Reliability and Validity of the Taiwan Chinese Version of the EORTC QLQ-PR25 in Assessing Quality of Life of Prostate Cancer Patients

Background/PurposeThis study examined the psychometric properties and clinical validity of the EORTC QLQ-PR25, a questionnaire for assessing the quality of life of patients with prostate cancer.MethodsThe Taiwan Chinese version of the prostate cancer module (EORTC QLQ-PR25) and the core questionnaires (EORTC QLQ-C30) were administered to 81 patients with prostate cancer after they had been treated with surgery or hormone therapy or both. The QLQ-PR25 module assesses urinary symptoms, bowel symptoms, hormonal treatment-related symptoms, sexual activity and sexual functioning.ResultsThe questionnaires were well accepted by the patients and very few of the items had missing data. Only the urinary symptom scale showed satisfactory internal consistency. Scales were able to differentiate clinical groups of patients with corresponding symptoms, but the differences were smaller than that of major functioning scales in the core questionnaire.ConclusionThe Taiwan Chinese version of the EORTC QLQ-PR25 is acceptable in patients with prostate cancer in Taiwan, able to differentiate corresponding symptoms, but the scale structure needs further improvement

Based on MIPv6 with Support to Improve the Mobile Commerce Transaction

Mobile Commerce is anticipated to be the next business revolution. Under the trend of mobile age, a person begins to realize the benefits of transaction by mobility operations. We can access information, shop and bank on line, work from home and speak and send messages via mobile appliances throughout all over the world. The research that is mobile transaction managing on database has begun since 1950 and skips the Link and Network Layer with support to improve mobile commerce. This paper focus on how effectually to make the new generation of mobile network protocol apply on mobile commerce and improve the mainly four properties required by mobile transactions. The four properties are respectively atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability. The purpose based on the mobile commerce environment and making mobile transactions complete and personal by means of the Destination Extension Header based on IPv6 and the Java Transaction Service. After experiment and testing, this paper verify that we improve the mobile commerce environment and make the mobile transaction more complete with the optimization of the Destination Extension Header based on IPv6 and the Java Transaction Service under the comparison with the environment on IPv4

Human Alveolar Epithelial Cell Injury Induced by Cigarette Smoke

Background: Cigarette smoke (CS) is a highly complex mixture and many of its components are known carcinogens, mutagens, and other toxic substances. CS induces oxidative stress and cell death, and this cell toxicity plays a key role in the pathogenesis of several pulmonary diseases. Methodology/Principal Findings: We studied the effect of cigarette smoke extract (CSE) in human alveolar epithelial type I-like (ATI-like) cells. These are isolated type II cells that are differentiating toward the type I cell phenotype in vitro and have lost many type II cell markers and express type I cell markers. ATI-like cells were more sensitive to CSE than alveolar type II cells, which maintained their differentiated phenotype in vitro. We observed disruption of mitochondrial membrane potential, apoptosis and necrosis that were detected by double staining with acridine orange and ethidium bromide or Hoechst 33342 and propidium iodide and TUNEL assay after treatment with CSE. We also detected caspase 3 and caspase 7 activities and lipid peroxidation. CSE induced nuclear translocation of Nrf2 and increased expression of Nrf2, HO-1, Hsp70 and Fra1. Moreover, we found that Nrf2 knockdown sensitized ATI-like cells to CSE and Nrf2 overexpression provided protection against CSE-induced cell death. We also observed that two antioxidant compounds N-acetylcysteine and trolox protected ATI-like cells against injury by CSE. Conclusions: Our study indicates that Nrf2 activation is a major factor in cellular defense of the human alveolar epitheliu

(S)-(–)-Methyl 2-(p-tolyl­sulfon­yloxy)­propanoate

In the title compound, C11H14O5S, there is an intra­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bond, for which the C—C—S—O torsion angle involving the acceptor and donor atoms is 2.4 (4)°. The dihedral angle between the benzene ring and the methoxy­carbonyl plane is 52.7 (4)°. In the crystal structure, mol­ecules are linked via inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming a mol­ecular chain along the b axis

Transforming growth factor-beta promotes rhinovirus replication in bronchial epithelial cells by suppressing the innate immune response

Rhinovirus (RV) infection is a major cause of asthma exacerbations which may be due to a deficient innate immune response in the bronchial epithelium. We hypothesized that the pleiotropic cytokine, TGF-?, influences interferon (IFN) production by primary bronchial epithelial cells (PBECs) following RV infection. Exogenous TGF-?(2) increased RV replication and decreased IFN protein secretion in response to RV or double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). Conversely, neutralizing TGF-? antibodies decreased RV replication and increased IFN expression in response to RV or dsRNA. Endogenous TGF-?(2) levels were higher in conditioned media of PBECs from asthmatic donors and the suppressive effect of anti-TGF-? on RV replication was significantly greater in these cells. Basal SMAD-2 activation was reduced when asthmatic PBECs were treated with anti-TGF-? and this was accompanied by suppression of SOCS-1 and SOCS-3 expression. Our results suggest that endogenous TGF-? contributes to a suppressed IFN response to RV infection possibly via SOCS-1 and SOCS-3

Domain-Generalized Face Anti-Spoofing with Unknown Attacks

Although face anti-spoofing (FAS) methods have achieved remarkable performance on specific domains or attack types, few studies have focused on the simultaneous presence of domain changes and unknown attacks, which is closer to real application scenarios. To handle domain-generalized unknown attacks, we introduce a new method, DGUA-FAS, which consists of a Transformer-based feature extractor and a synthetic unknown attack sample generator (SUASG). The SUASG network simulates unknown attack samples to assist the training of the feature extractor. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior performance on domain generalization FAS with known or unknown attacks.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2023