Background: This study was carried out on Iranian female adolescents to understandhealth needs for the purpose of designing health promoting intervention in schools.Methods: In this exploratory qualitative study, two focus group discussion (15 teachers)and 30 individual in-depth interviews were conducted among female adolescents in the eighthgrade in Zahedan, Iran. Qualitative content analysis was used for data evaluation.Results: The views of students and teachers demonstrated nine of needs including:informing students about the schools’ health project aims, education and training all dimensionsof health with an emphasis on mental health, use of experts in various fields for education fromother organisations, employing capable and trusted counselors in schools, utilisation of a varietyof teaching methods, activating reward systems for encouraging students’ participation in groupactivities, teaching communication and the ability to establish good relationships with parents andstrategies for resolving family conflict, teaching parents and students high-risk behaviours andstrategies for handling them as well as reforming wrong attitudes and indigenous sub-culture.Conclusion: This study found the different needs of Iranian female students comparedto other cultures about a health promoting school programme. Therefore, their contribution canprovide an insight for formulating policies and intervention in schools.

Periconceptional care such as lifestyle plays an important impact role in offspring health. The aim of the present study was to clarify the perspective of Avicenna on periconceptional care. Avicenna (980-1037 A.D.) was one of the outstanding Persian physicians, who made great contributions to the field of medical sciences, in particular, obstetrics. In advance, Avicenna's book, Canon of Medicine, was considered to find his perspectives on periconceptional care. Then, his ideas and theories were compared to the current findings by searching the keywords in main indexing systems including PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus and Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science as well as the search engine of Google Scholar. Current investigations show that gamete quality, pregnancy outcome, and offspring health at birth and long term depend on both parents' lifestyle in pre- and periconceptional period, as well as the intrauterine environment. Avicenna believed that seminal fluid, sperm, ovum, and developing conditions in utero were influenced by the stages of food digestion and the function of some organs. On the other hand, food digestion and function of the organs also depend on each parent's lifestyle and environmental factors. He mentioned 6 principles of healthy lifestyle: exercise, nutrition, sleep and awareness, excretion of body wastes and retention of necessary materials, psychic features, as well as air and climate. Thus, a multicomponent healthy lifestyle should be considered by parents of child-bearing age in an appropriate period before and in early pregnancy as well as elimination of any disorders in parents, to give birth to more healthy offspring.