Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Smoking in Friends and Relatives of Patients in Emergency Room: A New Frontier in the Fight against Tobacco

Background: Emergency rooms (ERs) are usually crowded with friends and relatives (F&Rs) of the patients. This experience may result in changes in smoking behaviors and create opportunities for smoking cessation interventions. The study aims to investigate these changes and offers a new frontier in the fight against smoking.Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in the ERs of two universities in different cities. A questionnaire consisting of 18 questions was applied to F&Rs of the emergency patients. Statistical analysis was performed using Jamovi program.Findings: A total of 603 respondents were included in the study. Of them, 71.3% were first-degree relatives, 51.7% waited 5 or more times in ER before, and 68.6% spent 0-2 hours in a day around the ER. Upon witnessing patients in the ERs, 53.4% of the F&Rs had the idea of quitting smoking and 42.9% wanted to have smoking cessation therapy during their wait in the hospital. While 76.1% of the participants were not using different brands of cigarettes when offered in normal life, this rate was lower around the ERs (64.6%) (P < 0.001). Participants smoked 0.82 ± 0.34 cigarette per hour in normal life excluding sleeping time; this number raised almost 6 folds during the wait (4.85 ± 2.11) (P < 0.001).Conclusion: F&Rs smoked more during waiting around ERs. However, they also expressed desire to quit smoking and receive smoking cessation intervention during the wait. Providing smoking cessation counseling to F&Rs in the ER may be a valuable intervention

Reserve price optimization with header bidding and Ad Exchange

The extremely high turnover of online advertising makes it one of the most important sources of income for many online ad publishers. Advertising through world wide web is mainly performed by Real Time Bidding in which the advertisers and the publishers participate to online auctions for trading the ad slots. Publishers usually set the reserve prices for their ad slots and any winning buyer in the auctions performed by ad exchanges has to pay at least the value of reserve price. Header bidding is a way of real time bidding and it becomes very popular, but how to use it together with advertising Exchanges (AdX) to achieve good revenue for online publishers is not well studied. In this paper, we propose a method that makes use of the historical auction data from header bidding and AdX to learn and optimize the reserve price for AdX. We propose a method based on supervised learning and survival analysis to increase the reserve price. The method assumes no information about current auctions and the bids of header bidding and AdX response are predicted and used to determine the highest possible reserve price. The experiments with real-world auction data show the promising results of our method in increasing the expected revenue of online publishers

International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) national report on device-associated infection rates in 19 cities of Turkey, data summary for 2003-2012

Background: Device-associated healthcare-acquired infections (DA-HAI) pose a threat to patient safety, particularly in the intensive care unit (ICU). We report the results of the International Infection Control Consortium (INICC) study conducted in Turkey from August 2003 through October 2012

Dealing with the gray zones in the management of gastric cancer: The consensus statement of the Istanbul Group

The geographical location and differences in tumor biology significantly change the management of gastric cancer. The prevalence of gastric cancer ranks fifth and sixth among men and women, respectively, in Turkey. The international guidelines from the Eastern and Western countries fail to manage a considerable amount of inconclusive issues in the management of gastric cancer. The uncertainties lead to significant heterogeneities in clinical practice, lack of homogeneous data collection, and subsequently, diverse outcomes

Disappearance of Biodiversity and Future of Our Foods

“I. Uluslararası Organik Tarım ve Biyoçeşitlilik Sempozyumu 27-29 Eylül Bayburt

The prevalence of microalbuminuria and relevant cardiovascular risk factors in Turkish hypertensive patients.

Objectives: A growing body of data illustrates the importance of microalbuminuria (MAU) as a strong predictor of cardiovascular risk in the hypertensive population. The present study was designed to define the prevalence of MAU and associated cardiovascular risk factors among Turkish hypertensive outpatients. Study design: Representing the Turkish arm of the multinational i-SEARCH study involving 1,750 sites in 26 countries around the world, a total of 1,926 hypertensive patients from different centers were included in this observational and cross-sectional survey study. Patients with reasons for a false-positive MAU test were excluded. The prevalence of MAU was assessed using a dipstick test, and patients were inquired about comorbidities, comedication, and known cardiovascular risk factors. Results: The overall prevalence of MAU was 64.7% and there was no difference between genders. Most of the patients (82.5%) had uncontrolled hypertension, 35.6% had dyslipidemia, and 35.5% had diabetes, predominantly type 2. Almost one-third of the patients (26.4%) had at least one cardiovascular-related comorbidity, with 20.3% having documented coronary artery disease (CAD). Almost all patients (96.8%) had one or more risk factors for cardiovascular disease in addition to hypertension, including family history of myocardial infarction or CAD, diabetes, dyslipidemia, lack of physical exercise, and smoking. A trend towards higher MAU values in the presence of CAD was determined. Conclusion: Microalbuminuria tests should be routinely used as a screening and monitoring tool for the assessment of subsequent cardiovascular morbidity and mortality among hypertensive patients. © 2011 Turkish Society of Cardiology