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Backgrounds: The primary goal of this study was to identify the potential association between COVID-19 prognosis and demographic and clinical features, underlying diseases, and drug and supplement use in patients admitted to Amir al-Momenin hospital in Zabol.

Materials & Methods: This retrospective study surveyed the electronic health records of 848 COVID-19 patients hospitalized in a tertiary referral hospital in southeastern Iran from the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak until the end of February 2021. Univariate and multiple analytical tests including unconditional and penalized logistic regressions were used for statistical analysis.

Findings: Out of a total of 848 patients, 371 (43.75%) patients were female, and 477 (56.25%) patients were male. Age, underlying pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases, and loss of consciousness predicted a higher mortality rate. On the contrary, a negative chest X-ray was associated with a lower risk of death.

Conclusion: Identifying predisposing factors of mortality in COVID-19 patients will help physicians provide more intensive care to those at higher risk of death by classifying patients based on risk factors and underlying diseases.

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Aims: Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are beneficial compounds that could be used as a new and effective method to suppress microbes. Both Ib-AMP4 and LL37 are antimicrobial peptides with a wide range of antimicrobial activities. This research aimed to evaluate the antibacterial potential of LL37-rIb-AMP4 hybrid protein as an antimicrobial agent against pathogenic bacteria. Therefore, its antibacterial effects against Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) were investigated in vivo and in vitro.

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Abstract The moment connections sustained by many steel buildings were damaged during the recent earthquakes due to brittle fractures in the special moment resistant frames. Previous studies showed that although the top beam flange resisted due to the interaction of concrete slab, many damages are created because of weld cracking between the bottom beam flange and the column flange. Different methods of retrofit and rehabilitation could be used to prevent weld cracking and brittle fracture of the joints. The reduction of the bottom flanges of steel beams near the beam-column joints in the special moment resistant frames is currently an acceptable alteration of a connection because the top flange is located in the concrete slab and removing of concrete slab has financial and technical problems. RBS connection is one of the different kinds of Post-Northridge connections in which by cutting some parts of the flange near the end of the beam (where the possibility of making plastic hinges is high), the plastic hinge moves by the side of the column into the area within the beam. By using this method, the connection is altered from the special moment frame into a more ductile connection that has more ability to endure in plastic rotation, and generally ductility increases. The ductility of the panel zone is one of the parameters, which undoubtedly affects the manner of the yield of beams with RBS connection. Our findings in this work showed that new method causes the beam plastic rotation to increase by 30%. In addition, the applied force at the panel zone (according to the capacity of panel zone) is decreased. When compared to the frames without cuts, these reductions result in a 52% decrease in the plastic rotation of the panel zone, we also investigated the amount of dissipated energy by beams in the conditions before and after retrofitting. ANSYS software was used to study and analyze the non-linear behavior in the area of connections.