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Background: Movement Disorders Society Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) and Unified Dyskinesia Rating Scale (UDysRS) were developed as standard tools to rate Parkinson's disease (PD) and drug-induced dyskinesias of PD. As these scales have become widely used, there is a need for translation to non-English languages. Here we present the standardization for the Turkish translations. Methods: The scales were translated into Turkish and then back-translated to English. These backtranslations were reviewed by the MDS team. After cognitive pretesting, movement disorder specialists from nine centers tested 352 patients for MDS-UPDRS, and 250 patients for UDysRS. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were used to determine if the factor structures for the reference standards could be confirmed in the Turkish data. The comparative fit indexes (CFIs) for the scales were required to be 0.90 or higher. Exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) were conducted to explore the underlying factor structure without the constraint of a pre-specified factor structure. Results: For both scales, the CFIs were 0.94 or greater as compared to the reference standard factor structures. The factor structures were consistent with that of reference standards, although there were some differences in some areas as compared to the EFA of the reference standard dataset. This may be due to the inclusion of patients with different stages of PD and different cultural properties of raters and patients.Conclusions: These results demonstrate that the Turkish translations of MDS-UPDRS and UDysRS have adequate clinimetric properties. They are established as the official translations and can be reliably used in Turkish speaking populations.

OBJECTIVE: Poor sleep and sleep-related breathing disorders are common in hemodialysis (HD) patients. However, it is not well known whether there is a relation between nutritional habit and quality of sleep. The aim of this study was to investigate the relation between quality of sleep and nutritional characteristics. MATERIAL and METHODS: The study population included 84 HD patients. Data were collected with the questionnaire developed by the researchers and included questions about socio-demographic features, biochemical fi ndings, and anthropometric data. RESULTS: The quality of sleep was poor in 51.2% of the patients. These patients were relatively older than the patients with good quality of sleep (44.0±13.0 and 37.4±11.8 year respectively, p<0.001). The patients with the good quality of sleep consumed signifi cantly more meat-offal-cheese-egg (p<0.01) and fruit (p<0.05). The patients with the poor quality of sleep had signifi cantly lower albumin (p<0.01), pre-albumin (p=0.02) and total lymphocyte counts (p=0.02). The patients who more frequently had gastrointestinal complaints (especially abdominal discomfort and fl atulence) had the poor quality of sleep. CONCLUSION: There are some associations between sleep quality and nutritional aspects. Nutritional habits should be evaluated in HD patients having poor sleep quality.

Aims: This study aimed to determine the effects of different cultivation practices on yield and characteristics of saffron corm grown in field and greenhouse conditions.Methods and Results: Two different saffron corm sizes, with an average weight of 12 g and 6 g, were used as production material. The cultivation of saffron corms was carried out in areas where 4 different treatments were applied such as silt (fine stream sand), cockpeat, peat + perlite and cockpeat + perlite. Field studies were set up according to the randomized blocks split-plot design experimental design, and greenhouse studies were set up according to the randomized plots design with 3 replications. The highest corm yield, corm increase rate per unit and the harvested corm weight were obtained in field conditions where silt applications were made.Conclusions: In field and greenhouse conditions, silt application has been determined as the most suitable cultivation treatment for the production of corm as seed material in a short time, as well as the corm properties of saffron.Significance and Impact of the Study: It has been demonstrated that the field conditions are more effective than the greenhouse conditions and the silt treatment is more effective than other applications used for saffron corm production.

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