Life Satisfaction and Psychological Status of Mothers with Disabled Children: A Descriptive Study.

The purpose of this study is to determine the life satisfaction, general health conditions, and depression levels of mothers with disabled children and the problems they experienced. This descriptive study was conducted between 1 and 30 December 2014 in a rehabilitation center that renders services for totally 254 physically and mentally-disabled children in Turkey. 184 mothers participated in the study. The data were collected by using an information form, the life satisfaction scale, the general health questionnaire, and the Beck depression inventory. General Health Questionnaire scores of the mothers who had another disabled child and Beck Depression Inventory scores of the working mothers were significantly high. In addition, a significant difference was found between the scores of Life Satisfaction Scale, General Health Questionnaire, and Beck Depression Inventory by mothers who had difficulties regarding care of their children, were worried for their children, and experienced uncertainty with regard to the future.

Ontology-based automatic identification of public health-related Turkish tweets.

Social media analysis, such as the analysis of tweets, is a promising research topic for tracking public health concerns including epidemics. In this paper, we present an ontology-based approach to automatically identify public health-related Turkish tweets. The system is based on a public health ontology that we have constructed through a semi-automated procedure. The ontology concepts are expanded through a linguistically motivated relaxation scheme as the last stage of ontology development, before being integrated into our system to increase its coverage. The ultimate lexical resource which includes the terms corresponding to the ontology concepts is used to filter the Twitter stream so that a plausible tweet subset, including mostly public-health related tweets, can be obtained. Experiments are carried out on two million genuine tweets and promising precision rates are obtained. Also implemented within the course of the current study is a Web-based interface, to track the results of this identification system, to be used by the related public health staff. Hence, the current social media analysis study has both technical and practical contributions to the significant domain of public health.

Health-related behaviors and nutritional status of adolescents who study asboarders and day-students.

BACKGROUND/AIM: Boarders and day-students study together in regional boarding schools. This study was carried out to compare the health and nutritional status of boarders and day-students who study at regional boarding schools in Turkey. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total 634 boarders and 492 day-students in the 4th-8th years of nine boarding schools in Giresun Province of Turkey were included. A questionnaire including 49 questions about sociodemographic characteristics and health and nutritional status was completed by the students. Height and weight measurements of the students were also taken. The chi-square test was used for statistical analyses. RESULTS: The boarders evaluated their health status as worse than the day-students. The proportion of the students having three meals a day was higher among the boarders than the day-students. According to BMI values, 11% of the boarders were evaluated as underweight, 77% as normal, 9.5% as overweight, and 2.5% as obese. These proportions were respectively 15.5%, 67.3%, 12.8%. and 4.5% for the day-students. CONCLUSION: The boarders have more regular diets and the proportion of normal-weighed boarders was higher than that of the day-students. However, they perceived their health as worse than the day-tudents.