Olfactory and gustatory functions, appetite, and nutritional status in Alzheimer's disease in a care facility

Kaneko N., Nohara K., Tanaka N., et al. Olfactory and gustatory functions, appetite, and nutritional status in Alzheimer's disease in a care facility. Oral Science International , (2024); https://doi.org/10.1002/osi2.1236

Comparison of Saccharin Time in Nursing Home Residents With and Without Pneumonia: A Preliminary Study

ackground/Aim: Although mucociliary clearance is important for preventing pneumonia, its association with the onset of pneumonia is unclear. The aim of this study is to examine the association between saccharin test results as a potential measure of mucociliary clearance and history of pneumonia in nursing home residents. Patients and Methods: Ninety elderly nursing home residents (elderly group) were selected, 35 of whom had a history of pneumonia. Twenty-five healthy adults (adult group) were also investigated to provide baseline values for this study. We conducted the saccharin test to evaluate mucociliary clearance and compared the saccharin time (ST) between those with and without history of pneumonia. Results: Mean ST in the adult group was 12±6 min. The ST in the pneumonia group was significantly longer than that in the non-pneumonia group (32±23 min vs. 17±13 min) (p<0.05). Conclusion: Impaired mucociliary clearance is a factor in the development of pneumonia among nursing home residents

Remarks on flavor-neutrino propagators and oscillation formulae

We examine the general structure of the formulae of neutrino oscillations proposed by Blasone and Vitiello(BV). Reconstructing their formulae with the retarded propagators of the flavor neutrino fields for the case of many flavors, we can get easily the formulae which satisfy the suitable boundary conditions and are independent of arbitrary mass parameters $\{\mu_{\rho}\}$, as is obtained by BV for the case of two flavors. In this two flavor case, our formulae reduce to those obtained by BV under $T$-invariance condition. Furthermore, the reconstructed probabilities are shown to coincide with those derived with recourse to the mass Hilbert space ${\cal H}_{m}$ which is unitarily inequivalent to the flavor Hilbert space ${\cal H}_{f}$. Such a situation is not found in the corresponding construction a la BV. Then the new factors in the BV's formulae, which modify the usual oscill ation formulae, are not the trace of the flavor Hilbert space construction, but come from Bogolyubov transformation among the operators of spin-1/2 ne utrino with different masses.Comment: revtex, 16 page

Pneumatic Microballoons for Active Control of the Vibration-Induced Flow

Vibration-induced flow (VIF), in which a mean flow is induced around a microstructure by applying periodic vibrations, is increasingly used as an active flow-control technique at the microscale. In this study, we have developed a microdevice that actively controls the VIF patterns using elastic membrane protrusions (microballoons) actuated by pneumatic pressure. This device enables on-demand spatial and temporal fluid manipulation using a single device that cannot be achieved using a conventional fixed-structure arrangement. We successfully demonstrated that the device achieved displacements of up to 38 µm using the device within a pressure range of 0 to 30 kPa, indicating the suitability of the device for microfluidic applications. Using this active microballoon array, we demonstrated that the device can actively manipulate the flow field and induce swirling flows. Furthermore, we achieved selective actuation of the microballoon using this system. By applying air pressure from a multi-input channel system through a connection tube, the microballoons corresponding to each air channel can be selectively actuated. This enabled precise control of the flow field and periodic switching of the flow patterns using a single chip. In summary, the proposed microdevice provides active control of VIF patterns and has potential applications in advanced microfluidics, such as fluid mixing and particle manipulation

A Graph Convolutional Network for Elution Order Prediction in Chromatographic Enantioseparation

Chromatography using chiral columns is the most effective method for determining the optical purity of enantiomer pairs, although identifying the absolute configuration of each peak is difficult and remains a challenging issue. We demonstrate a solution to this challenge based on machine learning in this study. We used a dataset that consists of retention times of absolute configurations of enantiomer pairs on CROWNPAK CR-I(+) and CR(+) columns to train a variety of neural network architectures. Our findings show that graph-based neural networks achieve superior prediction accuracy despite the relatively small dataset. Specifically, the model shows enantiomer elution order prediction accuracy of 88.9% for CR-I(+) and 88.4 % for CR(+) columns. We then predicted elution order for molecule types not contained in the original dataset, in order to test this model’s ability to generalize to new molecules. The overall accuracy across both column types was 81.0 %, indicating that our prediction model can be used for virtual experiments on enantioseparation before conducting actual experiments and analysis of column fractions