“Same same” but different? Exploring the impact of perceived organizational support at the school and teacher levels on teachers’ job engagement and organizational citizenship behavior

All countries in the world are currently trying to implement educational reform, which increases the additional workload of teachers. It is more important to discuss how to inspire teachers’ enthusiasm for educational reform from the perspective of organizational support (OS). Previous research on OS was limited to perceived organizational support (POS), but in recent years group-level OS has been considered the most promising. There is no study comparing POS and group-level OS in education, and therefore this study explored the relationships between OS, job engagement (JE) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in an educational context. In particular, OS was examined at the individual-level (POS) and the aggregated group-level (school organizational support, SOS). Analysis was performed using structural equation modeling (SEM) at both single and multiple levels. SEM results showed direct and positive relationships of individual-level POS with both JE and OCB. Moreover, JE is directly and positively related to OCB and plays the partial mediating role of the indirect and positive impact of POS on OCB. Multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) analysis revealed direct and positive relationships of SOS with teachers’ JE, which was directly and positively related to their OCB. While SOS had no significant positive relationship with OCB, it did have a positive impact on OCB through the mediation of JE. Comparison between SEM and MSEM results revealed the change in effect of OS on OCB from significant to insignificant, thus implying full mediation effect of JE when SOS is considered

Efficacy of the visual cognitive assessment test for mild cognitive impairment/mild dementia diagnosis: a meta-analysis

BackgroundMild cognitive impairment (MCI) is an intermediate stage between normal ageing and dementia. The early identification of MCI is important for timely intervention. The visual cognitive assessment test (VCAT) is a brief language-neutral screening tool for detecting MCI/mild dementia. This meta-analysis evaluated the diagnostic efficacy of the VCAT for MCI/mild dementia.MethodsMedline, Embase, Google Scholar, and Cochrane Library were searched from their inception until August 2023 to identify studies using VCAT to diagnose MCI/mild dementia. The primary outcome was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of the VCAT for detecting MCI/mild dementia through area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AU-ROC) analysis. The secondary outcome was to explore the correlation between VCAT scores and MCI/mild dementia presence by comparing scores among patients with and without MCI/mild dementia. Pooled sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC) were calculated.ResultsFive studies with 1,446 older adults (mean age 64–68.3 years) were included. The percentage of participants with MCI/mild dementia versus controls ranged from 16.5% to 87% across studies. All studies were conducted in Asian populations, mostly Chinese, in Singapore and Malaysia. The pooled sensitivity was 80% [95% confidence interval (CI) 68%–88%] and the specificity was 75% (95% CI 68%–80%). The AU-ROCC was 0.77 (95% CI 0.73–0.81). Patients with MCI/mild dementia had lower VCAT scores than the controls (mean difference −6.85 points, p < 0.00001).ConclusionVCAT demonstrated acceptable diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing MCI/mild dementia in cognitively normal older adults. As a language-neutral and culturally unbiased tool, the VCAT shows promise in detecting MCI/mild dementia. Further studies in non-Asian populations are required.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, identifier: CRD42023453453

Association Between Type I and II Diabetes With Gallbladder Stone Disease

Objective: To assess the association of type 1 diabetes (T1DM) and type 2 diabetes (T2DM) with the subsequent development of gallbladder stone disease (GSD).Setting: Cohort Study.Participants: We identified two study cohort groups to evaluate the association of T1DM and T2DM with the development of GSD. The first group comprised a T1DM cohort of 7015 patients aged ≤ 40 years and a non-diabetes cohort randomly matched with the study cohort (4:1). The second group comprised a T2DM cohort of 51,689 patients aged ≥20 years and a non-diabetes cohort randomly matched with the study cohort (1:1). All patients were studied from 1996 to the end of 2011 or withdrawal from the National Health Insurance program to determine the incidence of GSD.Results: Compared with patients without diabetes, those with T1DM had a decreased risk of GSD [adjusted hazard ratios (aHR) = 0.48, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.25–0.92]. Those with T2DM had an increased risk of GSD (aHR = 1.55, 95% CI = 1.41–1.69), after adjustment for age, sex, comorbidities, and number of parity. The relative risk of GSD in the T2DM cohort was higher than that in the non-diabetes cohort in each group of age, sex, and patients with or without comorbidity. However, the relative risk of GSD in the T1DM cohort was lower than that in the non-diabetes cohort only in the age group of 20–40 years.Conclusion: Our population-based cohort study reveals a strong association between T2DM and GSD. However, an inverse relationship exists between T1DM and GSD in patients aged 20–40 years

A Smartphone APP for Health and Tourism Promotion

The main purpose of this study is to develop an APP by integrating GPS to provide the digitized information of local cultural spots to guide tourists for tourism promotion and the digitized information of mountaineering trails to monitor energy expenditure (EE) for health promotion. The provided cultural information is also adopted for educational purpose. Extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used to evaluate the usefulness and behavior intention of the provided information and functions in the developed system. Most users agreed that the system is useful for health promotion, tourism promotion, and folk-culture education. They also showed strong intention and positive attitude toward continuous use of the APP

Mutations in the PKM2 exon-10 region are associated with reduced allostery and increased nuclear translocation.

PKM2 is a key metabolic enzyme central to glucose metabolism and energy expenditure. Multiple stimuli regulate PKM2's activity through allosteric modulation and post-translational modifications. Furthermore, PKM2 can partner with KDM8, an oncogenic demethylase and enter the nucleus to serve as a HIF1α co-activator. Yet, the mechanistic basis of the exon-10 region in allosteric regulation and nuclear translocation remains unclear. Here, we determined the crystal structures and kinetic coupling constants of exon-10 tumor-related mutants (H391Y and R399E), showing altered structural plasticity and reduced allostery. Immunoprecipitation analysis revealed increased interaction with KDM8 for H391Y, R399E, and G415R. We also found a higher degree of HIF1α-mediated transactivation activity, particularly in the presence of KDM8. Furthermore, overexpression of PKM2 mutants significantly elevated cell growth and migration. Together, PKM2 exon-10 mutations lead to structure-allostery alterations and increased nuclear functions mediated by KDM8 in breast cancer cells. Targeting the PKM2-KDM8 complex may provide a potential therapeutic intervention

A Cascaded Approach for ultraly High Performance Lesion Detection and False Positive Removal in Liver CT Scans

Liver cancer has high morbidity and mortality rates in the world. Multi-phase CT is a main medical imaging modality for detecting/identifying and diagnosing liver tumors. Automatically detecting and classifying liver lesions in CT images have the potential to improve the clinical workflow. This task remains challenging due to liver lesions' large variations in size, appearance, image contrast, and the complexities of tumor types or subtypes. In this work, we customize a multi-object labeling tool for multi-phase CT images, which is used to curate a large-scale dataset containing 1,631 patients with four-phase CT images, multi-organ masks, and multi-lesion (six major types of liver lesions confirmed by pathology) masks. We develop a two-stage liver lesion detection pipeline, where the high-sensitivity detecting algorithms in the first stage discover as many lesion proposals as possible, and the lesion-reclassification algorithms in the second stage remove as many false alarms as possible. The multi-sensitivity lesion detection algorithm maximizes the information utilization of the individual probability maps of segmentation, and the lesion-shuffle augmentation effectively explores the texture contrast between lesions and the liver. Independently tested on 331 patient cases, the proposed model achieves high sensitivity and specificity for malignancy classification in the multi-phase contrast-enhanced CT (99.2%, 97.1%, diagnosis setting) and in the noncontrast CT (97.3%, 95.7%, screening setting)

VNTRDB: a bacterial variable number tandem repeat locus database

Variable number tandem repeat-PCR (VNTR-PCR) is a novel method developed for molecular typing of microorganisms. This method has proven useful in epidemiological studies in medical microbiology. Although hundreds of bacterial genomes have been sequenced, variable number tandem repeats (TRs) derived from comparative genome analyses are scarce. This may hamper their application to the surveillance of bacteria in molecular epidemiology. Here, we present a freely accessible variable number tandem repeat database (VNTRDB) that is intended to be a resource for helping in the discovery of putatively polymorphic tandem repeat loci and to aid with assay design by providing the flanking sequences that can be used in subsequent PCR primer design. In order to reveal possible polymorphism, each TR locus was obtained by comparing the sequences between different sets of bacterial genera, species or strains. Through this comparison, TRs which are unique to a genus can also be identified. Moreover, a visualization tool is provided to ensure that the copy number and locus length of repeats are correct. The VNTRDB is available at