Perceived Stress and Cognitive Functions among Chinese Older Adults: The Moderating Role of Health Status

Objective: The primary purposes of the present study are 1) to investigate the stress-cognition relationship among U.S. Chinese older adults; and 2) to examine the moderating role of health status on the stress-cognition relationship. Method: Data were drawn from the Population Study of Chinese Elderly in Chicago (PINE), which investigated 3,159 Chinese adults over 60 years old living in Chicago. Participants reported health status and completed the Chinese Perceived Stress Scale. Cognitive functions were measured by the East Boston Memory Test, the Digit Span Backwards, the Symbol Digit Modalities Test, and Chinese Mini-Mental State Examination. Results: Controlling for age, sex, education, and income, perceived stress was negatively associated with cognitive functions, whereas health status was positively associated with cognitive functions. In addition, older adults’ health status interacted with stress such that the negative relationships between perceived stress and cognitive functions were more pronounced for those who had poor health than for those who had good health. Conclusion: Findings suggest that physical health is a critical factor moderating the relationship between perceived stress and cognitive functions among U.S. Chinese older adults. Longitudinal research is needed to examine the complex relationships among stress, health, and cognitive functions of U.S. Chinese older adults

Evaluation of Community Health Education Workshops among Chinese Older Adults in Chicago: A Community-Based Participatory Research Approach

Background: Health education is one of the proven ways to improve knowledge and change health attitudes and behaviors. This study is intended to assess the effectiveness of five health workshops in a Chinese community, focusing on depression, elder abuse, nutrition, breast cancer and stroke. Methods: A community-based participatory research approach was implemented to plan and organize the workshops. A total of 236 Chinese community-dwelling older adults participated in different health workshops. Quantitative questionnaires on knowledge, risk factors and outcomes of each health topic were distributed before and after the workshop. Pre and post workshop comparison analyses were conducted to examine the effectiveness of the workshops on knowledge and learning. Results: Overall, the health workshops have significantly improved participants’ understanding throughout the five health themes (P<0.05). Whereas Chinese older adults have limited knowledge on depression, nutrition and stroke, their health knowledge regarding depression and elder abuse were significantly improved after attending the workshops. In addition, health education workshops increased older adults’ understanding of the risk factors and consequences of depression, elder abuse and breast cancer. Conclusion: This study sheds light on the importance of promoting health education, and the complexity and challenges of designing health education for community dwelling Chinese older adults. Significant implications for researchers, community service providers, health service workers and policy makers are discussed

Percolation Theories for Quantum Networks

Quantum networks have experienced rapid advancements in both theoretical and experimental domains over the last decade, making it increasingly important to understand their large-scale features from the viewpoint of statistical physics. This review paper discusses a fundamental question: how can entanglement be effectively and indirectly (e.g., through intermediate nodes) distributed between distant nodes in an imperfect quantum network, where the connections are only partially entangled and subject to quantum noise? We survey recent studies addressing this issue by drawing exact or approximate mappings to percolation theory, a branch of statistical physics centered on network connectivity. Notably, we show that the classical percolation frameworks do not uniquely define the network's indirect connectivity. This realization leads to the emergence of an alternative theory called ``concurrence percolation,'' which uncovers a previously unrecognized quantum advantage that emerges at large scales, suggesting that quantum networks are more resilient than initially assumed within classical percolation contexts, offering refreshing insights into future quantum network design

Assessing the Health Needs of Chinese Older Adults: Findings from a Community-Based Participatory Research Study in Chicago's Chinatown

The objective of this study is to examine the cultural views of healthy aging, knowledge and barriers to services, and perception of health sciences research among community-dwelling Chinese older adults in Chicago's Chinatown. This qualitative study is guided by the Precede-Proceed conceptual model with community-based participatory research design. Data analysis is based on eight focus group interviews with Chinese older (age 60+) adults (n = 78). We used a grounded theory framework to systematically guide the thematic structure of our data. Findings show participants described cultural conception of health in terms of physical function, psychological well-being, social support, and cognitive function. The availability, affordability, and cultural barriers towards health care services were major negative enabling factors that inhibit participants from fulfilling health needs. Perception and knowledge of health sciences research were also discussed. This study has implications for the delivery of culturally appropriate health care services to the Chinese aging population

Leveraging a Community-Based Research Approach to Explore Research Perceptions Among Suburban Poor and Underserved Populations

This qualitative study explored perceptions of research among a rapidly growing underserved population within a suburban community, a setting that has yet to be sufficiently explored using a community-based research (CBR) approach. We recruited community members from community health care agencies in DuPage County, Illinois, and 79 participants were enrolled in the study. Community researchers conducted nine focus groups comprised of agency clients and eight stakeholder interviews to collect community perspectives regarding the meaning of research and its community impact, current and desired channels of research information, and research motives, discrimination, and funding. Findings revealed four major themes: community members 1) often associate research with medical research or community engagement; 2) rely most heavily on the internet for research information; 3) perceive financial barriers, rather than racial or ethnic barriers, as a significant obstacle to receiving the benefits of research; and 4) trust research conducted by academic institutions

Individuals’ preference on reading pathways influences the involvement of neural pathways in phonological learning

IntroductionExisting behavioral and neuroimaging studies revealed inter-individual variability in the selection of the two phonological routes in word reading. However, it is not clear how individuals’ preferred reading pathways/strategies modulate the involvement of a certain brain region for phonological learning in a new language, and consequently affect their behavioral performance on phonological access.MethodsTo address this question, the present study recruited a group of native Chinese speakers to learn two sets of artificial language characters, respectively, in addressed-phonology training (i.e., whole-word mapping) and assembled-phonology training conditions (i.e., grapheme-to-phoneme mapping).ResultsBehavioral results showed that the more lexical pathways participants preferred, the better they performed on newly-acquired addressed characters relative to assembled characters. More importantly, neuroimaging results showed that participants who preferred lexical pathway in phonological access show less involvement of brain regions for addressed phonology (e.g., the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex and right pars triangularis) in the processing of newly-acquired addressed characters.ConclusionThese results indicated that phonological access via the preferred pathway required less neural resources to achieve better behavioral performance. These above results provide direct neuroimaging evidence for the influence of reading pathway preference on phonological learning

DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior

We present DiffBIR, which leverages pretrained text-to-image diffusion models for blind image restoration problem. Our framework adopts a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we pretrain a restoration module across diversified degradations to improve generalization capability in real-world scenarios. The second stage leverages the generative ability of latent diffusion models, to achieve realistic image restoration. Specifically, we introduce an injective modulation sub-network -- LAControlNet for finetuning, while the pre-trained Stable Diffusion is to maintain its generative ability. Finally, we introduce a controllable module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by introducing the latent image guidance in the denoising process during inference. Extensive experiments have demonstrated its superiority over state-of-the-art approaches for both blind image super-resolution and blind face restoration tasks on synthetic and real-world datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/DiffBIR

Biochemical and Structural Insights into the Mechanisms of SARS Coronavirus RNA Ribose 2′-O-Methylation by nsp16/nsp10 Protein Complex

The 5′-cap structure is a distinct feature of eukaryotic mRNAs, and eukaryotic viruses generally modify the 5′-end of viral RNAs to mimic cellular mRNA structure, which is important for RNA stability, protein translation and viral immune escape. SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) encodes two S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAM)-dependent methyltransferases (MTase) which sequentially methylate the RNA cap at guanosine-N7 and ribose 2′-O positions, catalyzed by nsp14 N7-MTase and nsp16 2′-O-MTase, respectively. A unique feature for SARS-CoV is that nsp16 requires non-structural protein nsp10 as a stimulatory factor to execute its MTase activity. Here we report the biochemical characterization of SARS-CoV 2′-O-MTase and the crystal structure of nsp16/nsp10 complex bound with methyl donor SAM. We found that SARS-CoV nsp16 MTase methylated m7GpppA-RNA but not m7GpppG-RNA, which is in contrast with nsp14 MTase that functions in a sequence-independent manner. We demonstrated that nsp10 is required for nsp16 to bind both m7GpppA-RNA substrate and SAM cofactor. Structural analysis revealed that nsp16 possesses the canonical scaffold of MTase and associates with nsp10 at 1∶1 ratio. The structure of the nsp16/nsp10 interaction interface shows that nsp10 may stabilize the SAM-binding pocket and extend the substrate RNA-binding groove of nsp16, consistent with the findings in biochemical assays. These results suggest that nsp16/nsp10 interface may represent a better drug target than the viral MTase active site for developing highly specific anti-coronavirus drugs

Addressing Health and Well-being of U.S. Chinese Older Adults through Community-Based Participatory Research: Introduction to the PINE Study

The Chinese older population in the U.S. is among the largest and fastest growing segment of the aging population; however, little is known regarding their health and well-being due to various research barriers. To fill in the critical void, the Population-based Study of Chinese Elderly in Chicago (the PINE study) was carried out as an epidemiological study of health and well-being amongst 3,157 community-dwelling Chinese older adults aged 60 years and older in the Greater Chicago Area. Based on the PINE study findings, this special issue is designed to examine the health status, medical conditions, and social and psychological well-being of Chinese American older adults. This editorial described the rationale of the study, methods and design, and preliminary findings. Important study implications for researchers and policy makers were also reported. In aggregate, coordinated family and community care, improved delivery of care, practice changes, and policy reform are necessary to work in concert to prepare for the diverse minority older adults who are in urgent need of the linguistically and culturally appropriate social services