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BACKGROUND Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is one of the most important health problems worldwide with a high rate of morbidity and mortality. It is a major risk factor for cirrhosis and liver cancer. Currently, Iran is located in the intermediate HBV zone; however, recent studies have provided some evidence indicating an epidemiological change in the country. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of HBV in Iran. METHODS A systematic review was conducted to evaluate the studies performed in the past 25 years that have reported the prevalence of HBV infection and its associated factors in the Iranian general population (1990-2014). Any study assessing and reporting serum Hbs Ag levels was included in this review. RESULTS After excluding all impertinent studies, 19 eligible studies were included in the analysis. The overall prevalence of HBV was 3% (95% CI 2% to 3%). Its distribution showed that the prevalence of HBV varies in different provinces from 0.87% to 8.86%. The HBV rate was highest in the Golestan (8.86%) and lowest in the Kurdistan (0.87%) provinces. CONCLUSION This study provides some evidence about the prevalence of HBV in Iran. However, the collected data was very heterogenic, even within a single province, which made it hard to estimate a single-point prevalence. High quality studies are needed to find reliable information about HBV prevalence and to decrease the heterogeneity of results in the country.

Background: Acute leukemia is the prevalent malignancy in pediatrics. One of the most important causing factors of acute lymphoblastic leukemia is mutations of proto oncogenes and their chang in to oncogenes. Activation of N-RAS proto-oncogene due to point mutations plays a major role in ALL malignancy. Since there was no report on the frequency of N-RAS gene mutation in Iranian pediatric ALL patients, therefore we decided to determine its frequency and compare the results with age, sex and type of ALL. Materials and Methods: In this study, 60 pediatric ALL patients from Tehran Mahak hospital were screened for the mutations of N-RAS gene at codons 12 ,13 1nd 61.DNA was extracted from peripheral blood samples before the start of chemotherapy. The above mentioned codons were amplified by PCR and analyzed by restriction endonuclease enzymes. Results: We could detect mutations in 7 cases of 60(11.7%) patients. Most of the mutations were detected in males with an age less than 5 years old. The frequency of mutations for codons 12, 13 and 61 were 8.3%,3.3% and 1.7% respectively. Most of the mutations (71.4%) were found in c-ALL subtype. Conclusion: We detected mutations in 11.7% of our ALL patients. In general , frequency of the mutations that we found was in agreement with the results of other studies. However , to do study with more patients and wider range of age using a combination of PCR-RFLP and direct gene sequencing is highly recommended.