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The APOA1 p.Leu202Arg variant potentially causes autosomal recessive cardiac amyloidosis
Get PDFApoA-I amyloidosis is an extremely rare form of systemic amyloidosis that commonly involves the heart, kidneys, and liver. ApoA-I amyloidosis is caused by amyloidogenic variants of APOA1 that are inherited in an autosomal dominant manner. Here, we report a 69-year-old man with sporadic cardiac amyloidosis who was born to consanguineous parents and carried a homozygous variant of p.Leu202Arg in APOA1.journal articl
Determination of the blending parameters of ternary blends containing a terpolymer as a component copolymer by multivariate analysis of NMR data
No full textHeat-resistant ABS resin, an industrial polymer material, is generally prepared by mixing AN/MS bipolymer and/or AN/ST/MS terpolymer with the matrix of ABS resin, where AN, ST and MS denote acrylonitrile, styrene and α-methylstyrene, respectively. In order to predict the thermal properties of ABS resins, it is important to know which copolymers are blended and in what ratio. In this study, statistical structural analysis was performed on polymer blends consisting of AN/ST bipolymer, AN/MS bipolymer and AN/ST/MS terpolymer to predict blending parameters for heat-resistant ABS resin. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectral data of the polymer blends were used as explanatory variables to determine the chemical composition and mole fraction of the component copolymers. Partial least-squares (PLS) regression and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression were used as the exploratory techniques. The use of 1H NMR spectral data showed poor prediction, probably because of low resolution due to the narrow spectral width. Accordingly, 13C NMR spectra, which have wider spectral widths, were used, resulting in the successful prediction of the blending parameters of the ternary blends containing a terpolymer as a component. It should be noted that it was not necessary to obtain the NMR spectra of all the polymer blends as the explanatory variables, i.e., linear combinations of the NMR spectra of the component copolymers were sufficient.journal articl
Comparison of Relationships Between the Number of Deaths Due to the 10 Leading Causes and Air Temperature in Hokkaido and Okinawa, Japan
Get PDFBackground
Some literature reports an association between air temperature and mortality in certain diseases. However, the relationships between air temperature parameters and all causes of death have not been thoroughly explored in Japan.
Objective
This study examined the relationships between the number of deaths from the 10 leading causes and air temperature parameters in Hokkaido (the northernmost region) and Okinawa (the southernmost region) prefectures in Japan.
Methods
We collected monthly data on the number of deaths from the 10 leading causes and air temperature parameters in Hokkaido and Okinawa prefectures from January 2008 to December 2022 using information from official sources. Annual population data for each prefecture were also obtained. The relationships between the number of deaths and air temperature parameters were assessed through an ecological study.
Results
The mean air temperature was 9.59 ± 9.23 °C in Hokkaido and 23.46 ± 4.37 °C in Okinawa, with all temperature parameters significantly lower in Hokkaido than in Okinawa. The number of deaths from the 10 leading causes, excluding aspiration pneumonia, was significantly higher in Hokkaido for both sexes compared to Okinawa. In Hokkaido, deaths due to heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, pneumonia, accidents, and renal failure showed a significant correlation with all air temperature parameters for both sexes. In Okinawa, heart disease and cerebrovascular disease deaths were correlated with all air temperature parameters for both sexes.
Conclusions
The relationships between the number of deaths from the 10 leading causes and air temperature parameters differed between Hokkaido and Okinawa prefectures in Japan.journal articl
Removability of a newly developed oral care gel to simulated dry phlegm and debris
Get PDFObjectives: Some dependent older adults have a lot of dry phlegm and debris leading to the presence of bacteria firmly adhered to the oral and pharyngeal mucosa. This must be removed completely and safely to maintain oral hygiene and general health. We developed a new oral care gel, Okuchi-Wo-Arau-Gel® (OG) that softens dry phlegm and debris allowing them to be removed easily and safely. The aim of this study was to evaluate the removability of simulated dry phlegm and debris in vitro using the OG.\nMethods: In this experiment, standardized bovine thrombus (test soil) was used as simulated dried sputum or residue to compare the ability of OG and three commercial gels, Viva-Jellwet® (VJ), Refrecare® (RC), and Biotene OralBalance® gel (BT), to remove bovine thrombus. The test soil was covered with 0.5 mL of each gel, which was suctioned with a probe 1 min after (Experiment I) and 10 min after (Experiment II), spreading. The test soils were photographed with a digital camera and the digital images were analyzed in Photoshop. The pixel numbers of test soil were compared after suctioning, and a decrease in pixels was calculated as the removal value. Additional apparent viscosity and pH experiments were performed to confirm the physical properties of the research gels.
Results and discussion: The OG and VJ had a significantly higher removal value than the other gels in Experiment I. The OG had a significantly higher removal value than the other gels in Experiment II. The apparent viscosity of the OG and VJ was significantly lower than that of RC and BT. The pH of the gel ranged from 6.19 to 7.15. The OG and VJ retained more water than RC and BT and penetrated the test soils more easily. Additionally, the OG component had a higher removal rate in the test soils than VJ because it contained a surfactant.
Conclusions: In this in vitro study, the OG exhibited a greater ability to remove test soils compared with VJ, RC, and BT. The results indicate that the OG and VJ might be more effective than other gels at removing dry phlegm and debris from the oral and pharyngeal mucosa, whereas RC and BT have better anti-evaporation properties. We think that selecting gels by purpose is one way to improve the quality of oral care.doctoral thesi
Skeletal muscle mass during chemotherapy for haematological malignancies : a retrospective study
Get PDFObjective:
This study investigated whether baseline or alteration in muscle mass affects complications during chemotherapy or overall survival (OS) in hematological malignancies.
Methods:
Skeletal muscle index (SMI) was evaluated by bioimpedance analysis before and after chemotherapy in patients with hematological malignancies, and the association between muscle mass and clinical data was retrospectively analyzed.
Results:
Exactly 104 patients were enrolled, with a mean age of 62.2 years. SMI was 7.85 and 6.08 in male and female patients under 65 years and 7.10 and 5.92 over 65 years, before chemotherapy, respectively. Lower baseline SMI was not correlated with worse OS in total patients (p=0.915). After a median measurement interval of 30 days after chemotherapy (n=67), body weight and SMI decreased by 2.73% and 2.87% (mean), respectively. The decrease in body weight correlated with the loss of trunk muscle mass (R2=0.2107) but was more strongly associated with the loss of lower limbs muscle mass (R2=0.3985). The muscle mass of lower limbs significantly decreased in lymphoma patients who experienced febrile neutropenia (-0.42% vs -6.04%, p=0.040). OS significantly decreased in lymphoma patients with loss of lower limbs muscle ≥2.8% (p=0.0327).
Conclusions:
Muscle loss occurred following anti-cancer treatments, significantly contributing to worse outcomes. Body composition assessment and relevant multi-modal prevention of muscle loss may be vital for patients receiving chemotherapy for hematological malignancies.journal articl
Assessment of Perceptions of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine Among Japanese Healthcare Professional University Students Using Text Mining Analysis
Get PDFObjective: Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination is crucial, particularly for preventing cervical cancer. This study aimed to assess the perceptions of HPV vaccination among healthcare university students in Okayama City, Japan, with the goal of promoting HPV vaccination in the future.
Methods: The study enrolled 168 students (94 male students and 74 female students, median age: 20 (minimum: 18, maximum: 27)) from a healthcare university in Okayama, Japan. Data collected included sex, age, year, HPV vaccination status, knowledge about HPV vaccination, and cervical cancer screening status (for female students). Participants completed self-administered questionnaires on their perceptions of HPV vaccination. The responses were analyzed using text mining.
Results: The HPV vaccination rate among female participants was 16.2% (12 out of 74). Of the respondents, 43.6% of male respondents and 52.7% of female respondents knew that HPV causes cervical cancer. Text mining revealed that among the female respondents, the most frequently used words were “think”, followed by “vaccine”, “side effects”, “vaccination”, and “frightening”. Distinctive words among female respondents, especially those who haven't been vaccinated, include knowing the term "HPV," understanding that HPV causes cervical cancer, and for those who haven't had screenings, terms like "side effects" and " frightening" were common.
Conclusion: Among female students at the healthcare university, the HPV vaccination rate was thought to be comparatively low. Among those who had not received the HPV vaccine, it was particularly noted that they knew the term "HPV," were aware that HPV caused cervical cancer, and for those who had not undergone screenings, providing accurate information about "side effects" and " frightening" seemed necessary.journal articl
Affective knowledge assisted bi-directional learning for Multi-modal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
No full textAs a fine-grained task in the community of Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), Multi-modal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) is challenging and has attracted numerous researchers’ attention, and prominent progress has been achieved in recent years. However, there is still a lack of effective strategies for feature alignment between different modalities, and further exploration is urgently needed. Thus, this paper proposed a novel MABSA method to enhance the sentiment feature alignment, namely Affective Knowledge-Assisted Bi-directional Learning (AKABL) networks, which learn sentiment information from different modalities through multiple perspectives. Specifically, AKABL gains the textual semantic and syntactic features through encoding text modality via pre-trained language model BERT and Syntax Parser SpaCy, respectively. And then, to strengthen the expression of sentiment information in the syntactic graph, affective knowledge SenticNet is introduced to assist AKABL in comprehending textual sentiment information. On the other side, to leverage image modality efficiently, the pre-trained model Visual Transformer (ViT) is employed to extract the necessary image features. Additionally, to integrate the obtained features, this paper utilizes the module Single Modality GCN (SMGCN) to achieve the joint textual semantic and syntactic representation. And to bridge the textual and image features, the module Double Modalities GCN (DMGCN) is devised and applied to extract the sentiment information from different modalities simultaneously. Besides, to bridge the alignment gap between text and image features, this paper devises a novel alignment strategy to build the relationship between these two representations, which measures that difference with the Jensen-Shannon divergence from bi-directional perspectives. It is worth noting that cross-attention and cosine distance-based similarity are also applied in the proposed AKABL. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used and public benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that AKABL can improve the tasks’ performance obviously, which outperforms the optimal baseline with accuracy improvement of 0.47% and 0.72% on the two datasets.journal articl
Über die Stadt Tôkyô im japanischen Kinofilm
Get PDFThis essay explores the representation of urban spaces in Japanese cinema, with a particular focus on the city of Tokyo. It examines how Tokyo has been depicted across various periods and genres, reflecting Japan's cultural, social, and economic transformations. By introducing selected films, the study highlights the dynamic relationship between film and urban space, considering Tokyo as both a setting and a narrative force. The essay addresses the ways in which filmmakers have used Tokyo to portray themes such as modernization, social inequality, and identity, as well as to document historical events and societal changes, from early depictions of Tokyo's modernization to postwar narratives of recovery and contemporary portrayals of urban alienation. This analysis underscores the city’s evolving role in Japanese film as a space of cultural memory, societal critique, and artistic exploration.departmental bulletin pape