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Aims: This study was carried out to investigate fear levels, treatment compliance, and metabolic control of type II Diabetes Mellitus patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods: The study employed a single-center, observational design and was conducted between January and April 2021. The study consisted of 303 patients who attended the internal medicine outpatient clinic of a uni-versity hospital in Turkey. For data collection, the Patient Identification Form, COVID-19 Fear Scale, and the Type II Diabetes Treatment Compliance Scale were used. The study complied with the Helsinki Declaration criteria. IBM SPSS v25.0 statistics package program was used for data analysis.Results: The mean age of the patients was 45.8 +/- 7.5 years, the mean duration of illness was 8.2 +/- 3.6 years. Moreover, 40.6% of patients presented with poor levels of treatment compliance. In addition, the mean FCV-19S score of the patients was 29.1 +/- 3.05. It was noticeable that those with high mean scores of FCV-19S had poor compliance with treatment and metabolic control during the pandemic (p < 0.05). Practice implications: Fear of COVID-19 negatively affects treatment compliance and metabolic control of type II diabetes patients. The patients avoided attending their regular follow-ups at the hospital due to fear of con-tracting COVID-19. In order to reduce the fear of COVID-19 it is paramount to maintain optimum metabolic control and treatment compliance.

Objectives: The long-term consequences of COVID-19 infection on the gastrointestinal tract remain unclear. Here, we aimed to evaluate the prevalence of gastrointestinal symptoms and post-COVID-19 disorders of gut-brain interaction after hospitalisation for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Design: GI-COVID-19 is a prospective, multicentre, controlled study. Patients with and without COVID-19 diagnosis were evaluated on hospital admission and after 1, 6 and 12 months post hospitalisation. Gastrointestinal symptoms, anxiety and depression were assessed using validated questionnaires. Results: The study included 2183 hospitalised patients. The primary analysis included a total of 883 patients (614 patients with COVID-19 and 269 controls) due to the exclusion of patients with pre-existing gastrointestinal symptoms and/or surgery. At enrolment, gastrointestinal symptoms were more frequent among patients with COVID-19 than in the control group (59.3% vs 39.7%, p, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna; Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, MIUR; Korean Society of Neurogastroenterology and Mobility, KSNM; Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna: H2020, SC1-BHC-01-2019; United European Gastroenterology, UEG; Fondazione Roma, GB’s contribution to this research was partly supported by funding from Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research; and Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna and European Grant H2020, DISCOvERIE, SC1-BHC-01-2019, We thank the European Society of Neurogastroenterology and Motility, the United European Gastroenterology, and the Rome Foundation for supporting this study.

INTRODUCTION: Gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms in coronavirus-19 disease (COVID-19) have been reported with great variability and without standardization. In hospitalized patients, we aimed to evaluate the prevalence of GI symptoms, factors associated with their occurrence, and variation at 1 month. METHODS: The GI-COVID-19 is a prospective, multicenter, controlled study. Patients with and without COVID-19 diagnosis were recruited at hospital admission and asked for GI symptoms at admission and after 1 month, using the validated Gastrointestinal Symptom Rating Scale questionnaire. RESULTS: The study included 2036 hospitalized patients. A total of 871 patients (575 COVID+ and 296 COVID-) were included for the primary analysis. GI symptoms occurred more frequently in patients with COVID-19 (59.7%; 343/575 patients) than in the control group (43.2%; 128/296 patients) (P < 0.001). Patients with COVID-19 complained of higher presence or intensity of nausea, diarrhea, loose stools, and urgency as compared with controls. At a 1-month follow-up, a reduction in the presence or intensity of GI symptoms was found in COVID-19 patients with GI symptoms at hospital admission. Nausea remained increased over controls. Factors significantly associated with nausea persistence in COVID-19 were female sex, high body mass index, the presence of dyspnea, and increased C-reactive protein levels. DISCUSSION: The prevalence of GI symptoms in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 is higher than previously reported. Systemic and respiratory symptoms are often associated with GI complaints. Nausea may persist after the resolution of COVID-19 infection., Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna; Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research; Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna [SC1-BHC-01-2019]; European Grant H2020, DISCOvERIE [SC1-BHC-01-2019]; Italian Ministry of Health [Ricerca Finalizzata GR-2018-12367062], G.B. contribution to this research was permitted in part by funding from Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna; the ItalianMinistry of Education, University and Research; and Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna and European Grant H2020, DISCOvERIE, SC1-BHC-01-2019. M.R.B. is a recipient of a grant from the Italian Ministry of Health (Ricerca Finalizzata GR-2018-12367062). None of the funding organizations have had any role in the design and conduct of the study; in the collection, management, and analysis of the data; or in the preparation, review, and approval of the article.

A common strategy in variational image recovery is utilizing the nonlocal self-similarity property, when designing energy functionals. One such contribution is nonlocal structure tensor total variation (NLSTV), which lies at the core of this study. This paper is concerned with boosting the NLSTV regularization term through the use of directional priors. More specifically, NLSTV is leveraged so that, at each image point, it gains more sensitivity in the direction that is presumed to have the minimum local variation. The actual difficulty here is capturing this directional information from the corrupted image. In this regard, we propose a method that employs anisotropic Gaussian kernels to estimate directional features to be later used by our proposed model. The experiments validate that our entire two-stage framework achieves better results than the NLSTV model and two other competing local models, in terms of visual and quantitative evaluation. Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK)

In this study, two macroporous butyl rubber (BR)-based sorbents prepared in benzene (H-BR) and in cyclohexane (L-BR) with different porosities were synthesized by cryogelation technique. Their performances as a passive sampler were studied and then compared with commercially available silicon rubber (polydimethylsiloxane, PDMS) passive sampler. For that aim, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) absorption rates of the sorbents in the short-term and their accumulation capacities in the long-term periods were investigated. Four PAHs (naphthalene, phenanthrene, fluoranthene, and pyrene) with a different number of aromatic rings were utilized. The concentrations of the PAHs in solutions were quantified by fluorescence spectrophotometer. The results showed that the BR sampler prepared in benzene (H-BR) generally has the highest absorption rates for all PAHs. The rate constants k (h-1) of the H-BR, L-BR, and PDMS samplers were found as 1.07, 0.55, and 0.55 for naphthalene; 0.73, 0.16, and 0.09 for phenanthrene; 0.24, 0.26, and 0.08 for fluoranthene; and 0.97, 0.38, and 0.17 for pyrene, respectively. The highest PAH absorption capacity was found for the BR sorbents prepared in benzene for all PAHs. Thus, benzene was selected as the organic solvent rather than cyclohexane for further studies in the preparation of butyl rubber-based samplers. The H-BR possessing the highest absorption rate and capacity underlines their usage as a capable passive sampler for both short- and long-term monitoring activities in the aquatic environments.

Clarifying the interactions between substances as a result of exposure to multiple xenobiotics and determining the impacts on health are important from the toxicological point of view. Therefore, the aim of the study was to investigate the synergistic toxic effects of ethanol and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) in male albino rats. A total number of 28 Wistar male rats were divided into 4 groups (7/each), and 2,4-D (5 mg/kg) and ethanol (3 g/kg) were administered orally to rats for 60 days, either alone or in combination. Co-administration of ethanol and 2,4-D increased liver functional enzyme levels and lipid peroxidation in blood and tissues while decreased glutathione and antioxidant enzyme activities when compared to individual applications. Furthermore, co-administration of ethanol and 2,4-D caused DNA damage as well as the increase in apoptotic and proinflammatory cytokine gene expressions. Furthermore, histopathological examination of the tissues especially liver and kidney revealed that these two substances induced more serious damage. In conclusion, co-administration of ethanol and 2,4-D resulted in strong toxic effects on tissues (especially liver) with a synergistic interaction and give rise to serious toxicological drawbacks.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are organic pollutants having various adverse effects on the marine ecosystem. Because of their low solubility in the marine environment, their detection and monitoring in the water column are challenging tasks. Passive samplers are used to detect PAHs in aquatic environments as complementary tools to conventional water sampling. In the present study, PAH absorbance performances of four butyl rubber-based (BR) passive samplers with different structures (SN5, SN10, DN, and TN) and commercialized passive samplers (SPMD and PDMS) were determined. Stainless steel cages containing passive samplers were deployed in the water column in Istinye Bay, Istanbul, and retrieved after 7 and 28 days. Collected samplers were analyzed in the laboratory to determine their PAH contents. Results showed that, even though the SPMD samplers had the highest total PAH content, they were not able to collect PAHs with log Kow value of above 6.0. Similarly, PAHs with log Kow values higher than 5.5 could have not been collected by PDMS samplers. In contrast, BR-based passive samplers have sampled also high molecular weight PAHs in the water column, and SN10 sampler showed the highest performance in terms of the collected PAHs. Results highlighted that SN10 sampler has a wide absorption range when it is compared with the commercialized samplers, and it has also advanced absorption performance relative to the other BR samplers.

Direction-guided structure tensor total variation (DSTV) is a recently proposed regularization term that aims at increasing the sensitivity of the structure tensor total variation (STV) to the changes towards a predetermined direction. Despite of the plausible results obtained on the uni-directional images, the DSTV model is not applicable to the arbitrary (multi-directional and/or partly nondirectional) images. In this study, we build a two-stage denoising framework that brings adaptivity to the DSTV based denoising. We design a DSTV-like alternative to STV, which encodes the first-order information within a local neighborhood under the guidance of spatially varying directional descriptors (i.e., orientation and the dose of anisotropy). In order to estimate those descriptors, we propose an efficient preprocessor that captures the local geometry based on the structure tensor. Through the extensive experiments, we demonstrate how beneficial the involvement of the directional information in STV is, by comparing the proposed method with the state-of-the-art analysis-based denoising models, both in terms of quality and computational efficiency. Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK)