Our study suggest that serum TAOS and BNP levels may be useful as an early and sensitive indicator of anthracycline induced cardiotoxicity.

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These days, working people are finding it difficult to manage their time, get more done at work, and find some balance in their work and personal lives. Successful time management is often suggested to be a product of organizing skills, however, what works for one person may not work for others. Context current competence assessment formats for physicians, health professionals, and managers during their training years reliably test core knowledge and basic skills. However, they may underemphasize some important domains of professional medical practice. Thus, in addition to assessments of basic skills, new formats that assess clinical reasoning, expert judgment, management of ambiguity, professionalism, time management, learning strategies, and teamwork to promise a multidimensional assessment while maintaining adequate reliability and validity in classic health education and health care institutional settings are needed to be worked on. It should be kept in mind that institutional support, reflection, and mentoring must accompany the development of assessment programs. This study was designed to describe the main factors that consume time, effective hours of work, time management opportunities, and attitudes and behaviors of health professionals and managers on time management concept through assessment by the assessment tool Time Management Inquiry Form (TMIQ-F). The study was conducted at the State Hospital, Social Security Hospital, and University Hospital at Kirikkale, Turkey between October 1999 and January 2000, including 143 subjects defined as medical managers and medical specialists. According to the results, a manager should give priority to the concept of planning, which may be counted among the efficient time management techniques, and educate him/herself on time management.

The objective of this study was to reveal the present situation of organizational stress among employees of three major hospitals in Ankara, Turkey. Also to direct executives and individuals to the means to cope with organizational stress encouraging focusing the etiologies and promoting productive and functional service capabilities supplementing ever increasing literature and state of knowledge. Methodologically, the study was conducted on 699 subjects, selected randomly utilizing the ‘Organizational Stress Measure’ questionnaire. The results indicated that there was no significant variance of stress levels between samples obtained from three different hospitals. However; in the Social Security Hospital there was significant difference in stress levels of executives, health personnel, allied health personnel and the group of employees indicated as others, with highest mean stress levels in the group defined as others followed by executives, health personnel and allied health personnel. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between stress levels of different sexes and no correlation of age factor with stress. If high organizational stress is the case in an institution a change in strategy that includes structural and organizational change will be necessary. Such change will improve the productivity of employees. By doing so, menagerial costs of job stress will also be diminished. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An organism's ability to respond to the external and internal environments is explained in terms of the concept of biological stress. The causes of these responses are called stressors. They may be physical, chemical, emotional, or traumatic. With continued exposure to the stressor the organism enters the stage of resistance and defense. After prolonged exposure to the same stressor the organism may enter the stage of exhaustion. Catecholamines have an important role in maintaining biological homeostasis to stress. Catecholamine biosynthesis starts from tyrosine and in the first step DOPA is synthesized from tyrosine and catalyzed by the enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase (TH). In rats this enzyme activity varies depending on cold stress, exercise and age. The production of adrenomedullin in adrenal medulla, heart and brain also suggest a role for this peptide in the physiological control of homeostasis. In this study TH enzyme activity and adrenomedullin levels were investigated in rat tissues that were excised from animals exposed to 8°C cold for 3 weeks. After cold exposure TH enzyme activities and adrenomedullin levels were changed but also age was found to be a factor. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.