Background & Objective: Each year thousands of children under five years old die due to acute respiratory infection and diarrheal diseases. A huge number of infants and children are hospitalized and visited by the physicians whereas most of these diseases can be prevented with timely treatment. Child health maintenance and improvement is one of the most important considerations in each society. Moreover, identifying child morbidity patterns should be a matter of concern in order to improve the health services. This study provides an overview of the leading causes of hospitalization among children with the aim of determining the most important causes of hospitalization and offering appropriate strategies to decrease them.

 Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2001 in Ardabil Ali-Asghar hospital. The subjects were randomly selected from the admission list on a daily basis. A questionnaire including demographic characteristics such as age, sex, time of admission and primary diagnosis was completed for each subject. The data were analyzed by SPSS software using descriptive statistics.

 Results: A total of 1945 patients were admitted almost half of which were studied. Febrile convulsion was found to be the most common cause of hospitalization (26%) while gastroenteritis (22.1%) and pneumonia (20%) were in the second and third order. Other causes included epilepsy, drug poisoning, meningitis, mumps, drug encephalitis, asthma, etc.

 Conclusion: According to the findings of this study, standard case management is necessary especially about febrile convulsion which is the most common cause of hospitalization. Since the present pattern is different from similar studies, further investigations are required to identify its causes.

  Background & Objectives: Respiratory distress is one of the most important causes of children admission in hospitals. In most cases, it is due to pneumonia, asthma or acute bronchiolitis. Since theses diseases have a lot of symptoms in common, we decided to study these disorders in more details to facilitate the appropriate diagnosis and treatment based on clinical, laboratory and radiologic findings.

  Methods: 238 children who suffered from respiratory distress and were admitted to pediatric ward in Ghaem hospital were studied. This descriptive study was performed during 3 years including 2 retrospective and one prospective year. The relationship between variables was analyzed using chi-square test.

  Results: The patients were six months to five years old. Pneumonia (40.3%) asthma (30.3%) and bronchiolotis (16.8%) were the most common causes of respiratory distress. Totally, 61.1% of the patients were male. The mean age of the patients was 10.3 months in bronchiolitis and 36.6 months for asthma. The most common symptom among these three diseases was tachypnea. Most of the patients were admitted in winter and fall respectively. The main radiologic pattern in pneumonia was pulmonary infiltration and for asthma and acute bronchiolitis it was pulmonary hyperinflation.

  Conclusion: Proper attention to signs and symptoms as well as laboratory and radiologic fndings is necessary for accurate diagnosis. In this study the most common cause of respiratory distress in children under 5 was found to be pneumonia, asthma and bronchiolitis respectively.

  Back grounds and objectives : Arthrosclerosis is the major cause of cerberovascular disorders and major problems of industrial countries. Mortality from chronic diseases such as arthrosclerosis and mortality from infectious diseases have a reverse, relationship with economic and educational levels of people. For this reason, investigating the relationship of MI with other risk factors such as infections has been of great interest.

  Methods: This was a case- control study. 60 patients with MI and 60 matched cases were selected from other wards of Boali Hospital. All of the patients who had been admitted with myocardial infarction diagnosis in the time of study were selected and information about them was recorded in a researcher made questionnaire. Serum sample from patients and control case were sent to determinations of IgG Anti Chlamydia antibodies with enzyme immune assay. Control case were selected from other wards of hospital who matched in age, sex and same test in serum sample was done.

  Results: In this study in each group 48 persons (80%) were male and 12 persons (20%) were female. The range of age group was 35-80. Mean age group was 58.83±12.6 (SD) and mean age of control tools was 59.08±11.59.All of the patients in each group had anti Chlamydia antibodies (IgG) (titer more than 5U/ml). The mean range IgG in both groups were compared through t-test and there was no significant difference between them (p=0.85).

  Conclusion: In this study all of the cases and controls had anti Chlamydia antibodies. (IgG) high prevalence due to cold climate and high crowd of people in this area may be related to Chlamydia infection.