The experiences and thoughts of Turkish family physicians about COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative study.

BACKGROUND: Efforts to contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus would fall short without strong primary health care. OBJECTIVES: In this study, we aimed to determine the experiences, views and suggestions of family physicians regarding their roles, primary care health systems' preparedness and the challenges/needs for a better organisation during the pandemic via in-depth exploration. METHODS: Twenty-one family physicians working in different cities of Turkey participated in semi-structured interviews between 15/08/2020-21/01/2021. Convenience sampling was used. We did this qualitative study through interviews by telephone. Participants were asked seven open-ended questions. Thematic analysis was used, which included reading the transcript, identifying significant phrases and formulating meanings and validating meanings through research team discussions to reach consensus, identifying themes. RESULTS: Ten of the participants were female and the average age of the participants was 39.5 (SD = 10.5) years. Twelve of the family physicians are specialists in family medicine. Four themes were identified: role of primary care in the pandemic, pandemic preparedness of primary care, challenges of working in primary care centres during the COVID-19 pandemics, and approaches to future pandemics. CONCLUSION: Our study showed that, despite unprepared primary care and undefined roles of family physicians in pandemic planning, family physicians played a significant role in pandemic management.

Developing a label propagation approach for cancer subtype classification problem.

Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells grow uncontrollably and invade other tissues. Several types of cancer have various subtypes with different clinical and biological implications. Based on these differences, treatment methods need to be customized. The identification of distinct cancer subtypes is an important problem in bioinformatics, since it can guide future precision medicine applications. In order to design targeted treatments, bioinformatics methods attempt to discover common molecular pathology of different cancer subtypes. Along this line, several computational methods have been proposed to discover cancer subtypes or to stratify cancer into informative subtypes. However, existing works do not consider the sparseness of data (genes having low degrees) and result in an ill-conditioned solution. To address this shortcoming, in this paper, we propose an alternative unsupervised method to stratify cancer patients into subtypes using applied numerical algebra techniques. More specifically, we applied a label propagation-based approach to stratify somatic mutation profiles of colon, head and neck, uterine, bladder, and breast tumors. We evaluated the performance of our method by comparing it to the baseline methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach highly renders tumor classification tasks by largely outperforming the state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised approaches.

Effect of anions on the cloud point temperature of aqueous poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) solutions.

Poly(2-alkyl-2-oxazoline)s have recently gained attention in especially biological applications due to their lower critical solution temperature being close to the body temperature and their biocompatibility. The understanding of how cloud point temperature (T(c)) depends on the salt concentration and the molecular mechanisms responsible for such behavior are important to tune T(c) as desired by the applications. In this paper, we report the effect of a series of sodium salts on T(c) of aqueous poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) (PEOX) solutions by dynamic light scattering. PEOX samples having four different molecular weights were investigated, and the results were compared with those of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), the mostly investigated and used thermoresponsive polymer. Kosmotropic anions decreased T(c) linearly while chaotropic anions increased T(c) nonlinearly with salt concentration. The contributions of different mechanisms to T(c) change have been discussed. Our results indicate that the dominant mechanism is the dehydration of PEOX for divalent kosmotropic anions (CO(3)(2-), SO(4)(2-), S(2)O(3)(2-)) and direct binding for chaotropic anions (NO(3)(-), I(-), ClO(4)(-), SCN(-)). For the remaining monovalent kosmotropic anions (H(2)PO(4)(-), F(-), Cl(-), Br(-)), a combination of dehydration and surface tension mechanisms was in effect. The additional contribution of the surface tension mechanism for the monovalent kosmotropic anions was inferred for different molecular weight PEOX samples and also for PNIPAM. With PEOX molecular weight decreasing from 500,000 to 5000 g/mol, T(c) decreased less with salt concentration which was attributed to the contribution of the surface tension mechanism. For PEOX samples, the decrease of T(c) with kosmotropic anion concentration was faster compared to PNIPAM due to differences in their chemical structure. Our results show that the molecular mechanisms of interactions between PEOX chains and specific anions can simply be inferred from determination of T(c) by a common technique-dynamic light scattering.

Diastematomyelia: a case with familial aggregation of neural tube defects.

Intrauterine neural tube defects, meningomyelocele, and diastematomyelia are developmental errors at different stages of the closure of the neural tube. The familial aggregation of these neural tube defects is not previously reported in the literature and should make one think about a common embryogenesis and a possible common mechanism of etiopathogenesis leading to anomalies at different stages of this embryogenesis. This paper presents a 12-year-old Turkish boy with diastematomyelia who was suspected with a demonstrative dermatologic finding without any neurologic sign and diagnosed with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He has a positive family history of a stillbirth with neural tube defect, an exitus with meningomyelocele, and an epileptic child in his female siblings.