Epidemiological investigations of burn patients help health services to identify the need for burn care and to plan burn care facilities. Various epidemiological studies on burn injury have been conducted, but they have usually covered major burn victims who required hospitalization or minor burn victims who were treated at health care centers. Few studies have included burn victims who were not admitted to any health care center. Through a population-based questionnaire, we studied the epidemiology of the entire population of burn victims, including those who did not seek medical attention. Thus, we identified the actual frequency of hospital admission and the frequency of sequelae. In total, 1068 persons from the city of Denizli, Turkey were questioned about burns in the last 10 years and the burn prevalence was found to be 12.6%. Only 33.3% of the burn victims were treated at a health care center; thus, 66.7% of the victims were treated at home with traditional burn wound care methods. Etiologic factors such as the age and sex of each victim, the cause and anatomic location of the burn, and location of the victim when burned were all investigated. The overall percentage of sequelae was 31.3%; of these, 89.5% were cosmetic problems, 7.9% were functional impairments, and 2.9% were physiological problems. The low percentage of health care center admissions and high incidence of sequelae suggest the need for professional burn care centers that can be easily reached by burn victims.

Aim:The aim of this study was to compare maternal blood and umbilical-cord leptin, spexin and visfatin levels during delivery in severe preeclampsia (PE) with controls, and to evaluate whether any clinical or demographic variables had independent associations with them. Methods: This is a case-controlled observational study consisting of 45 pregnant women with severe PE and a control group consisting of gestational age-matched 45 healthy pregnant women. We examined the leptin, spexin, and visfatin levels in serum samples taken from maternal blood and umbilical cords during cesarean section in both groups. Leptin, spexin, and visfatin levels were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: The maternal leptin and visfatin levels were significantly higher and the maternal spexin levels were significantly lower in the PE group than in the control group (p < 0.001). Similar to the maternal adipokine levels, the umbilical-cord leptin and visfatin levels were significantly higher and the spexin levels were significantly lower in the PE group (p < 0.001). We found a significant positive correlation between maternal body mass index and maternal blood and umbilical-cord serum leptin and visfatin levels in both groups (p < 0.001). Conclusion:The leptin, spexin and visfatin levels were significantly altered in the nondiabetic preeclamptic women in our study. We believe that the main reason for these changes may be the hypoxic placenta to protect the fetus and maintain its nutrition.

Transobturator tape procedures are a common treatment modality in patients with stress urinary incontinence (SUI). Various complications have been reported related to this procedure. We present a rare case of vaginocutaneous fistula formation 5 years after transobturator tape surgery. A 56-year-old woman presented with complaints of increased vaginal discharge, difficulty in coitus, and serosanguineous discharge from the left groin 5 years after transobturator tape surgery for SUI. Pelvic examination revealed 2-3 cm of extruded mesh at the anterior vaginal wall. The vaginocutaneous fistula was detected at surgery. The suburethral tape was removed, and the fistula tract was excised and repaired primarily. Postoperative period was uneventful, and the patient was still continent 6 weeks postoperatively. With widespread use of mesh for treating SUI, we will likely see a variety of complications in the long term.

Infertility is defined as failure to achieve clinical pregnancy after 12 months of regular sexual intercourse. 1 Emotional stress related to infertility has been shown to impair quality of life (QoL) and could play an important role in successful infertility treatment. 2To understand the burden of emotional stress, the QoL of couples experiencing infertility was examined from a dyadic perspective, and the factors affecting the QoL of men and women were evaluated comparatively.board provided ethical approval prior to data collection and informed consent was obtained from all participants. A structured questionnaire was used to obtain demographic information known to be relevant based on previous study data. 3 The FertiQoL, an internationally developed instrument for measuring infertility-specific QoL in people experiencing infertility, 4 was used to evaluate the QoL of participants, with higher scores for any subdomain indicating better QoL. FertiQoL scores were considered to be dependent variables in the present study, with all other parameters considered independent variables.Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS version 16.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA). A two-way analysis of variance test was used to examine the influence of different categorical independent variables on FertiQoL scores, with the results stratified by gender; P<0.05 was considered statistically significant.In total, 202 couples were enrolled in the present study. The age range was 24-35 years for female participants and 28-39 years for male participants. The mean±SD duration of infertility experienced by participants was 5.0±4.9 years. The incidence of receiving psychological support (34 of 200 [17.0%] women responding vs 13 of 197 [6.6%] men responding; P=0.001) and desiring psychological support (33 of 202 [16.3%] women responding vs 13 of 198 [6.6%] men responding; P=0.003) were significantly higher among female participants, and emotional (P=0.001) and mind/body (P=0.006) FertiQoL scores were significantly lower among female participants. Two-way analysis of variance tests were used to analyze the effects of age, education, employment status, health insurance, income level, receiving psychological support, desiring psychological support, and infertility cause on the FertiQoL scores; the results were stratified by gender (Table 1). Higher emotional and mind/body FertiQoL subscale scores were recorded among male participants who were in employment in comparison with female participants (P=0.003) and compared with male participants who were unemployed (P=0.005).The present results demonstrated that, among couples experiencing infertility, QoL was higher in male participants compared with their partners; however, being unemployed was associated with decreased QoL among male participants. Female participants were more likely to utilize psychological support and to report desiring psychological support. Consequently, individualized counselling methods could be applied to individuals among couples experiencing infertility.

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