Epidemiology of pemphigus in Turkey: One-year prospective study of 220 cases

Pemphigus is a group of rare and life-threatening autoimmune blistering diseases of the skin and mucous membranes. Although they occur worldwide, their incidence shows wide geographical variation, and prospective data on the epidemiology of pemphigus are very limited. Objective of this work is to evaluate the incidence and epidemiological and clinical features of patients with pemphigus in Turkey. All patients newly diagnosed with pemphigus between June 2013 and June 2014 were prospectively enrolled in 33 dermatology departments in 20 different provinces from all seven regions of Turkey. Disease parameters including demography and clinical findings were recorded. A total of 220 patients were diagnosed with pemphigus during the 1-year period, with an annual incidence of 4.7 per million people in Turkey. Patients were predominantly women, with a male to female ratio of 1:1.41. The mean age at onset was 48.9 years. Pemphigus vulgaris (PV) was the commonest clinical subtype (n=192; 87.3%), followed by pemphigus foliaceus (n=21; 9.6%). The most common clinical subtype of PV was the mucocutaneous type (n=83; 43.2%). The mean Pemphigus Disease Area Index was 28.14±22.21 (mean ± Standard Deviation).  The incidence rate of pemphigus in Turkey is similar to the countries of South-East Europe, higher than those reported for the Central and Northern European countries and lower than the countries around the Mediterranean Sea and Iran. Pemphigus is more frequent in middle-aged people and is more common in women. The most frequent subtype was PV, with a 9-fold higher incidence than pemphigus foliaceus.   </p

A User Interest Model for Web Page Navigation

Making recommendation requires predicting what is of interest to a user at a specific time. Even the same user may have di#erent desires at di#erent times. It is important to extract the aggregate interest of a user from his or her navigational path through the site in a session

Mixed type audio classification with Support Vector Machine

Content-based classification of audio data is an important problem for various applications such as overall analysis of audio-visual streams, boundary detection of video story segment, extraction of speech segments from video, and content-based video retrieval. Though the classification of audio into single type such as music, speech, environmental sound and silence is well studied, classification of mixed type audio data, such as clips having speech with music as background, is still considered a difficult problem. In this paper, we present a mixed type audio classification system based on Support Vector Machine (SVM). In order to capture characteristics of different types of audio data, besides selecting audio features, we also design four different representation formats for each feature. Our SVM-based audio classifier can classify audio data into five types: music, speech, environment sound, speech mixed with music, and music mixed with environment sound. The experimental results show that our system outperforms other classification systems using k Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Neural Network (NN), and Naive Bayes (NB)

THE EFFECTS OF CEFTRIAXONE, TEICOPLANIN AND MEROPENEM ON THE HEMORHEOLOGICAL PARAMETERS

Objective: Microcirculatory blood flow is altered in sepsis. Changes in hemorheological parameters may contribute to the alterations in microcirculatory blood flow. This study was conducted to observe the effects of ceftriaxone, teicoplanin and meropenem, commonly used antimicrobial agents in sepsis, on hemorheological properties

The benefits of hormone replacement therapy on plasma and platelet antioxidant status and fatty acid composition in healthy postmenopausal women

Oxidative stress is suggested to play an important role in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Various hormone replacement therapy (HRT) protocols are used to reduce the CVD risk in postmenopausal women. Recent studies found that HRT lowers lipid levels and improves vascular endothelial function in postmenopausal women. In this study the effects of HRT on plasma and platelet membrane fatty acid composition and the oxidant-antioxidant system in postmenopausal women are investigated. Blood samples were obtained from 50 postmenopausal women. Before starting treatment, all participants underwent clinical, biochemical and hormonal screening procedures including gynecologic and physical breast examination. Then oral HRT (2mg estrodiol valerate+1mg cyproterone acetate) were given to all subjects for 1 year. Levels of malondialdehyde (MDA), total thiol (t-SH) and fatty acid contents, activities of glutathione-Stransferase (GST) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) were measured before and after treatment. Platelet membrane palmitic, stearic and oleic acid contents decreased (6.5%, 22.5% and 21.9% respectively) and linoleic and arachidonic acid contents increased (21.2% and 25.4% respectively) after HRT. Platelet MDA, GST and SOD levels were lower and t-SH content was higher than pre-treatment levels. These results indicate that hormone replacement therapy may affect platelet membrane fatty acid content and oxidant-antioxidant balance in postmenopausal women