IntroductionAcute rheumatic fever (ARF) is a non-suppurative systemic inflammatory disease that manifests 1-5 weeks following a Group A beta-hemolytic streptococcal infection. On the other hand, ...familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) is a hereditary autoinflammatory disease characterized as an autosomal recessive disease, with affected individuals having pathogenic mutations in the Mediterranean fever gene (MEFV) gene located on the short arm of chromosome 16. FMF and ARF have overlapping symptoms and signs, and both disorders are common in Turkey. In ARF, the target organ is the heart, while in FMF, the target organ is the kidney; both organs can benefit from prophylactic measures. Our study aims to determine the frequency of the FMF gene mutation in patients with ARF in Turkey and detect any overlapping conditions.MethodPatients who were diagnosed with a first-attack ARF between May 2015 and May 2018 were retrospectively screened. Patients who underwent MEFV gene analysis considering FMF in the differential diagnosis were included in the study.ResultsIn this study, no statistical difference was found between the presence of MEFV gene mutations, carditis, high anti-streptolysin-O antibody (ASO) levels, and the groups with monoarthritis, polyarthritis, and polyarthralgia (p >0.05).ConclusionsIn conclusion, patients with ARF should be evaluated for FMF to avoid irreversible complications.
Background: Endothelial cell-specific molecule 1 (ESM-1 or endocan) is an immunoinflammatory marker strongly associated with inflammation, vascular endothelial dysfunction and atherosclerosis. We ...explored the relationship between serum endocan concentrations and coronary in-stent restenosis (ISR). Methods: Fifty consecutive patients with ISR and 50 control subjects were included in this study. Clinical data and angiographic characteristics were collected. Serum endocan concentrations were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: All included patients were divided into four quartiles based on their concentrations of endocan: quartile 1 (0.62-1.31 ng/mL), quartile 2 (1.33-1.74 ng/mL), quartile 3 (1.75-2.77 ng/mL) and quartile 4 (2.78-4.24 ng/mL). The rates of ISR were 16%, 24%, 68%, and 92%, respectively. The patients in quartile 4 had significantly higher rates of ISR than the other groups (p ＜ 0.001). Logistic regression analysis indicated that endocan concentration odds ratio = 8.65, 95% confidence interval 3.56-20.94; p ＜ 0.001 was an independent predictor of ISR. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to explore the relationship between endocan and ISR. Using a cutoff value of 1.625 ng/mL, endocan predicted ISR with a sensitivity of 86% and a specificity of 78%. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that plasma endocan levels may be a novel biomarker of endothelial dysfunction in patients with ISR.
Oculo-auriculo-vertebral spectrum is a heterogeneous group of genetic disorder, also known as Goldenhar Syndrome, which has several phenotypic features including craniofacial anomalies, cardiac, ...vertebral and central nervous system defects. Cardiovascular anomalies include ventricular septal defects, atrial septal defects, patent ductus arteriosus, Tetralogy of Fallot, double outlet right ventricle, aberrant right subclavian artery, coarctation of aorta, transposition of the great arteries, double inlet left ventricle, cor triatriatum, pulmonary artery stenosis, aortic stenosis, persistent left superior vena cava, partially or totally abnormal pulmonary venous return and bicuspid aortic valve. Persistent fifth aortic arch, also named as double lumen aortic arch, is a very rare cardivascular anomaly and usually associate other cardiac defects.
We present a 7 month old patient with oculo-auriculo-vertebral spectrum signs as facial asymmetry, short neck, choanal atresia, cleft palate, bilateral preauricular skin tags, bilateral hypoplastic ear lobes, epibulbar dermoid cyst, rib, vertebrae and cardiovascular anomalies. Cardiovascular anomalies detected with echocardiography and computed tomography were malalignment ventricular septal defect and double lumen aorta, known as persistent fifth aortic arch.
Various cardiovascular anomalies may accompany Goldenhar Syndrome. We present a case with persistent fifth aortic arch and Oculo-auriculo-vertebral spectrum and this is a new association that was not reported before in the literature.
We examine named entity recognition (NER), an essential and commonly used first step in many natural language processing tasks, including chatbots and language translation. We focus on the ...application of NER to texts that have a lot of noise, such as tweets, which is difficult due to the casual and unstructured language often used in these mediums. In this study, we make use of the largest available labeled data sets for Turkish NER, specifically targeting three informal platforms, namely Twitter, Facebook and Donanimhaber. We choose Turkish as a representative agglutinative language, which has a significantly different structure than other well-known languages such as English, French, and German. We emphasize that the methodologies and insights gained from this study can be extended to other agglutinative languages, like Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, and Korean. We apply NER to these datasets using 16 different named entity tags through a framework that employs bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks followed by conditional random fields (CRF), known together as the BiLSTM-CRF model. Our experiments show an F1 score of 84% on a combined dataset, which indicates that deep learning models can also be effectively used for business applications in informal settings in agglutinative languages such as Turkish.
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