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Background: Addiction is considered as a social disease causes economic loss in family shared financial resources, increase in health care costs, and sexual dysfunctions in sexual relations. Due to the high prevalence rate and reduced age of addiction beginning, this study aimed to evaluate the prevalence rate of comorbidities (psychiatric disorders, liver and neuromuscular diseases) in patients with substance abuse problems.
Methods and Material: In this descriptive study, 200 drug abusers referred to Borzouyeh clinic in Tehran, Iran were selected by convenience sampling method. Data were collected with the help of a questionnaire, liver function tests, and clinical records of the patients during 2010-2016. Data were analyzed through the analysis of Chi-square test at the significance level of P < .05.
Results: Data analysis was performed using chi-square test in SPSS software version 23. The results showed that there was a significant relationship between addiction and liver diseases, psychiatric disorders, and neuromuscular pains (p < .05). According to the results, 44.9% of the patients consuming crack had psychiatric disorders, and also 49.1% of the patients consuming opium had liver diseases. Also, neuromuscular pains were found in drug users (opium, sap, heroin and crack) and not found in hallucinogenic and stimulant drug users.
Conclusions: The correlations between opium and liver diseases, drug users and neuromuscular pains, and also crack using and psychiatric disorders were determined.
 

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Developing high-yielding varieties of sunflower as oilseed staple crops requires knowledge of physiological and molecular mechanisms involved in yield formation. Source strength, sink demand, and their interactions play crucial roles in the yield formation of sunflowers. The persistence of assimilate flux to the developing grains mainly determines sink demand. There was no information on the molecular mechanism for assimilate flux to the sink organ of sunflowers. To shed light on molecular events engaging in assimilate flux to sink organs, two experiments were carried out on five sunflower inbred lines differing in their grain yields. Source-related parameters (such as leaf biomass, area, and number) and sink-associated attributes (such as floret number at the first anthesis and capitulum biomass and diameter, in addition to changes in biomass of capitulum and stem, at the first anthesis with those at physiological maturity) were evaluated across all the inbred lines. The Invertase gene expression level was measured on the receptacle base of three inbred lines, showing discrepancies in the source, sink, and grain yield performances. While no significant correlation was found between source strength and sink demand with grain yield, the results showed that higher grain yield was likely attributed to the persistence of assimilate flux to the capitulum base during grain filling. This phenomenon is discussed to be due to higher Invertase activity in the receptacle base.

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This experiment was conducted to determine whether 6-phytase has a positive effect on zinc requirements, production performance, and zinc content of tissues in broiler breeders at the end of their production cycle. One hundred and twenty-eight obese Cobb-500 broiler breeder hens (>v4.9 kg) were weighed at 58 weeks of age and assigned to various treatment groups. To deplete the zinc reserves in hens, they were given a zinc-deficient diet (9.5 mg kg^-1 of zinc) and drank water with 35 μg L^-1 zinc for two weeks. Then, hens were randomly allocated to 8 dietary treatments in a factorial arrangement of two levels of phytase (0, 300 FTU kg^-1) and four levels of dietary zinc (30, 60, 90, 120 mg kg^-1) with four replicates of 4 hens in each. Bodyweight, egg production, egg weight, and egg quality were measured during the five-week experimental period. Added zinc significantly increased yolk weight and zinc content of yolk (P< 0.05) and plasma (P< 0.0001). Egg weight was significantly increased by adding phytase (P< 0.05). As the results of this experiment show, adding exogenous phytase can decrease the zinc requirement of broiler breeder hens by releasing 16.9% of the zinc bound to phytate.