The Association between Traditional Chinese Dietary and Herbal Therapies and Uterine Involution in Postpartum Women

Background. Traditional Chinese postpartum care is believed to help in the recovery of women after delivery. Objective. This study investigated the association of elements in dietary and herbal therapy with uterine involution. Methods. Indices of uterine involution were measured ultrasonographically in 127 postpartum women between 4-6 weeks after delivery. A self-reported retrospective questionnaire was used to query women about their frequencies of taking herbal medicines and consuming special diets during the first month after delivery. Correlation coefficients were calculated to identify the associations, then the regression models were used to identify the predictors. Result. Among the herbal medicines and diet, consumption of Eucommia ulmoides (E. ulmoides) negatively correlated with the AP diameter of the uterus and the cavity. E. ulmoides was also the only predictor of maximum AP diameter of the uterus, AP diameter of the uterus 5 cm from the fundus, and the maximum AP diameter of the cavity. Moreover, consumption of Sheng-hau-tang was significantly correlated with anteverted uterus and was a predictor of anteverted uterus. Conclusion. E. ulmoides and Sheng-hau-tang positively correlated with the degree of uterine involution after delivery, implying that both therapies might possess the pharmacological efficacy of uterine contraction in postpartum women

iPDA: integrated protein disorder analyzer

This article presents a web server iPDA, which aims at identifying the disordered regions of a query protein. Automatic prediction of disordered regions from protein sequences is an important problem in the study of structural biology. The proposed classifier DisPSSMP2 is different from several existing disorder predictors by its employment of position-specific scoring matrices with respect to physicochemical properties (PSSMP), where the physicochemical properties adopted here especially take the disorder propensity of amino acids into account. The web server iPDA integrates DisPSSMP2 with several other sequence predictors in order to investigate the functional role of the detected disordered region. The predicted information includes sequence conservation, secondary structure, sequence complexity and hydrophobic clusters. According to the proportion of the secondary structure elements predicted, iPDA dynamically adjusts the cutting threshold of determining protein disorder. Furthermore, a pattern mining package for detecting sequence conservation is embedded in iPDA for discovering potential binding regions of the query protein, which is really helpful to uncovering the relationship between protein function and its primary sequence. The web service is available at http://biominer.bime.ntu.edu.tw/ipda and mirrored at http://biominer.cse.yzu.edu.tw/ipda

Applying the Modified Delphi Method to Identify the Taiwanese Electronic Health Record Systems Evaluation Framework and Instrument

The aim of this research is to design an appropriate conceptual evaluation framework with a draft instrument for validating the structure of the Taiwanese EHR systems evaluation framework. According to the knowledge of “Triangulation research method” and both quantitative and qualitative approaches, the modified Delphi method was applied to refine the proposed instrument into practicable for real medical environment based on a quantitative approach. In addition, by calculating content validity index for items (I-CVI) and content validity index for scales (S-CVI), it also indicates the degree of consensus between and within questions in the proposed instrument. In short, an appropriate instrument for achieving its target was generated in this research

EFFECTS ON POSTURAL CONSTRAINTS ON OVERARM THROWING

This study explored the effects of postural constraints on overarm throwing. 10 participants were required to perform an overarm throwing movement by 3 tasks which under postural constraints. Tasks were including trunk-fixed, sitting, and standing. 10 pieces of 3D motion capture system were used to record the maximum velocity of body segments as data and one-way repeated measures ANOVA (a=.05) with HSD post-hoc tests was conducted to analysis the data. Therefore, the results indicated that the performance of overarm throwing by 3 tasks were different significantly, which proved the kinetic chain formed by links connected in series gave body segments more velocities. Moreover, it meat trunk and lower limbs played the roles to transport velocity as performing overarm throwing