Understand How Children Cope with the Diagnosis and Treatment of Cancer: An Important Step to Implement Appropriate Psychological Interventions

Poster Presentation (Nurse's Session)Introduction: Understanding how children cope with the diagnosis and treatment of cancer is a crucial step toward designing appropriate psycho-educational interventions. This paper aimed to explore how Hong Kong Chinese children cope with the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, an area of research that has been underrepresented in existing literature. Methods: A cross-sectional study was employed. Eightyeight Hong Kong Chinese children aged 9 to 16 years, admitted for treatment of cancer in 2 paediatric oncology units, were invited to participate in the study. A one-to-one short interview was conducted. Content analysis was used to analyze the interview data. The differences in coping strategies used between children's sex and age group were assessed by using chi-square test. Results: Findings from this study indicated that the most commonly reported coping strategy used by Hong Kong Chinese children was self-control (emotion-focused). This finding is incongruent with previous studies on Western children in which it was found that seeking social support (problem-focused) was the most commonly reported coping strategy. On the other hand, this study revealed that children used different coping strategies at different developmental stages, with younger children used less problem-focused and more emotionfocused coping strategies than older children. Discussion: The diagnosis and treatment of childhood cancer have been described as extremely stressful and threatening experiences in the life of a child. This study has addressed a gap in the literature by examining how Hong Kong Chinese children coped with and responded to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. It is anticipated that the information derived from this study would help nurses to shape and design appropriate psycho-educational interventions that can help ease the burden of cancer treatment and provide support for childhood cancer survivors to flight cancer and its subsequent adverse treatment effects at every step of their long and difficult journey.published_or_final_versio

The impact of cancer on children's physical, emotional, and psychosocial well-being

The diagnosis and treatment of cancer are a stressful and threatening experience, which can be emotionally devastating to children. Despite the improved prognosis, the course of cancer treatment has tremendous impact on children. This article aims to examine the impact of cancer on physical, emotional, and psychosocial well-being of Hong Kong Chinese children, an area of research that has been underrepresented in the literature. Ninety-eight Hong Kong Chinese children aged 7 to 15 years, admitted for treatment of cancer in 2 pediatric oncology units of 2 different hospitals, were invited to participate in the study. Findings from this study indicated that the children scored considerably high state anxiety on admission, and more than half of the participants presented some depressive symptoms during their stay in the hospital. Moreover, semistructured interviews indicated that nearly all children expressed different degrees of sadness and worry. The findings suggested that there is a room for improvement in existing nursing intervention regarding preparing children for hospitalization and treatment of cancer. There is an imperative need for nurses to evaluate appropriate nursing interventions that can help children resume their normal growth and development, in particular, to help them ease the physical, emotional, and psychological burden of life-threatening disease. © 2010 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.postprin

Effectiveness of an integrated adventure-based training and health education program in promoting regular physical activity among childhood cancer survivors

Background: There is growing concern about declining levels of physical activity in childhood cancer survivors. This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of an integrated adventure-based training and health education program in promoting changes in exercise behavior and enhancing the physical activity levels, self-efficacy, and quality of life of Hong Kong Chinese childhood cancer survivors. Methods: A randomized controlled trial, two-group pretest and repeated post-test, between-subjects design was conducted to 71 childhood cancer survivors (9- to 16-year-olds). Participants in the experimental group joined a 4-day integrated adventure-based training and health education program. Control group participants received the same amount of time and attention as the experimental group but not in such a way as to have any specific effect on the outcome measures. Participants' exercise behavior changes, levels of physical activity, self-efficacy, and quality of life were assessed at the time of recruitment, 3, 6, and 9 months after starting the intervention. Results: Participants in the experimental group reported statistically significant differences in physical activity stages of change (p < 0.001), higher levels of physical activity (p < 0.001) and self-efficacy (p = 0.04) than those in the control group. Besides, there were statistically significant mean differences (p < 0.001) in physical activity levels (-2.6), self-efficacy (-2.0), and quality of life (-4.3) of participants in the experimental group from baseline to 9 months after starting the intervention. Conclusions: The integrated adventure-based training and health education program was found to be effective in promoting regular physical activity among childhood cancer survivors. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.postprin

Chaotic motions in the real fuzzy electronic circuits

Fuzzy electronic circuit (FEC) is firstly introduced, which is implementing Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy chaotic systems on electronic circuit. In the research field of secure communications, the original source should be blended with other complex signals. Chaotic signals are one of the good sources to be applied to encrypt high confidential signals, because of its high complexity, sensitiveness of initial conditions, and unpredictability. Consequently, generating chaotic signals on electronic circuit to produce real electrical signals applied to secure communications is an exceedingly important issue. However, nonlinear systems are always composed of many complex equations and are hard to realize on electronic circuits. Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model is a powerful tool, which is described by fuzzy IF-THEN rules to express the local dynamics of each fuzzy rule by a linear system model. Accordingly, in this paper, we produce the chaotic signals via electronic circuits through T-S fuzzy model and the numerical simulation results provided by MATLAB are also proposed for comparison. T-S fuzzy chaotic Lorenz and Chen-Lee systems are used for examples and are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed electronic circuit. © 2013 Shih-Yu Li et al

Diverse proteomic alterations in gastric adenocarcinoma

Gastric adenocarcinoma is one of the most common cancers in Asian countries including China. Although its incidence rates in the West are lower than that in Asia, gastric cancer is still a major health problem worldwide, being second only to lung cancers in the number of deaths it causes. Helicobacter pylori infection has been identified as the major pathogen, but the detailed pathogenesis of gastric carcinoma remains elusive. Due to the lack of suitable and specific biomarkers for early detection, most cases of the disease are diagnosed at late stages and the survival rate is low. In this study, we used a proteomic approach to globally analyze the protein profiles of paired surgical specimens of primary gastric adenocarcinoma and nontumor mucosa aiming at identifying specific disease-associated proteins as potential clinical biomarkers and for carcinogenetic study. Compared to nontumor tissues, multiple protein alterations were found in tumor tissues. Some of these alterations involve variations in the expression of cytoskeleton proteins, including an increase in cytokeratin 8 and tropomyosin isoform and a decrease in cytokeratin 20. Co-up-regulations of heat-shock proteins and glycolytic enzymes were observed in tumor tissues, indicating self-protective efforts of cells and the growing energy requirement during malignant transformation. Diverse regulations also occurred with proteins involved in cell proliferation and differentiation, such as GMP reductase 2 and creatine kinase B, and proteins bearing potential tumor suppressor activities, including prohibitin and selenium binding protein 1. More interestingly, a human stomach-specific protein, 18 kDa antrum mucosa protein, was found to be dramatically under-expressed in cancer tissues, implicating a possible special pathological role for this protein in gastric carcinogenesis. Further comprehensive evaluation by globally considering the altered factors may result in the discovery of a biomarker index for effective assessment of the disease and may provide in-depth information for better understanding the pathogenesis of gastric cancer.postprin

Aqcostic quantification and colour kinesis: evaluation of left atrial and left ventricular function in real time

published_or_final_versio

Combination of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor and irbesartan for the treatment of heart failure

published_or_final_versio

Sharp Global Bounds for the Hessian on Pseudo-Hermitian Manifolds

We find sharp bounds for the norm inequality on a Pseudo-hermitian manifold, where the L^2 norm of all second derivatives of the function involving horizontal derivatives is controlled by the L^2 norm of the sub-Laplacian. Perturbation allows us to get a-priori bounds for solutions to sub-elliptic PDE in non-divergence form with bounded measurable coefficients. The method of proof is through a Bochner technique. The Heisenberg group is seen to be en extremal manifold for our inequality in the class of manifolds whose Ricci curvature is non-negative.Comment: 13 page

Benefits of cardiac rehabilitation in patients with left ventricular systolic heart failure

published_or_final_versio

Role of domain walls in the abnormal photovoltaic effect in BiFeO3

Recently, the anomalous photovoltaic (PV) effect in BiFeO3 (BFO) thin films, which resulted in open circuit voltages (V-oc) considerably larger than the band gap of the material, has generated a revival of the entire field of photoferroelectrics. Here, via temperature-dependent PV studies, we prove that the bulk photovoltaic (BPV) effect, which has been studied in the past for many non-centrosymmetric materials, is at the origin of the anomalous PV effect in BFO films. Moreover, we show that irrespective of the measurement geometry, V-oc as high as 50V can be achieved by controlling the conductivity of domain walls (DW). We also show that photoconductivity of the DW is markedly higher than in the bulk of BFO