Blood culture results at a research and training hospital and the importance of training.

OBJECTIVES: This study aims to measure the level of knowledge of the nurses who collect blood cultures at our hospital, and after providing the necessary training, evaluate the distribution of microbial growth and rate of contamination in blood cultures that are referred to our laboratory during a 1-year term. METHODS AND MATERIALS: A survey was conducted to assess the level of knowledge regarding blood culture acquisition with the participation of 99 nurses at our hospital in October 2017. Blood cultures sent to our laboratory during 2017 May-October were retrospectively evaluated in terms of their results, contamination rates, and number of bottles. Taking survey results into account, monthly trainings were provided to the nurses for 6 months starting from October 2017, and blood culture results and error rates were investigated prospectively. RESULTS: It was determined from the survey results that the level of knowledge regarding the need to wipe the rubber septum of the blood culture bottle with alcohol prior to adding the blood sample (23.2%) and definition of a blood culture set (25.3%) were quite low. It was found that while the contamination rate prior to training was 6.4%, it fell to 3.7% after training, and although the rate of single-bottle cultures was 6.3% before training, it decreased by 2.0%. CONCLUSIONS: Standardizing blood culture acquisition with the provided training will produce maximal benefit for every laboratory in terms of cost and workload.

Serum neutrophil gelatinase associated lipocalin and plasma nitric oxide levels in healthy and preeclamptic pregnants.

AIMS: The authors aimed to evaluate serum neutrophil gelatinase associated lipocalin (NGAL) and plasma nitric oxide (NO) levels in preeclamptic and healthy pregnant women above 24 gestation weeks. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Forty-nine healthy and 21 preeclamptic (total 70) pregnant women participated voluntarily in the study. Presence of 140 mmHg and above systolic and 90 mmHg and above diastolic blood pressure which emerges after 20th gestation week, proteinuria more than 300 mg/24 hour, and edema were used as diagnostic criterion for preeclamptic pregnant women. Measurements of serum NGAL and plasma NO were performed with enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and photometric method, respectively. RESULTS: Serum NGAL and plasma NO levels of healthy and preeclamptic groups did not show a statistical difference. In preeclamptic group, a statistically meaningful correlation was found between level of NGAL and body mass index (BMI) of sampling time, creatinine and NGAL, total protein and NO, and albumin and NO. CONCLUSIONS: Serum NGAL levels, correlated with serum creatinine levels in this study, may be the early marker of renal damage which may develop mainly due to inflammation and endothelial damage. The authors could not find a statistical difference for serum NGAL and plasma NO levels between healthy pregnant and preeclamptic groups. Varieties peculiar to humans in preeclampsia, impossibility of obtaining first trimester tissue material as an evidence of inadequate trophoblast invasion, and different appearance of maternal reaction to underlying main pathology in every case may restrict clarification of etiopathogenesis.

A dynamic factor model of the evaluation of the financial crisis in Turkey.

Factor analysis has been widely used in economics and finance in situations where a relatively large number of variables are believed to be driven by few common causes of variation. Dynamic factor analysis (DFA) which is a combination of factor and time series analysis, involves autocorrelation matrices calculated from multivariate time series. Dynamic factor models were traditionally used to construct economic indicators, macroeconomic analysis, business cycles and forecasting. In recent years, dynamic factor models have become more popular in empirical macroeconomics. They have more advantages than other methods in various respects. Factor models can for instance cope with many variables without running into scarce degrees of freedom problems often faced in regression-based analysis. In this study, a model which determines the effect of the global crisis on Turkey is proposed. The main aim of the paper is to analyze how several macroeconomic quantities show an alteration before the evolution of the crisis and to decide if a crisis can be forecasted or not.