Determinants of participation restriction among community dwelling stroke survivors: A path analysis

Background: Apart from promoting physical recovery and assisting in activities of daily living, a major challenge in stroke rehabilitation is to minimize psychosocial morbidity and to promote the reintegration of stroke survivors into their family and community. The identification of key factors influencing long-term outcome are essential in developing more effective rehabilitation measures for reducing stroke-related morbidity. The aim of this study was to test a theoretical model of predictors of participation restriction which included the direct and indirect effects between psychosocial outcomes, physical outcome, and socio-demographic variables at 12 months after stroke. Methods: Data were collected from 188 stroke survivors at 12 months following their discharge from one of the two rehabilitation hospitals in Hong Kong. The settings included patients' homes and residential care facilities. Path analysis was used to test a hypothesized model of participation restriction at 12 months. Results: The path coefficients show functional ability having the largest direct effect on participation restriction (β = 0.51). The results also show that more depressive symptoms (β = -0.27), low state self-esteem (β = 0.20), female gender (β = 0.13), older age (β = -0.11) and living in a residential care facility (β = -0.12) have a direct effect on participation restriction. The explanatory variables accounted for 71% of the variance in explaining participation restriction at 12 months. Conclusion: Identification of stroke survivors at risk of high levels of participation restriction, depressive symptoms and low self-esteem will assist health professionals to devise appropriate rehabilitation interventions that target improving both physical and psychosocial functioning

Pro-angiogenic effects of chalcone derivatives in zebrafish embryos in vivo

[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]電子

The Effect of Paternal Age on Relapse in First-Episode Schizophrenia

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Exactly Marginal Deformations and Global Symmetries

We study the problem of finding exactly marginal deformations of N=1 superconformal field theories in four dimensions. We find that the only way a marginal chiral operator can become not exactly marginal is for it to combine with a conserved current multiplet. Additionally, we find that the space of exactly marginal deformations, also called the "conformal manifold," is the quotient of the space of marginal couplings by the complexified continuous global symmetry group. This fact explains why exactly marginal deformations are ubiquitous in N=1 theories. Our method turns the problem of enumerating exactly marginal operators into a problem in group theory, and substantially extends and simplifies the previous analysis by Leigh and Strassler. We also briefly discuss how to apply our analysis to N=2 theories in three dimensions.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure

Associations between health-related quality of life, physical function and fear of falling in older fallers receiving home care

Falls and injuries in older adults have significant consequences and costs, both personal and to society. Although having a high incidence of falls, high prevalence of fear of falling and a lower quality of life, older adults receiving home care are underrepresented in research on older fallers. The objective of this study is to determine the associations between health-related quality of life (HRQOL), fear of falling and physical function in older fallers receiving home care

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in a quenched ferromagnetic spinor Bose condensate

A central goal in condensed matter and modern atomic physics is the exploration of many-body quantum phases and the universal characteristics of quantum phase transitions in so far as they differ from those established for thermal phase transitions. Compared with condensed-matter systems, atomic gases are more precisely constructed and also provide the unique opportunity to explore quantum dynamics far from equilibrium. Here we identify a second-order quantum phase transition in a gaseous spinor Bose-Einstein condensate, a quantum fluid in which superfluidity and magnetism, both associated with symmetry breaking, are simultaneously realized. $^{87}$Rb spinor condensates were rapidly quenched across this transition to a ferromagnetic state and probed using in-situ magnetization imaging to observe spontaneous symmetry breaking through the formation of spin textures, ferromagnetic domains and domain walls. The observation of topological defects produced by this symmetry breaking, identified as polar-core spin-vortices containing non-zero spin current but no net mass current, represents the first phase-sensitive in-situ detection of vortices in a gaseous superfluid.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Establishing the precise evolutionary history of a gene improves prediction of disease-causing missense mutations

PURPOSE: Predicting the phenotypic effects of mutations has become an important application in clinical genetic diagnostics. Computational tools evaluate the behavior of the variant over evolutionary time and assume that variations seen during the course of evolution are probably benign in humans. However, current tools do not take into account orthologous/paralogous relationships. Paralogs have dramatically different roles in Mendelian diseases. For example, whereas inactivating mutations in the NPC1 gene cause the neurodegenerative disorder Niemann-Pick C, inactivating mutations in its paralog NPC1L1 are not disease-causing and, moreover, are implicated in protection from coronary heart disease. METHODS: We identified major events in NPC1 evolution and revealed and compared orthologs and paralogs of the human NPC1 gene through phylogenetic and protein sequence analyses. We predicted whether an amino acid substitution affects protein function by reducing the organism’s fitness. RESULTS: Removing the paralogs and distant homologs improved the overall performance of categorizing disease-causing and benign amino acid substitutions. CONCLUSION: The results show that a thorough evolutionary analysis followed by identification of orthologs improves the accuracy in predicting disease-causing missense mutations. We anticipate that this approach will be used as a reference in the interpretation of variants in other genetic diseases as well. Genet Med 18 10, 1029–1036

A one-year trial of lamivudine for chronic hepatitis B

Background and Methods: In preliminary trials, lamivudine, an oral nucleoside analogue, has shown promise for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B. We conducted a one-year double-blind trial of lamivudine in 358 Chinese patients with chronic hepatitis B. The patients were randomly assigned to receive 25 mg of lamivudine (142 patients), 100 mg of lamivudine (143), or placebo (73) orally once daily. The patients underwent liver biopsies before entering the study and after completing the assigned treatment regimen. The primary end point was a reduction of at least two points in the Knodell necroinflammatory score. Results: Hepatic necroinflammatory activity improved by two points or more in 56 percent of the patients receiving 100 mg of lamivudine, 49 percent of those receiving 25 mg of lamivudine, and 25 percent of those receiving placebo (P<0.001 and P=0.001, respectively, for the comparisons of lamivudine treatment with placebo). Necroinflammatory activity worsened in 7 percent of the patients receiving 100 mg of lamivudine, 8 percent of those receiving 25 mg, and 26 percent of those receiving placebo. The 100mg dose of lamivudine was associated with a reduced progression of fibrosis (P=0.01 for the comparison with placebo) and with the highest rate of hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) seroconversion (loss of HBeAg, development of antibody to HBeAg, and undetectable HBV DNA) (16 percent), the greatest suppression of HBV DNA (98 percent reduction at week 52 as compared with the base-line value), and the highest rate of sustained normalization of alanine aminotransferase levels (72 percent). Ninety-six percent of the patients completed the study. The incidence of adverse events was similar in all groups, and there were few serious events. Conclusions: In a one-year study, lamivudine was associated with substantial histologic improvement in many patients with chronic hepatitis B. A daily dose of 100 mg was more effective than a daily dose of 25 mg.published_or_final_versio

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

Herbs and Rehabilitation after Stroke Study: A Multi-center, Double-blinded, Randomized Trial in Hong Kong

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