Caregiver Burden in Chronic Diseases

Duration of human life has been substantially increased in the last fifty years. Survivals of diseases have been prolonged through the advances in medicine. Together with these gratifying consequences, there appeared novel difficulties to cope with. Furthermore developments including globalization, industrialization and transition from rural to urban life occurred during the last century; so family units became smaller and numbers of members on employment in family units increased. As a result numbers of family members to undertake the responsibility of care decreased. As a concept, caregiver burden expresses physical, psychosocial and financial reactions during the course of care providing. Distinct factors including structures of social, cultural and family units and health care systems may affect conditions of care. Caregiver’s age, gender, ethnicity, education, relationship with the patient, attitude towards providing care, financial situation, coping abilities, her own health, beliefs, social support and cultural pattern are the personal factors that are related to perception of caregiver burden. Burden of care giving is geared to differential aspects of care needs. For instance care needs of physically disabled and medical care requiring patients with spinal cord injuries may differ from care needs of chronic psychiatric disorders, demented patients in advanced age of their lives or cancer patients in terminal periods. Strain due to care giving may differ as a result of properties of care demands. It is aimed to review the burden of caregivers in different medical and psychiatric care requiring conditions and to introduce differential aspects of caregiver burden in these different conditions

TRedD—A database for tandem repeats over the edit distance

A ‘tandem repeat’ in DNA is a sequence of two or more contiguous, approximate copies of a pattern of nucleotides. Tandem repeats are common in the genomes of both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. They are significant markers for human identity testing, disease diagnosis, sequence homology and population studies. In this article, we describe a new database, TRedD, which contains the tandem repeats found in the human genome. The database is publicly available online, and the software for locating the repeats is also freely available. The definition of tandem repeats used by TRedD is a new and innovative definition based upon the concept of ‘evolutive tandem repeats’. In addition, we have developed a tool, called TandemGraph, to graphically depict the repeats occurring in a sequence. This tool can be coupled with any repeat finding software, and it should greatly facilitate analysis of results. Database URL: http://tandem.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu

PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGICAL SIGNATURES IN THE RETINA IN SCHIZOPHRENIA AND BIPOLAR DISORDER: AN OPTIC COHERENCE TOMOGRAPHY STUDY

Background: Retina is considered as a window to the brain due to the similarities in terms of development and pathologies. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) can perform quantitative examinations in the retina. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effects of drugs used in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (BD) on retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) and macular thickness. Subjects and methods: The study included schizophrenia (n=35) and euthymic BD (n=46) patients on various medications, and age, gender matched healthy control group (n=31). For retinal evaluation, measurements of RNFL and macula were performed with Optovue RTVue Premier OCT. Results: In the schizophrenia group, chlorpromazine equivalent dose of antipsychotics was a statistically significant negative predictor of left RNFL nasal superior region thickness. In the BD group, serum valproate level was a significant positive predictor of thickness in the right macular inferior outer, left macular nasal outer region, right RNFL inferotemporal, left temporal and inferotemporal regions. Conclusion: Since the retina consists of neurons, morphological or functional examination of retina may be beneficial for the evaluation of the effects of psychopharmalogical treatments in schizophrenia and BD. The outcome of this study implies that valproate has neuroprotective effects on the optic nerve and macula, and this finding is consistent with the literature implying neurotrophic effects of valproate

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Feelings of burden among family caregivers of people with spinal cord injury in Turkey

Study design: The study was designed as a cross-sectional survey. Objectives: The purpose of the study was to examine the level of feelings of burden in family caregivers of people with spinal cord injury (SCI) in Turkey, and to explore its predictors. Setting: Turkey. Methods: One hundred family caregivers of people with SCI completed measures of burden of caregiving, depression, social support and physical health. The SCI participants completed a measure of functional independence. Multivariate statistics and structural equation modeling (SEM) were conducted to identify significant predictors of caregiver burden. Results: Caregiver burden was significantly related to caregivers’ feelings of depression. SEM analysis showed that social support from family and from friends predicted caregiver burden via depression. Caregivers’ age, sex, educational level, physical health and household income did not significantly predict their feelings of depression or burden. Conclusions: Our findings revealed that support received from both families and friends is an important source for alleviating the depressive feelings of caregivers and, in return, their burden in the caregiving. In Turkey, high support from family members is expected and is important for psychological well-being, yet the current study showed that the support received from friends also has unique contribution to the well-being of the caregivers of persons with SCI. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of supportive relationships between family as well as friends for the caregivers who may have to provide lifetime care for their family member with special needs.WOS:000407265700012Scopus - Affiliation ID: 60105072PMID: 28169295Science Citation Index Expanded - Social Sciences Citation IndexQ2 - Q3ArticleUluslararası işbirliği ile yapılan - EVETAğustos2017YÖK - 2016-1

Shared and Disorder-Specific Event-Related Brain Oscillatory Markers of Attentional Dysfunction in ADHD and Bipolar Disorder.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder (BD) often present with overlapping symptoms and cognitive impairments, such as increased fluctuations in attentional performance measured by increased reaction-time variability (RTV). We previously provided initial evidence of shared and distinct event-related potential (ERP) impairments in ADHD and BD in a direct electrophysiological comparison, but no study to date has compared neural mechanisms underlying attentional impairments with finer-grained brain oscillatory markers. Here, we aimed to compare the neural underpinnings of impaired attentional processes in ADHD and BD, by examining event-related brain oscillations during a reaction-time task under slow-unrewarded baseline and fast-incentive conditions. We measured cognitive performance, ERPs and brain-oscillatory modulations of power and phase variability in 20 women with ADHD, 20 women with BD (currently euthymic) and 20 control women. Compared to controls, both ADHD and BD groups showed increased RTV in the baseline condition and increased RTV, theta phase variability and lower contingent negative variation in the fast-incentive condition. Unlike controls, neither clinical group showed an improvement from the slow-unrewarded baseline to the fast-incentive condition in attentional P3 amplitude or alpha power suppression. Most impairments did not differ between the disorders, as only an adjustment in beta suppression between conditions (lower in the ADHD group) distinguished between the clinical groups. These findings suggest shared impairments in women with ADHD and BD in cognitive and neural variability, preparatory activity and inability to adjust attention allocation and activation. These overlapping impairments may represent shared neurobiological mechanisms of attentional dysfunction in ADHD and BD, and potentially underlie common symptoms in both disorders.We thank all who made this research possible: The National Adult ADHD Clinic at the South London and Maudsley Hospital, Dr Helen Costello, Prof Sophia Frangou, Prof Anne Farmer, Jessica Deadman, Hannah Collyer, Sarah-Jane Gregori, and all participants who contributed their time to the study. Dr Giorgia Michelini was supported by a 1+3 PhD studentship awarded by the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London (G9817803). This project was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council studentship to Dr Viryanaga Kitsune (ES/100971X/1). Dr Giorgia Michelini and Prof Philip Asherson are supported by generous grants from the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience and South London and Maudsley National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust. The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication

Groups of soft sets

In this paper, we introduce two new operations on soft sets, called inverse production and characteristic production, by using Molodtsov's definition of the soft sets. We prove that the set of all soft sets over a universe U is an abelian group under the each operations and called "the inverse group of soft sets" and "the characteristic group of soft sets". We finally show that these groups are isomorphic

Int-Soft Substructures of Groups and Semirings with Applications

In this paper, we introduce a new type of subgroup and normal subgroup of a group, called intersection-soft subgroup (int-soft subgroup) and intersection-normal subgroup (int-soft normal subgroup), by using Molodtsov’s definition of the soft sets. We investigate their related properties with respect to soft set operations and group homomorphisms. Moreover, we introduce intersectionsoft subsemiring (int-soft subsemiring) and intersection-soft ideal (int-soft ideal) of a semiring and some related properties are investigated and illustrated by many examples. Finally, we give some applications of these new concepts to group theory and semiring theory

A NOTE ON SOFT NEAR-RINGS AND IDEALISTIC SOFT NEAR-RINGS

Molodtsov introduced the theory of soft sets, which can be seen as an effective mathematical tool to deal with uncertainties, since it is free from the difficulties that the usual theoretical approaches have troubled. In this paper, we apply the definitions proposed by Ali et al. [M. I. Ali, F. Feng, X. Liu, W. K. Min and M. Shabir, On some new operations in soft set theory, Comput. Math. Appl. 57 (2009), 1547-1553] to the concept of soft near-rings and substructures of soft near-rings, proposed by Atagun and Sezgin [A. O. Atagun and A. Sezgin, Soft Near-rings, submitted] and show them with illustrating examples. Moreover, we investigate the properties of idealistic soft near-rings with respect to the near-ring mappings and we show that the structure is preserved under the near-ring epimorphisms. Main purpose of this paper is to extend the study of soft near-rings from a theoretical aspect

EQUIPRIME N-IDEALS OF MONOGENIC N-GROUPS

In this paper we introduce the notion of equiprime N-ideals where N is a near-ring. We consider the interconnections of equiprime, 3-prime and completely prime N-ideals of a monogenic N-group Gamma. We show that if P is an equiprime N-ideal of Gamma, then (P: Gamma)(N) is an equiprime ideal of N, and that the converse holds when N is a right permutable near-ring and Gamma is a monogenic N-group