Quality of life of the Chinese elderly in Hong Kong : preliminary findings from two focus groups studies

In addressing the issues of developing a culturally sensitive and elderly relevant measure of quality of life, the research teams resort to a multi-staged approach. The first is to take on an easier target group (i.e. those living in community and are reasonably mobile) in an attempt to develop an initial measure for the elderly people living in community. Assuming that this initial measurement will be largely applicable to the frail ones, an alternative version will be developed based on the modification of the former. So the first stage was a series of focus groups designed to exhaust meanings and components of quality of life as reported by the elderly people living in the community. The second stage involved a representative survey of elderly people drawn from the general household survey lists generated by the Censis and Statistics Department. It was from the community survey that a valid measure called Hong Kong Quality of Life for the Elderly in Community Scale (HKQoLECS) was developed (Chan et al, 2000). However, just about the time when a proposal to study the frail was drawn, WHOQOL Study Group in Edinburgh approached the Hong Kong WHOQOL study group to develop a WHOQOL-elderly protocol. The Hong Kong Team then thought it was a good opportunity to collaborate with the WHOQOL Study Group. However, it also means that we have to adopt the WHOQOL-100 (100 items version) as a base rather than using the newly developed HKQoLECS. Nonetheless, the Hong Kong Team, taking that the domains and facets in HKQoLECS were fairly similar to the WHOQOL-100\u27s, accepted to follow the WHOQOL Study Group protocol in developing a WHOQOL version specificially for the elderly people. Procedure taken was almost the same. Focus groups were run in the same way as before, except that WHOQOL-100 was used to facilitate (or frame) the responses of the participants. The present monograph attempted to make comparison between the findings from the first stage focus groups and those from the focus groups using WHOQOL protocol. For clarity of presentation, a brief overview on quality of life concepts and literature will be given first. Then the first focus gropus study and the WHOQOL-elderly focus groups study will be presented in separate sections. The final section will be a comparison of findings from the two focus groups studies

Why Do Woodpeckers Resist Head Impact Injury: A Biomechanical Investigation

Head injury is a leading cause of morbidity and death in both industrialized and developing countries. It is estimated that brain injuries account for 15% of the burden of fatalities and disabilities, and represent the leading cause of death in young adults. Brain injury may be caused by an impact or a sudden change in the linear and/or angular velocity of the head. However, the woodpecker does not experience any head injury at the high speed of 6–7 m/s with a deceleration of 1000 g when it drums a tree trunk. It is still not known how woodpeckers protect their brain from impact injury. In order to investigate this, two synchronous high-speed video systems were used to observe the pecking process, and the force sensor was used to measure the peck force. The mechanical properties and macro/micro morphological structure in woodpecker's head were investigated using a mechanical testing system and micro-CT scanning. Finite element (FE) models of the woodpecker's head were established to study the dynamic intracranial responses. The result showed that macro/micro morphology of cranial bone and beak can be recognized as a major contributor to non-impact-injuries. This biomechanical analysis makes it possible to visualize events during woodpecker pecking and may inspire new approaches to prevention and treatment of human head injury

Local structural alignment of RNA with affine gap model

Predicting new non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) of a family can be done by aligning the potential candidate with a member of the family with known sequence and secondary structure. Existing tools either only consider the sequence similarity or cannot handle local alignment with gaps. In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the optimal local structural alignment between a query RNA sequence (with known secondary structure) and a target sequence (with unknown secondary structure) with the affine gap penalty model. We provide the algorithm to solve the problem. Based on a preliminary experiment, we show that there are ncRNA families in which considering local structural alignment with gap penalty model can identify real hits more effectively than using global alignment or local alignment without gap penalty model.The project is partially supported by the Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research (Project number: 200911159065) of the University of Hong Kong

SOAP3-dp: Fast, Accurate and Sensitive GPU-based Short Read Aligner

To tackle the exponentially increasing throughput of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS), most of the existing short-read aligners can be configured to favor speed in trade of accuracy and sensitivity. SOAP3-dp, through leveraging the computational power of both CPU and GPU with optimized algorithms, delivers high speed and sensitivity simultaneously. Compared with widely adopted aligners including BWA, Bowtie2, SeqAlto, GEM and GPU-based aligners including BarraCUDA and CUSHAW, SOAP3-dp is two to tens of times faster, while maintaining the highest sensitivity and lowest false discovery rate (FDR) on Illumina reads with different lengths. Transcending its predecessor SOAP3, which does not allow gapped alignment, SOAP3-dp by default tolerates alignment similarity as low as 60 percent. Real data evaluation using human genome demonstrates SOAP3-dp's power to enable more authentic variants and longer Indels to be discovered. Fosmid sequencing shows a 9.1 percent FDR on newly discovered deletions. SOAP3-dp natively supports BAM file format and provides a scoring scheme same as BWA, which enables it to be integrated into existing analysis pipelines. SOAP3-dp has been deployed on Amazon-EC2, NIH-Biowulf and Tianhe-1A.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, submitted to PLoS ONE, additional files available at "https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bhclhxpoiubh371/O5CO_CkXQE". Comments most welcom

Cardiovascular outcomes and hospitalizations in Asian patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors: a population-based study.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) have known associations with cardiotoxicity. However, a representative quantification of the adverse cardiovascular events and cardiovascular attendances amongst Asian users of ICI has been lacking. This retrospective cohort study identified all ICI users in Hong Kong, China, between 2013-2021. All patients were followed up until the end of 2021 for the primary outcome of major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE; a composite of cardiovascular mortality, myocardial infarction, heart failure, and stroke). Patients with prior diagnosis of any component of MACE were excluded from all MACE analyses. In total, 4324 patients were analysed (2905 (67.2%) males; median age 63.5 years old (interquartile range 55.4-70.7 years old); median follow-up 1.0 year (interquartile range 0.4-2.3 years)), of whom 153 were excluded from MACE analyses due to prior events. MACE occurred in 116 (2.8%) with an incidence rate (IR) of 1.7 [95% confidence interval: 1.4, 2.0] events per 100 patient-years; IR was higher within the first year of follow-up (2.9 [2.3, 3.5] events per 100 patient-years). Cardiovascular hospitalization(s) occurred in 188 (4.4%) with 254 episodes (0.5% of all episodes) and 1555 days of hospitalization (1.3% of all hospitalized days), for whom the IR of cardiovascular hospitalization was 5.6 [4.6, 6.9] episodes per 100 person-years with 52.9 [39.8, 70.3] days' stay per 100 person-years. Amongst Asian users of ICI, MACE was uncommon, and a small proportion of hospitalizations was cardiovascular in nature. Most MACE and cardiovascular hospitalizations occurred during the first year after initiating ICI. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Physiological concentration of protocatechuic acid directly protects vascular endothelial function against inflammation in diabetes through Akt/eNOS pathway

BackgroundCardiovascular diseases (CVDs) have been the major cause of mortality in type 2 diabetes. However, new approaches are still warranted since current diabetic medications, which focus mainly on glycemic control, do not effectively lower cardiovascular mortality rate in diabetic patients. Protocatechuic acid (PCA) is a phenolic acid widely distributed in garlic, onion, cauliflower and other plant-based foods. Given the anti-oxidative effects of PCA in vitro, we hypothesized that PCA would also have direct beneficial effects on endothelial function in addition to the systemic effects on vascular health demonstrated by previous studies.Methods and resultsSince IL-1β is the major pathological contributor to endothelial dysfunction in diabetes, the anti-inflammatory effects of PCA specific on endothelial cells were further verified by the use of IL-1β-induced inflammation model. Direct incubation of db/db mouse aortas with physiological concentration of PCA significantly ameliorated endothelium-dependent relaxation impairment, as well as reactive oxygen species overproduction mediated by diabetes. In addition to the well-studied anti-oxidative activity, PCA demonstrated strong anti-inflammatory effects by suppressing the pro-inflammatory cytokines MCP1, VCAM1 and ICAM1, as well as increasing the phosphorylation of eNOS and Akt in the inflammatory endothelial cell model induced by the key player in diabetic endothelial dysfunction IL-1β. Upon blocking of Akt phosphorylation, p-eNOS/eNOS remained low and the inhibition of pro-inflammatory cytokines by PCA ceased.ConclusionPCA exerts protection on vascular endothelial function against inflammation through Akt/eNOS pathway, suggesting daily acquisition of PCA may be encouraged for diabetic patients