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Essential tremor (ET) is one of the most common neurological diseases. New evidence suggest that ET is associated with cognitive disorders other than motor symptoms. We aimed to investigate executive dysfunctions, which are comorbid cognitive deficiencies that may accompany ET. The study was conducted as an observational, case-control study in the Neurology Department of Ankara City Hospital in a 3-month period. The "Fahn-Tolosa-Marin Tremor Evaluation Scale" was used to rate tremor severity. Both patients and control group were subjected to the Mini Mental Test, followed by the Stroop TBAG test (TBAG is composed of the first letters of "TUBİTAK Temel Bilimler Araştırma Grubu," which means Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey Basic Sciences Research Group), word fluency (category fluency), phonemic fluency (K), and abstract thinking (binary similarities, proverb interpretation) tests. Both the patient and the control group consisted of 20 women and 20 men, with age, gender, and educational background compatible. Mean age of the patient group was 34.80 ± 13.23 years, while it was 34.95 ± 10.21 years in control group. In the ET group, statistically significant impairment was detected in the Stroop Test section 5 duration and error + correction number, category fluency, binary similarity, and phonemic fluency tests compared to the control group. There was a correlation between the severity of tremor and especially Stroop, category fluency, and binary similarity tests such that, as the severity of tremor increased, these test scores deteriorated. In ET patients, an impairment, accompanying tremor, may be present in executive functions that are a part of frontal lobe functions even in younger patients. This finding may suggest that impairment in the cerebellum-thalamus-frontal lobe connection may play a role in ET pathology.

The aim is to investigate the rate of GBS in the pre- and postpandemic period and potential differences in probable COVID-19-associated Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) cases and nonassociated cases. The medical records of individuals older than 18 years who were hospitalized with acute and rapidly developing progressive extremity weakness between March 2019 and March 2021 were analyzed retrospectively, and the rate of GBS 1 year before the first reported COVID-19 case (March 2020) in Turkey and 1 year later was compared. Neurological symptoms, medical histories, and GBS disability scores, as well as the findings of electrophysiological, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) investigations at the time of presentation, were reviewed. The GBS cases were divided into those with confirmed COVID-19 within 6 weeks before the clinical presentation of GBS and those without COVID-19. The rate of COVID-19 was significantly higher in the patients with GBS as an etiological factor. When the probable COVID-19-associated GBS cases and nonassociated cases were compared, there was a significant between-group difference with respect to sedimentation, C-reactive protein, D-dimer, ferritin, albumin, lymphocyte number, mean platelet volume, neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio, fibrinogen, and lactate dehydrogenase values. In addition, there was a significant between-group difference in admission and discharge disability scores. The GBS rate did not increase after the COVID-19 pandemic, but probable COVID-19-associated GBS significantly affected inflammatory markers and admission-discharge GBS disability scores.

Introduction: Refractory overactive bladder (OAB) in children can be treated with second line modalities such as as biofeedback, transcutaneous electrical stimulation (TENS), and botulinum toxin. In this study, we aimed to investigate the efficacy of biofeedback-assisted pelvic floor muscle therapy (PFMT) on symptoms, bladder capacity, uroflowmetry, and pelvic floor muscle activity (PFMA) in children with resistant OAB or dysfunctional voiding (DV) with associated seconder bladder overactivity (DV/SBO)., Materials and Methods: A total of 24 children with resistant OAB were included in the study. Patients were divided into two groups as: group-1 pure OAB and group-2 DV/SBO. Children were evaluated with voiding diary, uroflowmetry-EMG, PFMA before and after treatment. All patients were treated with PFMT., Results: Urgency cured or improved in 12 of 17 (71%) of children in group-1 and in six of seven (86%) children in group-2 (P < 0.0001 and 0.031, respectively). Other symptoms cured or improved with 64%-100% recovery rates in group-1 and 50%-80% in group-2. Maximum voided volume (maxVV) in voiding diary increased from 81.6 to 150.9 mL in group-1 and from 115.6 to 175.7 mL in group-2 (P < 0.0001 and 0.063, respectively). Mean work value of PFMA increased and mean rest value of PFMA decreased significantly (P < 0.0001, 0.018 and P = 0.002 and 0.018, respectively)., Conclusion: The measurement of PFMA in children with refractory OAB or DV/SBO gives information on the strength and endurance of PFMs. In children with refractory OAB or DV/SBO, biofeedback-assisted PFMT provides symptomatic improvement and increases functional bladder capacity., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Background: Seed location filtering is critical in DNA read mapping, a process where billions of DNA fragments (reads) sampled from a donor are mapped onto a reference genome to identify genomic variants of the donor. State-of-the-art read mappers 1) quickly generate possible mapping locations for seeds (i.e., smaller segments) within each read, 2) extract reference sequences at each of the mapping locations, and 3) check similarity between each read and its associated reference sequences with a computationally-expensive algorithm (i.e., sequence alignment) to determine the origin of the read. A seed location filter comes into play before alignment, discarding seed locations that alignment would deem a poor match. The ideal seed location filter would discard all poor match locations prior to alignment such that there is no wasted computation on unnecessary alignments., Results: We propose a novel seed location filtering algorithm, GRIM-Filter, optimized to exploit 3D-stacked memory systems that integrate computation within a logic layer stacked under memory layers, to perform processing-in-memory (PIM). GRIM-Filter quickly filters seed locations by 1) introducing a new representation of coarse-grained segments of the reference genome, and 2) using massively-parallel in-memory operations to identify read presence within each coarse-grained segment. Our evaluations show that for a sequence alignment error tolerance of 0.05, GRIM-Filter 1) reduces the false negative rate of filtering by 5.59x-6.41x, and 2) provides an end-to-end read mapper speedup of 1.81x-3.65x, compared to a state-of-the-art read mapper employing the best previous seed location filtering algorithm., Conclusion: GRIM-Filter exploits 3D-stacked memory, which enables the efficient use of processing-in-memory, to overcome the memory bandwidth bottleneck in seed location filtering. We show that GRIM-Filter significantly improves the performance of a state-of-the-art read mapper. GRIM-Filter is a universal seed location filter that can be applied to any read mapper. We hope that our results provide inspiration for new works to design other bioinformatics algorithms that take advantage of emerging technologies and new processing paradigms, such as processing-in-memory using 3D-stacked memory devices.

Motivation: High throughput DNA sequencing (HTS) technologies generate an excessive number of small DNA segments -called short reads- that cause significant computational burden. To analyze the entire genome, each of the billions of short reads must be mapped to a reference genome based on the similarity between a read and 'candidate' locations in that reference genome. The similarity measurement, called alignment, formulated as an approximate string matching problem, is the computational bottleneck because: (i) it is implemented using quadratic-time dynamic programming algorithms and (ii) the majority of candidate locations in the reference genome do not align with a given read due to high dissimilarity. Calculating the alignment of such incorrect candidate locations consumes an overwhelming majority of a modern read mapper's execution time. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a fast and effective filter that can detect incorrect candidate locations and eliminate them before invoking computationally costly alignment algorithms., Results: We propose GateKeeper, a new hardware accelerator that functions as a pre-alignment step that quickly filters out most incorrect candidate locations. GateKeeper is the first design to accelerate pre-alignment using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which can perform pre-alignment much faster than software. When implemented on a single FPGA chip, GateKeeper maintains high accuracy (on average >96%) while providing, on average, 90-fold and 130-fold speedup over the state-of-the-art software pre-alignment techniques, Adjacency Filter and Shifted Hamming Distance (SHD), respectively. The addition of GateKeeper as a pre-alignment step can reduce the verification time of the mrFAST mapper by a factor of 10., Availability and Implementation: https://github.com/BilkentCompGen/GateKeeper., Contact: mohammedalser@bilkent.edu.tr or onur.mutlu@inf.ethz.ch or calkan@cs.bilkent.edu.tr., Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online., (© The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com)

Objective: Postpartum nerve injuries are rare complications of labor and the lower extremity peripheral nerves are the frequently affected ones. In this case report, we are presenting a patient who developed brachial plexus injury after a forceful vaginal delivery., Case Report: The patient is a 28-year-old woman with right upper extremity pain, numbness and weakness, whose symptoms started just after labor. According to the clinical evaluation, electrodiagnostic study and magnetic resonance imaging, it was diagnosed as the brachial plexus injury., Conclusion: We concluded that similar to the ones seen after some surgeries, brachial plexus may be injured also during delivery and the labor positions should be considered.

Study Design: A prospective, controlled clinical study performed in a tertiary care center., Objective: To determine reliability and validity of low-tech measurements in assessment of range of motion (ROM) of lumbar flexion in ankylosing spondylitis (AS)., Summary of Background Data: ROM measurements of lumbar flexion in patients with AS and healthy subjects are evaluated using original Schober test (OST), modified Schober index (MSI), and modified-modified Schober test (MMST) and compared with radiography., Methods: Fifty patients with AS and 17 healthy subjects were included. A tape measure was used for measuring OST, MSI, and MMST, and goniometer was used for measuring angle of lumbar ROM on lateral radiographical views in erect position and maximal forward bending position., Results: Angle between L1 and S1 vertebrae displayed a change upon flexion by 18.2° ± 18.7° in AS group and 30.4° ± 11.1° in controls (P = 0.002). Angle between L3 and S1 vertebrae was detected to change upon flexion by 25.3° ± 25.4° in AS group and 46.7° ± 14.2° in controls (P = 0.0001). A weak correlation was observed between MSI, OST, and L1-S1 radiographical mobility measurements as (P = 0.018 and P = 0.063) and MSI, OST, and L3-S1 radiographical mobility measurements as (P = 0.009 and P = 0.024), respectively for AS. There were correlations between MSI, OST, and radiographical mobility measurements in patients with AS (r = 0.333, P = 0.018, and r = 0.363, P = 0.009, respectively). There was a correlation between OST and radiographical mobility measurements in controls (r = -0.504, P = 0.039). Intrarater reliability was determined to be excellent for OST, MSI, and MMST., Conclusion: Despite excellent intrarater reliabilities for OST, MSI, and MMST, only a weak correlation could be established between OST, MSI, and MMST and radiographical analysis. MMST was found not to reflect lumbar spine angular motions. Although MSI reflected spinal mobility better than OST, both seemed to reflect lumbar spine angular motion poorly.

Objective: Although bone mineral density (BMD) is an important predictor of hip fracture, there is a large overlap of BMD values between those who fracture their hips and those who do not. The aim of this study was to evaluate differences in the structural parameters of the hip in patients with osteopenia and osteoporosis in the hip region and to assess their relationship with osteoporotic fracture risk, age and gender., Materials and Methods: In this observational retrospective study, 150 patients with osteopenia (100 postmenopausal women and 50 men ≥50 years of age) and 125 patients with osteoporosis in the hip (100 postmenopaussal women and 25 men ≥50 years of age) were included. In addition to densitometry measurements by DEXA (Dual Energy X-ray Absorbimetry), structural variables were determined using the Hip Strength Analysis program (HSA)., Results: In logistic regression analyses, the femoral neck BMD (odds ratio (OR), 2.6; 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 1.8-3.8), age (OR per 10 years 1.4; 95% CI, 1.1-1.9), femoral neck shaft angle (NSA) (OR 1.5; 95% CI, 1.2-2.1), Femur Strength Index (FSI) (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.3-2.2), and Cross sectional area (CSA) (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.2-2.1) were all associated with osteoporotic fractures in women and men. Osteopenic patients had smaller femoral neck-shaft angles (NSA) compared to osteoporotic patients (p<0.05). This angle was larger in women (p<0.05); and women had decreased (FSI) (p<0.001) and CSA (p<0.05), which cause increased fracture risk., Conclusion: Spatial distribution of bone tissue is a useful determinant of fracture risk.

The objectives of this study were to examine the effect of TDZ and BAP on shoot proliferation and to develop a satisfactory rooting procedure for in vitro propagation of caper (Capparis spinosa L). TDZ was found to be more effective than BAP in shoot production. The highest shoot number per explant (45.7) was achieved on the media that contained 4.54 microM TDZ in the absence of IAA. TDZ at 4.54 microM alone or in combination with 0.57 microM IAA did not inhibit shoot elongation, although they produced the most shoots. Dipping the caper shoots in the solution of IBA at 24.6 microM for 10 minutes before planting on MS media, improved the rooting percentage up to 80.5% under a 16 hr photoperiod.

Endocervical specimens obtained from 251 registered prostitutes working in a brothel in Izmir, were screened for Chlamydia trachomatis by using a direct fluorescent antibody test. Twenty seven of these specimens were excluded because of inadequate sampling. Of the remaining 224 samples, 57 (25.4%) were found positive for C. trachomatis. It is concluded that, prostitutes play an important role in the transmission of chlamydial and other sexually transmitted diseases, and routine screening and appropriate treatment of chlamydial infections in prostitutes will help to control this disease in the general population.