Editorial

Health, as a general topic and as one of the principle human requirements in all societies, recently has been apt to great environmental and social changes. So as the aforementioned societies depending on their facilities, and development in economics and human well-being, go through different stages of epidemiological transition and in each phase of this transition will face various necessities. Nowadays developed societies, entering the final phases of this transition, are going to control non-communicable diseases and their risk factors, so as health indices and statistics show this significant reduction. Reciprocally, developing countries such as the Islamic Republic of Iran are faced with a lot of diseases and their related risk factors. The rapid economic, social and cultural growth of these societies, which is accompanied by increased population and life expectancy, has caused a considerable population of these countries to reach to the age of suffering from non- communicable diseases. On the other hand, great social changes have led to the appearance of such risk factors as smoking, immobility, obesity, hypertension, and so on. Increased costs of health care services accompanied by increased cost which is paid by people known as out of pocket are unavoidable outcomes of this unordinary phenomenon. Executing the project of family physician is a proper and practical method to confront this event. This project has begun to work in rural areas for the last seven years and recently its urban version has been introduced. We hope that using preventive principles at all levels leads to a reduction in disease load especially non- communicable diseases all over our country and by safe and harmless steps we could enter the next phases of the epidemiological transition