Publications by authors named "Lau A"

Objective: This study tests the effectiveness of leader and provider-level implementation strategies to implement evidence-based interventions (EBIs) in two of the service systems caring for autistic children. The TEAMS Leadership Institute (TLI) targets implementation leadership and climate, and TEAMS Individualized Provider Strategy (TIPS) targets provider motivation and engagement.

Method: A cluster randomized hybrid type 3 implementation-effectiveness trial tested the effects of the implementations strategies when paired with AIM HI (An Individualized Mental Health Intervention for Autism) in mental health programs (Study 1) and CPRT (Classroom Pivotal Response Teaching) in classrooms (Study 2).

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Objective: This study described therapists' delivery of six child mental health evidence-based practices (EBPs) over 33 months during the sustainment phase of a system-driven implementation aimed at improving access to EBPs in community settings.

Method: Seven hundred seventy-seven therapists and 162 program leaders delivering at least one of six EBPs of interest completed surveys, and these data were matched to therapist administrative claims data. Survival analyses examined (a) therapists' discontinuation of delivery of all Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health direct client services (i.

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Huntington's disease (HD) is caused by a CAG repeat expansion in the HTT gene, leading to altered gene expression. However, the mechanisms leading to disrupted RNA processing in HD remain unclear. Here we identify TDP-43 and the N6-methyladenosine (m6A) writer protein METTL3 to be upstream regulators of exon skipping in multiple HD systems.

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Hong Kong is an intermediate tuberculosis (TB) endemicity city dominated by reactivation diseases. A cross-sectional study on the clinical and epidemiologic data of newly diagnosed TB cases was conducted in such a setting, to examine the association between ambient PM and TB reactivation. After the exclusion of cases most likely resulting from recent infection, four distinct TB population phenotypes were delineated by latent class analysis based on their reactivation risk and clinical profiles ( = 2,153): '' (26%), '' (34%), '' (19%) and '' (21%).

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Article Synopsis
  • Aging leads to cellular damage and mitochondrial dysfunction, impacting metabolism and contributing to age-related diseases.
  • The cofactor NAD decreases in tissues with age and is crucial for various metabolic pathways, yet its levels and ratio to NADH remained stable during healthy aging in mice studied.
  • Research showed that older tissues, especially in the brain, increased fatty acid and sphingolipid metabolism, helping to maintain NAD levels, which could be essential for healthy aging.
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Background: Immunotherapy, including the use of immune checkpoint inhibitors such as nivolumab, is increasingly common in cancer treatment and can lead to various immune-related adverse effects, including rare cases of diabetic ketoacidosis. This case report highlights an unique instance of nivolumab-induced diabetic ketoacidosis in a patient without prior history of diabetes, emphasizing the importance of careful monitoring even in those without traditional risk factors.

Case Presentation: We report a case of a 70-year-old Caucasian male with metastatic esophageal adenocarcinoma who developed diabetic ketoacidosis 3 weeks after stopping nivolumab therapy.

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Granular activated carbon (GAC) is widely used to treat contaminated per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) waste streams, resulting in the accumulation of large quantities of spent GAC that need to be landfilled or regenerated. A novel modified supercritical CO (scCO) extraction for regeneration of spent GAC is developed. With the addition of organic solvents and acid modifiers, the procedure yielded >99% perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) desorption after a 60-min treatment in a continuous flow reactor.

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Background: Interpreting the pathogenicity of genetic variants associated with rare diseases is a laborious and time-consuming endeavour. To streamline the diagnostic process and lighten the burden of variant interpretation, it is crucial to automate variant annotation and prioritization. Unfortunately, currently available variant interpretation tools lack a unified and comprehensive workflow that can collectively assess the clinical significance of these types of variants together: small nucleotide variants (SNVs), small insertions/deletions (INDELs), copy number variants (CNVs) and structural variants (SVs).

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Background: Virtual reality (VR) gaming is a promising technology that can be applied in stroke rehabilitation to increase survivors' social engagement, though its optimal usage and effects on stroke recovery are not fully understood. This qualitative study aimed to investigate stroke survivors' and caregivers' perspectives of VR-based gaming rehabilitation modules for supporting post-stroke recovery and social participation.

Methods: Twenty-eight participants (18 stroke survivors and 10 caregivers) were recruited through purposive sampling from acute hospitals in Hong Kong.

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Background: The optimal timing of initiating adjuvant temozolomide (TMZ) chemoradiotherapy after surgery in patients with glioblastoma is contentious. This study aimed to determine whether the timing of adjuvant treatment affects their overall survival (OS).

Methods: Consecutive adult patients with histologically-confirmed newly diagnosed glioblastoma treated with adjuvant TMZ chemoradiotherapy across all neurosurgical centers in Hong Kong between 2006 and 2020 were analyzed.

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Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of estrogen and progesterone analog supplementation on the development of autoimmune conditions.

Methods: This retrospective observational study used data from the TriNetX network, which comprised over 100 million patients from 89 health care organizations. We compared patients exposed to estrogen and progesterone analogs to those exposed to progesterone-only therapy, using 1:1 propensity score matching based on age, ethnicity, and additional criteria.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study assessed the safety and tolerability of bulevirtide (BLV), a new treatment for chronic hepatitis delta (CHD), by analyzing data from three clinical trials involving 269 patients.
  • The findings indicated that certain adverse events, such as increased bile acid levels and injection-site reactions, were more common with BLV compared to a control group, but serious side effects were minimal and did not lead to treatment discontinuation.
  • Overall, BLV was deemed safe and well tolerated over 48 weeks of therapy in patients with CHD, showing promise as an effective treatment option.
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Despite significant technological progress in prosthetic hands, a device with functionality akin to a biological extremity is far from realization. To better support the development of next-generation technologies, we investigated the grasping capabilities of clinically prescribable and commercially available (CPCA) prosthetic hands against those that are 3D-printed, which offer cost-effective and customizable solutions. Our investigation utilized the Anthropomorphic Hand Assessment Protocol (AHAP) as a benchtop evaluation of the multi-grasp performance of 3D-printed devices against CPCA prosthetic hands.

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Orientia tsutsugamushi (OT) is an obligate intracellular bacterium transmitted by larval trombiculid mites, responsible for scrub typhus in humans. In Japan, approximately 500 human cases are reported annually, with six major serotypes identified as Kato, Karp, Gilliam, Irie/Kawasaki, Shimokoshi, and Hirano/Kuroki. However, the prevalence of OT in Yamaguchi prefecture remains largely unknown.

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Macrophages are pivotal in driving breast tumor development, progression, and resistance to treatment, particularly in estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) tumors, where they infiltrate the tumor microenvironment (TME) influenced by cancer cell-secreted factors. By analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing data from 25 ER+ tumors, we elucidated interactions between cancer cells and macrophages, correlating macrophage density with epithelial cancer cell density. We identified that S100A11, a previously unexplored factor in macrophage-cancer crosstalk, predicts high macrophage density and poor outcomes in ER+ tumors.

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Falls and hip fractures are a major health concern among older adults in long term care (LTC) with almost 50% of residents experiencing a fall annually. Hip fractures are one of the most important and frequent fall-related injuries in LTC. There is moderate to strong certainty evidence that multifactorial interventions may reduce the risk of falls and fractures; however, there is little evidence to support its implementation.

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The Linker of Nucleoskeleton and Cytoskeleton (LINC) complex serves to connect the nuclear envelope and the cytoskeleton, influencing cellular processes such as nuclear arrangement, architecture, and mechanotransduction. The role LINC plays in mechanotransduction pathways in bone progenitor cells has been well studied; however, the mechanisms by which LINC complexes govern in vivo bone formation remain less clear. To bridge this knowledge gap, we established a murine model disrupting LINC using transgenic Prx-Cre mice and floxed Tg(CAG-LacZ/EGFP-KASH2) mice.

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CATH (https://www.cathdb.info) is a structural classification database that assigns domains to the structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AFDB) and adds layers of biological information, including homology and functional annotation.

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Article Synopsis
  • Several products claim to effectively clean PFAS from AFFF-impacted fire suppression systems, but their long-term effectiveness is still uncertain.
  • Experiments on different cleaning solutions showed that completely removing PFAS from stainless steel pipes is extremely challenging due to potential PFAS accumulation on pipe surfaces.
  • Understanding the rebound behavior of PFAS and the mechanisms involved is crucial for enhancing cleaning processes and managing contaminated materials in fire suppression systems.
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Reducing MOF particles to the nanoscale size range is beneficial due to their increased surface-to-volume ratio, higher defects exposing metals and ligands, and short diffusion path. While great efforts have been made to reduce the particle sizes by controlling the reaction kinetics or terminating the particle growth, large-scale, rapid synthesis of MOF nanoparticles (NPs) remains a challenge. Here, we report supercritical (sc) CO-assisted synthesis of HKUST-1 NPs in a continuous flow reactor, which yielded pure and thermally stable MOFs with median sizes of 110-250 nm and BET surface areas of 1610-1890 m g under 10 seconds synthesis time.

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In this paper, a chromatic-dispersion-aware non-orthogonal discrete Fourier transform precoding (CDA-NODFTP) scheme is proposed for CD-constrained intensity-modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) multicarrier-signal transmission systems. The performance of the proposed CDA-NODFTP scheme is experimentally evaluated and compared with conventional DFTP and NODFTP schemes over a 50-km C-band dispersion-uncompensated link, utilizing 90-Gb/s orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) signals. Experimental results show that the proposed CDA-NODFTP with adaptive spectral compression outperforms conventional DFTP, NODFTP, and the non-precoding schemes in terms of bit error rate (BER) performance.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how exposure to particulate matter (PM2.5) throughout different life stages influences the risk of developing prediabetes and diabetes in adults, highlighting the urban health challenge of air pollution.
  • It involved 4,551 participants from Taiwan and Hong Kong, assessing PM2.5 exposure using satellite data and linking it to medical visits over nearly 10 years.
  • Results showed that each increase of 10 μg/m3 in PM2.5 exposure was associated with higher odds of prediabetes/diabetes, with exposure during adulthood posing a slightly greater risk than exposure during earlier life stages.
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Magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) is a tunable material with remarkably flat energy bands near the Fermi level, leading to fascinating transport properties and correlated states at low temperatures. However, grown pristine samples of this material tend to break up into landscapes of twist-angle domains, strongly influencing the physical properties of each individual sample. This poses a significant problem to the interpretation and comparison between measurements obtained from different samples.

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