Support for Local Educational Expenditures by the Elderly : Evidence from Japan

投稿論文Refereed Articl

Do the Elderly Support Public Educational Expenditure? An Empirical Analysis Focusing on the Characteristics of Spending

This paper investigates the preferences of the elderly with respect to local public educational expenditures at the kindergarten, primary school, junior high school and high school stages in Japan focusing on the characteristics of expenditures. We applied dynamic estimation method to the data of educational expenditures after the latter half of the 1990s, during which period the aging factor would have been likely to have had a negative relationship with educational expenditure. According to the estimation results, the elderly population would not support an increase in current expenditures composed mainly of personnel expenses at every educational stage but would support capital expenditures of junior high and high schools, which consists of construction costs mostly

トクシマ ダイガク ビョウイン ガイライ カガク リョウホウシツ ニオケル チーム イリョウ ト カンゴシ ノ ヤクワリ

Recently, cancer chemotherapy in outpatient chemotherapy unit has been progressively promoted, which is affected by improvement of supportive therapy, shortening of hospital stay, induction of comprehensive medicine, and political necessity. Whereas chemotherapy in outpatient chemotherapy unit has expected benefit to advance the quality of life, cancer patients sometimes feel some anxiety about their daily life and adverse events induced by anticancer agents. Moreover, in the setting of out patient clinic, the delay of adequate response against adverse events might be a serious problem. For the safety administration of anticancer agents and the enhancement of patient satisfaction in outpatient chemotherapy unit, multidisciplinary team approach should be essential. In this chapter, we outline the role of multidisciplinary team including nursing staffs in the outpatient chemotherapy unit in Tokushima University Hospital

Multi-Layer Distributed Storage of LHD Plasma Diagnostic Database

At the end of LHD experimental campaign in 2003, the amount of whole plasma diagnostics raw data had reached 3.16 GB in a long-pulse experiment. This is a new world record in fusion plasma experiments, far beyond the previous value of 1.5 GB/shot. The total size of the LHD diagnostic data is about 21.6 TB for the whole six years of experiments, and it continues to grow at an increasing rate. The LHD diagnostic database and storage system, i.e. the LABCOM system, has a completely distributed architecture to be sufficiently flexible and easily expandable to maintain integrity of the total amount of data. It has three categories of the storage layer: OODBMS volumes in data acquisition servers, RAID servers, and mass storage systems, such as MO jukeboxes and DVD-R changers. These are equally accessible through the network. By data migration between them, they can be considered a virtual OODB extension area. Their data contents have been listed in a “facilitator” PostgreSQL RDBMS, which now contains about 6.2 million entries, and informs the optimized priority to clients requesting data. Using the “glib” compression for all of the binary data and applying the three-tier application model for the OODB data transfer/retrieval, an optimized OODB read-out rate of 1.7 MB/s and effective client access speed of 3?25 MB/s have been achieved. As a result, the LABCOM data system has succeeded in combination of the use of RDBMS, OODBMS, RAID, and MSS to enable a virtual and always expandable storage volume, simultaneously with rapid data access

Human calgizzarin ; one colorectal cancer-related gene selected by a large scale random cDNA sequencing and Northern blot analysis

A cDNA library was constructed from COLO 205 and 1056 clones randomly selected from this library were partially sequenced. Two hundred and two (38.4%) out of 526 independent genes had more than 80% similarity to the genes reported in GenBank. In Northern blot analysis, 96 out of 98 genes were shown to be expressed at the same level in colon and lung carcinoma cell lines and control fibroblasts. Only two clones, including human synovial phospholipase A-2 and a homologue to rabbit calgizzarin, were expressed at different levels among these cell lines. The full sequence of human calgizzarin was determined and its expression was remarkably elevated in colorectal cancers compared with that in normal colorectal mucosa

Genetics of Endometrial Cancers

Endometrial cancers exhibit a different mechanism of tumorigenesis and progression depending on histopathological and clinical types. The most frequently altered gene in estrogen-dependent endometrioid endometrial carcinoma tumors is PTEN. Microsatellite instability is another important genetic event in this type of tumor. In contrast, p53 mutations or Her2/neu overexpression are more frequent in non-endometrioid tumors. On the other hand, it is possible that the clear cell type may arise from a unique pathway which appears similar to the ovarian clear cell carcinoma. K-ras mutations are detected in approximately 15%–30% of endometrioid carcinomas, are unrelated to the existence of endometrial hyperplasia. A β-catenin mutation was detected in about 20% of endometrioid carcinomas, but is rare in serous carcinoma. Telomere shortening is another important type of genomic instability observed in endometrial cancer. Only non-endometrioid endometrial carcinoma tumors were significantly associated with critical telomere shortening in the adjacent morphologically normal epithelium. Lynch syndrome, which is an autosomal dominantly inherited disorder of cancer susceptibility and is characterized by a MSH2/MSH6 protein complex deficiency, is associated with the development of non-endometrioid carcinomas

Phosphodiesterase 3 inhibition and cough in elderly asthmatics

AIMS: Cough is a common symptom of bronchial asthma, a chronic inflammatory airway disease. Recently, the therapeutic effects of selective phosphodiesterase (PDE) inhibitors have been focused on bronchial asthma. This study was designed to investigate the clinical effect of PDE 3 inhibition on cough reflex sensitivity in elderly patients with bronchial asthma. METHODS: Effects of cilostazol, a PDE 3 inhibitor, on cough response to inhaled capsaicin were examined in 11 patients over 70 years with stable asthma in a randomized, placebo-controlled cross over study. Capsaicin cough threshold, defined as the lowest concentration of capsaicin eliciting five or more coughs, was measured as an index of airway cough reflex sensitivity. RESULTS: The cough threshold was significantly (p < 0.05) increased after two-week treatment with cilostazol (100 mg twice a day orally) compared with placebo [48.8 (GSEM 1.4) vs. 29.2 (GSEM 1.3) μM]. CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that PDE 3 inhibition may be a novel therapeutic option for elderly patients with asthma, especially for their cough symptoms

Nonstop Lose-Less Data Acquisition and Storing Method for Plasma Motion Images

Plasma diagnostic data analysis often requires the original raw data as they are, in other words, at the same frame rate and resolution of the CCD camera sensor. As a non-interlace VGA camera typically generates over 70 MB/s video stream, usual frame grabber cards apply the lossy compression encoder, such as mpeg-1/-2 or mpeg-4, to drastically lessen the bit rate. In this study, a new approach, which makes it possible to acquire and store such the wideband video stream without any quality reduction, has been successfully achieved. Simultaneously, the real-time video streaming is even possible at the original frame rate. For minimising the exclusive access time in every data storing, it has adopted the directory structure to hold every frame files separately, instead of one long consecutive file. The popular ‘zip’ archive method improves the portability of data files, however, the JPEG-LS image compression is applied inside by replacing its intrinsic deflate/inflate algorithm that has less performances for image data

Steady-state data acquisition method for LHD diagnostics

The LHD experiment has gone through 5 campaign periods over the past 4 years, during which the diagnostics data continues to grow and the primary 28 measurements produce about 620 MB/shot in 150 shot/day 3-min cycles. In 2002, 30-min long-pulse experiments will be carried out in LHD, where real-time operations are indispensable for plasma measurements and data acquisition. The new scheme for utilizing conventional CAMAC digitizers in long-pulse experiments has been discussed and examined. As a result, in LHD, CAMACs will shift into 120?180 s cyclic operation, synchronized by the diagnostic timing system. The new CompactPCI-based digitizer frontend has performed about 84 MB/s continuous acquisition in benchmarks, and has been formulated with the conventional CAMAC system to make concurrent acquisitions

Validating Variational Bayes Linear Regression Method With Multi-Central Datasets.

PurposeTo validate the prediction accuracy of variational Bayes linear regression (VBLR) with two datasets external to the training dataset.MethodThe training dataset consisted of 7268 eyes of 4278 subjects from the University of Tokyo Hospital. The Japanese Archive of Multicentral Databases in Glaucoma (JAMDIG) dataset consisted of 271 eyes of 177 patients, and the Diagnostic Innovations in Glaucoma Study (DIGS) dataset includes 248 eyes of 173 patients, which were used for validation. Prediction accuracy was compared between the VBLR and ordinary least squared linear regression (OLSLR). First, OLSLR and VBLR were carried out using total deviation (TD) values at each of the 52 test points from the second to fourth visual fields (VFs) (VF2-4) to 2nd to 10th VF (VF2-10) of each patient in JAMDIG and DIGS datasets, and the TD values of the 11th VF test were predicted every time. The predictive accuracy of each method was compared through the root mean squared error (RMSE) statistic.ResultsOLSLR RMSEs with the JAMDIG and DIGS datasets were between 31 and 4.3 dB, and between 19.5 and 3.9 dB. On the other hand, VBLR RMSEs with JAMDIG and DIGS datasets were between 5.0 and 3.7, and between 4.6 and 3.6 dB. There was statistically significant difference between VBLR and OLSLR for both datasets at every series (VF2-4 to VF2-10) (P &lt; 0.01 for all tests). However, there was no statistically significant difference in VBLR RMSEs between JAMDIG and DIGS datasets at any series of VFs (VF2-2 to VF2-10) (P &gt; 0.05).ConclusionsVBLR outperformed OLSLR to predict future VF progression, and the VBLR has a potential to be a helpful tool at clinical settings