2. Patients and Methods
Approved by the Educational Deputy of Tehran University of Medical Sciences, the present study was a randomized
educational intervention trial carried out in 2013-2014. The inclusion criteria for the study population
included confirmed PV diagnosis through skin biopsy, being diagnosed with the disease for at least 6 months
and tendency to participate in the study. The exclusion criteria were being unable to attend the educational program
or missing one fourth of the planned sessions. 88 eligible patients with PV participated as intervention or
control groups. The objectives of the study were clearly explained to them in their first visit to the dermatology
center. Patients were invited to join group meetings in the center where they were asked queries about the study,
gave verbal informed consent, provided baseline data and were divided randomly to two groups of intervention
and control. The random allocation sort was performed using randomization block of size four. The subjects in
intervention group were assigned to participate in a 6-month educational program including group discussions
and problem solving strategies based on Health Belief Model to adopt self-care behaviors. The control group did
not receive any further intervention more than that of the routine treatment plan of the center. At the start of
study and three months after the last session of the self-care educational program, data were collected from patients
in both groups.
The self-designed questionnaire comprised of two sections: First, demographic characteristics and PV related
variables (14 items) including age, gender, level of education, family income, occupation, smoking, the time of
disease incidence and recurrence, history of surgery and disease duration; Second, KAP including 22 items assessing
knowledge, 10 items assessing attitudes based on 5-point Likert scale (completely disagree = 1 to completely
agree = 5) and 10 items for practice whose score was based on a 4-point Likert scale (not at all = 1 to