and EMBASE to identify any association between incidence of CVD and T2DM and dairy foods intake, and also associated relative risks. We obtained age- and sex-specific dairy foods consumption level and healthcare expenditures from national surveys and studies. Patient level simulation Markov models were constructed to predict the disease incidence, patient population size and associated healthcare costs for current and optimal dairy foods consumption at different time horizons (1, 5, 10 and 20 years). All parameters including costs and transition probabilities were defined as statistical distributions in the models, and all analyses were conducted by accounting for first and second order uncertainty., Results: The systematic review results indicated that dairy foods consumption was inversely associated with incidence of T2DM, coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke. We estimated that the introduction of a diet containing 3 servings of dairy foods per day may produce a $0.43 saving in annual per capita healthcare costs in Iran in the first year due to saving in cost of CVD and T2DM treatment. The estimated savings in per capita healthcare costs were $8.42, $39.97 and $190.25 in 5, 10 and 20-years' time, respectively. Corresponding total aggregated avoidable costs for the entire Iranian population within the study time horizons were $33.83, $661.31, $3,138.21 and $14,934.63 million, respectively., Conclusion: Our analysis demonstrated that increasing dairy foods consumption to recommended levels would be associated with reductions in healthcare costs. Further randomized trial studies are required to investigate the effect of dairy foods intake on cost of CVD and T2DM in the population., (© 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.)