Background & Objectives: Schizophrenia is a chronic disease with frequent periods of exacerbation & remission which influences all aspects of the patient's life, in a way that the patient never returns to his premorbid life. The goal of this survey is Study of main signs in Schizophrenia patients in Ardabil City.

Methods:�This study was a descriptive-analytic one which was done on all of the patients with schizophrenia admitted in Fatemi & Issar hospitals in 2006. A sample of 100 was selected. To study the main signs of schizophrenia in these patients, a questionnaire was used. To screen the patients with schizophrenia, MMPI test was used. The findings were analyzed by descriptive statistics & through the computer software SPSS. Also a PCA method of factor analysis was used for the hypotheses.

Results:�79 patients were male and the rest female.�The most frequent main sign in these patients was attention deficit, & social withdrawal was at the second place. Also, the most frequent type of schizophrenia was paranoid schizophrenia (44%=44 patients). The most widely used was clozapine.

Conclusion: The findings of this study have a concordance with the results of the last studies about the main signs of schizophrenia & also with DSM-IV & Bluerian & Kreaplian symptoms (except from the perception disorders).

  Background & Objectives: Ethambutol is one of the four main drugs in treatment of tuberculosis. The most common mutation associated with this drug resistance usually occurs in codon 306 of embB. The aim of this study was to detect ethambutol resistance using Allele-Specific PCR and Spoligotyping in various subtypes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

  Methods : 140 sputum specimens were collected from suspected TB patients. They were digested and decontaminated using Pettrof method before culturing them on LJ medium. Drug susceptibility testing was performed on 106 culture positive specimens using proportional method. DNA was extracted from the isolated organisms and subsequently subjected to Allele-Specific PCR to detect any mutationin embB306. Spoligotyping was then used to determine the subtypes.

  Results: Out of 106 cultures positive samples, 36 samples (33.9%) showed resistance to ethambutol using proportional method. Allele-Specific PCR assay identified 93 as sensitive and 13 (27.6%) as resistant strains. The results of PCR were in agreement with result of proportional method. The PCR method revealed that 61.5% of mutation occurred in the first and 38.5% in third nucleotides. Spoligotyping differentiated Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains into Beijing (10 9.4%), Bovis (2 1.8%), CAS (24 22.6%), EAI (1 0.9%), Haarlem (27 25.4%), LAM (5 4.7%), Manu (5 4.7%), T (27 25.4%) and U( 2 1,8%) families. The high frequency of mutation in embB gene was belonged to Haarlem, CAS and T subfamilies.

  Conclusion: Based on results current study, mutations in the genes other than embB might have occurred in the resistant strains that gave negative result in Allele-Specific PCR assay. Therefore other mechanisms of resistance to this antibiotic should be investigated.