Jamileh Mirzaali, Mohammadali Vakili, Homeira Khoddam,
Volume 17, Issue 1 (4-2020)
Abstract
Background: One of the important criteria in patients receiving artificial respiration is the time of weaning from the mechanical ventilator. As physician’s decision might be somehow subjective, several tools have been suggested for prediction of the time of weaning more objectively. This study aimed to determine the predictive value of Persian Weaning Tool (PWT) compared with Physician- directed approach as the gold standard.
Methods: This diagnostic accuracy study was done in 2016-2017 in Two Medical and Educational Centers of Gorgan, Iran. 97 admitted patients in intensive care units, under mechanical ventilation were evaluated. The patients were recruited into the study by a convenience sampling method and evaluated for readiness to wean using two approaches (physician’s decision and using PWT). Successful weaning was considered as the ability of patient to breathe spontaneously during the first 48 hours after weaning. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), positive likelihood ratio (PLR), and negative likelihood ratio (NLR), as well as the agreement (kappa coefficient) between the two approaches, were calculated. In addition, to compare the differences between variables in two groups, chi-Square, T and man-Whitney tests were used. All analyses were performed using SPSS software ver.16, and MedCalc program ver.13. P<0.05 was considered as statistically significant.
Results: Most patients (64.9%) were men. The mean age, duration of hospital admission, and duration of mechanical ventilation of the participants were 46.49±18.15 years, 67.11±7.14 days, and 31.5±2.5 days, respectively. Weaning was successful in 87.6% of the patients. PWT had a significant agreement with the physician’s choice (kappa coefficient=0.637, P<0.001) with sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV, PLR, and NLR of 100%, 50%, 93.4%, 100%, 2, and 0, respectively. The cut-off level of 53 was considered as the best point to improve the diagnostic accuracy to 92.94%, 75%, 96.3%, 60%, 3.72, and 0.094, respectively.
Conclusions: Findings showed that PWT is an accurate tool for predicting the readiness of patients for weaning objectively. This tool can be used as a complementary approach by physicians and other care providers in intensive care units.
Arthur Asa Berger, Hamed Bahmani, Ehsan Shahghasemi ,
Volume 23, Issue 2 (6-2026)
Abstract
Background: Social media platforms provide important spaces in which cancer patients narrate their illness experiences and reveal needs that often remain unexpressed in clinical settings. However, Persian-language cancer discourse has received limited scholarly attention. This study sought to identify the emotional orientations and dominant themes in Iranian cancer patients' posts on X and to determine their implications for nursing practice.
Methods: This cross-sectional infodemiology study examined posts published between September 2017 and June 2025. Among 50 screened accounts belonging to self-identified cancer patients, 24 satisfied the inclusion criteria. A Persian-language keyword lexicon yielded 2,489 posts, of which 1,617 remained following manual relevance screening. Sentiment was classified into five categories with a Persian BERT-based model (ParsBERT–DeepSentiPers), and themes were identified by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling in Python 3.10 (Gensim, Transformers); a 12-topic model achieved the highest coherence (0.4729). Sentiment distributions were subsequently examined within each theme.
Results: Happy was the most frequently identified sentiment (31.2%), followed by Neutral (25.5%), Furious (17.3%), Angry (16.7%), and Delighted (9.4%); the overall proportion of positive sentiment (40.6%) exceeded that of negative sentiment (34.0%). Among the twelve identified themes, Treatment Process was the most prevalent (66.8%), followed by Personal Journey & Empowerment (23.7%) and Side Effects & Physical Suffering (23.2%), the only major theme in which negative posts outnumbered positive posts. Negative sentiment was concentrated in accounts of stigma, financial hardship, and experiences with the healthcare system. Metaphorical misuse of cancer language and fabricated illness claims were identified.
Conclusion: Iranian cancer patients' online narratives identify priorities for nursing practice, including symptom-management education, psychosocial screening, financial navigation, stigma reduction, and caregiver inclusion, while positioning nurses to guide patients toward credible online communities amid health misinformation.
