Self-Efficacy Among Indonesian Chronic Liver Disease Patients

Chronic Liver Diseases are among the most extensive diseases globally and are related to significant morbidity and mortality. Although physical well-being has long been the primary goal of medical care, as chronic disease becomes more prevalent in developed countries, there has been a greater focus on patients' emotional and social well-being. This study aimed to describe the self-efficacy among chronic liver disease patients in North Sumatra, Indonesia. This study uses a cross-sectional design. The study assessed 102 chronic liver disease patients from two hospitals using the Chronic Disease Self-Efficacy Scales Indonesian version. The participants had moderate self-efficacy (58.8%), followed by high self-efficacy (38.2%). The majority of the patients in this study had moderate self-efficacy because many individuals with chronic liver disease suffer chronic fatigue, abdominal pain and swelling, itchy skin, nausea or vomiting, loss of appetite, and other symptoms that affect self-efficacy.  Health professionals should strengthen patients' self-efficacy by engaging in positive activities and enhancing their coping skill

Application of Andersen Model to verify utilization of maternal and child\u27s preventive care among South-East Asian immigrant women in Taiwan: Influence of acculturation and associated factors

Session presented on Saturday, July 26, 2014: Purpose: This is a report of utilization of maternal and child\u27s preventive care based on Andersen health seeking behavior model. The purpose of this study was to examine the predisposing, enabling, need factors among immigrant women in Taiwan, and further to explore acculturation and other predictors of both utilizations. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted. Immigrant women who were living in Taiwan with their Taiwanese husbands and with children under 7 years old were included. Andersen behavior model (1995) was used to identify influencing factors with acculturation and medical access barrier be added in the enabling factors, and health status in need factor. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method was used by SPSS 17.0 and AMOS 18.0 for data analysis. Results: The completed sample included 284 women lived in 2 counties of Taiwan who were in 28.6 years old (SD=4.33) averaged. Results showed that the Chi-square test for the model produced a statistically significant finding (?2 =568.74, df =206, p=0.001; ?2 =539.86, df =206, p=0.001) of maternal and child\u27s preventive care use. Based on the ?2/ df ratio (2.76; 2.62), the second-order factor baseline model fits the data quite well (CFI =0.826, RMSEA =0.079; CFI =0.837, RMSEA =0.076). There were four factors significantly predicted utilization of maternal preventive care: length of stay in Taiwan, educational level in original country, perceived support and integration. And three factors significantly predicted utilization of child\u27s preventive care: family income, perceived support and integration. Conclusion: Our findings indicated a significant relationship of predisposing and enabling factors with utilization of maternal and child\u27s preventive care. This study demonstrated that acculturation was a vivid factor to influence the utilization of maternal and child\u27s preventive care use. Clinical interventions based on these results should be developed and further to examine its effects in order to improve health behavior of immigrant women who might be in different acculturation and need more health support

Online Learning: Patterns of Engagement and Interaction Among In-Service Teachers

Language teacher education programs attempt to foster collaboration amongst pre-service and in-service teachers. The approach is in place in an online teacher education program in a Midwestern university where the current study was undertaken. Collaborative interactions are an essential element of any pedagogy which assumes that good learning is collaborative and that understanding comes through modeling, participation in, and reaction to the behaviors and thoughts of others. This study was conducted with the following objectives: (a) to analyze the patterns and types of collaborative interactions taking place in three online classes; and (b) to use these findings as a guide in the design of instructional interventions. Our goal is to understand the practice of collaborative teaching and learning so that assistance can be provided to support instructor efforts to include collaborative interactions in their courses. We used Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's (2001) "practical inquiry " model as a framework for the study. Without instructors' explicit guidance and "teaching presence, " students were found to engage primarily in "serial monologues. " Based on the findings, we propose three intervention strategies that may hel

Evaluations of Tactics for Automated Negotiations

[[abstract]]Automated negotiation under the infrastructure of e-commerce is becoming an important issue. However, although the communication protocols and frameworks of automated negotiation have been extensively investigated, the corresponding tactics and strategies are still underdeveloped and need to be evaluated further. Based on the negotiation model proposed by Faratin et al., this paper examines the performance of automated negotiation tactics and intends to provide concise suggestions for the users of automated negotiation. First, theoretical analysis is used to evaluate the behavior-dependent tactics. Constructive conclusions are obtained when single-issue negotiations are considered. Next, a new framework for applying single-issue tactics to multi-issue negotiation is proposed. Based on this framework, theoretical analysis is then extended to multi-issue cases. Finally, different from the previous work, exhaustive simulations based on two-issue negotiations are performed to evaluate the effectiveness of behavior-dependent and time-dependent tactics. The experimental results provide several important insights into negotiation tactics.[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子

A simple statistical speech recognition of mandarin monosyllables

Abstract Each mandarin syllable is represented by a sequence of vectors of linear predict coding cepstra (LPCC). Since all syllables have a simple phonetic structure, in our speech recognition, we partition the sequence of LPCC vectors of all syllables into equal segments and average the LPCC vectors in each segment. The mean vector of LPCC is used as the feature of a syllable. Our simple feature does not need any time consuming and complicated nonlinear contraction and expansion as adopted by the dynamic time-warping. We propose several probability distributions for the feature values. A simplified Bayes decision rule is used for classification of mandarin syllables. For the speaker-independent mandarin digits, the recognition rate is 98.6% if a normal distribution is used for feature values and the rate is 98.1% if an exponential distribution is used for the absolute values of the features. The feature proposed in this paper to represent a syllable is the simplest one, much easier to be extracted than any other known features. The computation for feature extraction and classification is much faster and more accurate than using the HMM method or any other known techniques

Look, the World is Watching How We Treat Migrants! The Making of the Anti-Trafficking Legislation during the Ma Administration

Employing the spiral model, this research analyses how anti-human trafficking legislation was promulgated during the Ma Ying-jeou (Ma Yingjiu) presidency. This research found that the gov- ernment of Taiwan was just as accountable for the violation of mi- grants’ human rights as the exploitive placement agencies and abusive employers. This research argues that, given its reliance on the United States for political and security support, Taiwan has made great ef- forts to improve its human rights records and meet US standards for protecting human rights. The reform was a result of multilevel inputs, including US pressure and collaboration between transnational and domestic advocacy groups. A major contribution of this research is to challenge the belief that human rights protection is intrinsic to dem- ocracy. In the same light, this research also cautions against Taiwan’s subscription to US norms since the reform was achieved at the cost of stereotyping trafficking victimhood, legitimising state surveillance, and further marginalising sex workers

Relationship between illness perceptions and stigma in patients with schizophrenia in community

Session presented on Monday, July 25, 2016: Background: Despite the benefits of maintenance treatment with antipsychotic drugs for patients with schizophrenia, non-adherence impedes the treatment effect and results in reduced functioning and increased relapses, hospitalization, and healthcare costs. Nonadherence has been studied from biomedical and behavioral perspectives; however, patients\u27 subjective perceptions of their illnesses and treatments and their association with health outcomes have been increasingly highlighted for knowledge development (Kucukarslan, 2012). Illness perception has been supported its mediated effect on patients\u27 adherence to antipsychotics in Western studies (Rungruangsiripan, Sitthimongkol, Maneesriwongul, Talley, & Vorapongsathorn, 2011). Furthermore, stigma has been reported to have a negative impact on adherence (Vrbov et. al, 2014; Yilmaz & Okanli, 2015). Therefore, in this study, the relationship between illness perception and stigma were examined. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the relationships between the illness perception of patients with schizophrenia and their stigma. Methods: A cross-sectional research design was used to examine the relationship between schizophrenia patients\u27 illness perception and stigma. The Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the hospital approved the study protocol and written informed consent was obtained from each participant. Based on the inclusion criteria, 240 patients with schizophrenia were purposively recruited into this study. Patients\u27 illness perception and perceived stigma were assessed with self-rated Illness Perception Questionnaires-Revised (IPQ-R) and Perceived Psychiatric Stigma Scale (PPSS). The data were analyzed by Pearson correlation and multiple regression. Results: Most patients were male, unmarried, unemployed, graduated from junior high school with 9 educational years, and onset during adulthood. Their mean age was 47.07-11.88 and mean illness years was 19.14-12.02. There were significant positive relationship between IPQR-identity, timeline, consequence, timeline cyclical, emotional representation, and stigma; while illness coherence was negatively associated with stigma. The results indicated that patients\u27 IPQR could significantly predict their sigma. Regarding to illness perception, consequence and emotional representation could positively predict sigma. Conclusion: The results provided empirical knowledge about illness perceptions and stigma in patients with schizophrenia, which could equip professionals with the their subjective interpretations and concerns about their illness and treatments in terms of how to assist them to decide in favor of treatments preference and to develop sensitive interventions to increase that adherence. Future research is suggested to further examine the relationships among treatment adherence, illness perception, and stigma to understand the influence of patients\u27 subjective perception concerning about their illness on adherent behaviors

The risk factors affecting survival in colorectal cancer in Taiwan

Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second and third most commonly diagnosed cancer type in females and males, respectively, representing almost 10% of the global cancer incidence. The incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) in Taiwan is rising. Cancer survival is an indicator of the overall effectiveness of health services in the management of patients. In this study, we sought to determine the five-year survival rate of patients diagnosed with CRC and to determine factors affecting survival. Methods: In this study, we conducted a single-center, retrospective cohort study to estimate the survival outcome of patients diagnosed with colorectal carcinoma at medical center hospital in North Taiwan between 2007 and 2013. Data were extracted from medical records and the cancer database by trained data collectors. In all, 869 patients with CRC were included in this study. Survival analysis was performed using Kaplan-Meier curves, and differences between the curves were analyzed using the log-rank test. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to analyze survival by each variable. Results: We retrospectively evaluated 869 CRC patients from 2007 to 2013. Of these, 454 subjects were males (52.24%), and the remaining (47.76%) were females. The mean and median ages at diagnosis were 63.70 years (SD = 0.45) and 64 years (range, 17-97), respectively. The mean survival time was 71.27±1.27 months. CRC-specific survival was 95.3%, 79.4% and 68.7% at 1, 3 and 5 years. The five-year survival rate for patients with stage I, II, III and IV disease was 91.20%, 82.20%, 63.20% and 21.70%. The Cox forward stepwise regression model revealed a significant potentially curable disease and risk of CRC death. The following factors were associated with a relative excess hazard for death: age ≥ 65 years (HR = 2.36, 95% CI: 1.76 - 3.17, P \u3c 0.001); high grade of pathological differentiation (HR = 1.84, 95% CI: 1.27 - 2.66, P = 0.001); perineural nerve invasion (HR = 2.90, 95% CI: 2.03 - 4.14, P \u3c 0.001); metastasis to distant organs (HR = 2.78, 95% CI: 2.00 - 3.87, P \u3c 0.001); intestinal obstruction (HR = 1.38, 95% CI: 1.04 - 1.84, P = 0.026); and multiple regional lymph node metastases (HR = 1.81, 95% CI: 0.28 - 2.57, P = 0.001). Conclusion: Long-term survival from colorectal cancer remains good with 68.7% of patients being a live five years after their diagnosis. In this study, we found that perineural nerve invasion, distant metastasis, age, pathological differentiation grade, obstruction and regional lymph node metastasis are independent predictors of the survival and prognosis of patients with CRC. Perineural nerve invasion and distant metastasis appeared to be important prognostic factors affecting the entire patient cohort, and the earlier detection of CRC would improve patient survival. One limitation of this study was the small sample size; in addition, the findings were generated using data from a single medical center hospital in North Taiwan. Thus, the results of some survival comparisons were not significant. These limitations should be considered when applying these results to other districts in Taiwan that may have demographic differences. Furthermore, multicenter studies should be conducted to merge patient datasets for further research in Taiwan

Distinct Gene Expression Profiles in Immortalized Human Urothelial Cells Exposed to Inorganic Arsenite and Its Methylated Trivalent Metabolites

Inorganic arsenic is an environmental carcinogen. The generation of toxic trivalent methylated metabolites complicates the study of arsenic-mediated carcinogenesis. This study systematically evaluated the effect of chronic treatment with sodium arsenite (iAs(III)), monomethylarsonous acid (MMA(III)), and dimethylarsinous acid (DMA(III)) on immortalized human uroepithelial cells (SV-HUC-1 cells) using cDNA microarray. After exposure for 25 passages to iAs(III) (0.5 μM), MMA(III) (0.05, 0.1, or 0.2 μM), or DMA(III) (0.2 or 0.5 μM), significant compound-specific morphologic changes were observed. A set of 114 genes (5.7% of the examined genes) was differentially expressed in one or more sets of arsenical-treated cells compared with untreated controls. Expression analysis showed that exposure of cells to DMA(III) resulted in a gene profile different from that in cells exposed to iAs(III) or MMA(III), and that the iAs(III)-induced gene profile was closest to that in the tumorigenic HUC-1–derived 3-methylcholanthrene–induced tumorigenic cell line MC-SV-HUC T2, which was derived from SV-HUC-1 cells by methylcholanthrene treatment. Of the genes affected by all three arsenicals, only one, that coding for interleukin-1 receptor, type II, showed enhanced expression, a finding confirmed by the reduced increase in NF-κB (nuclear factor kappa B) activity seen in response to interleukin-1β in iAs(III)-exposed cells. The expression of 11 genes was suppressed by all three arsenicals. 5-Aza-deoxycytidine partially restored the transcription of several suppressed genes, showing that epigenetic DNA methylation was probably involved in arsenical-induced gene repression. Our data demonstrate that chronic exposure to iAs(III), MMA(III), or DMA(III) has different epigenetic effects on urothelial cells and represses NF-κB activity