Front Public Health
October 2023
Objective: Regarding the circadian rhythm regulating an individual's response to external stimulation, it remains unclear whether older adults engaged in physical activity at different times of day may be differently related to depression symptoms. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the association between overall and timing-specific physical activity and depressive symptoms in older Taiwanese adults.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted at a medical center in Taipei City, Taiwan, between September 2020 and December 2021.
In this study, we aimed to investigate the prevalence of poor mental health and its association with loneliness and social support among 3531 undergraduate students in nine Asian countries. Mental health was assessed using the Self-Reporting Questionnaire, which was developed by the World Health Organization. Across the entire sample, we detected that nearly half of the students reported poor mental health according to the Self-Reporting Questionnaire and nearly one out of seven students felt lonely.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Olfactory dysfunction can indicate early cognitive decline and is associated with dementia symptoms. We developed an olfactory-based sensory stimulation program and investigated its effects on cognition and emotion, and board game training were used as a comparison. In this parallel design pilot study, 30 participants with mild to moderate dementia were equal randomly assigned to the control (CONT), olfactory stimulation with cognitive training (OS), and board game (BG) groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Cell Infect Microbiol
July 2021
Polymicrobial interactions with oral mucosal surfaces determine the health status of the host. While a homeostatic balance provides protection from oral disease, a dysbiotic polymicrobial community promotes tissue destruction and chronic oral diseases. How polymicrobial communities transition from a homeostatic to a dysbiotic state is an understudied process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAllergy Rhinol (Providence)
February 2021
Background: The Taiwan Smell Identification Test (TWSIT) was developed and successfully administered in Taiwanese population since 2015. However, for sanitation reason, the original liquid-jar form of this test is not appropriate. The commercialized TWSIT was then re-designed as "scratch-and-sniff" version: the TIBSIT (Top International Biotech, Taipei, Taiwan).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: The Loewenstein Occupational Therapy Cognitive Assessment-Geriatric (LOTCA-G) can provide multifaceted and comprehensive measures of cognitive function with reduced literacy demands; however, its minimal clinically important difference (MCID) has not been determined for interpreting the change scores.
Objective: To establish the LOTCA-G MCID for people with dementia.
Design: Psychometric field study.
Background: This study establishes norms for the Box and Block Test (BBT) in healthy Taiwanese adults between 15 and 75 years of age.
Methods: 621 right-handed healthy adults (296 males and 325 females) completed the study. All participants performed the BBT following the standard protocol.
Before Erikson proposed the life stages, Confucius concluded an autobiographic review of his entire life in about 500 BC. Confucius' life stages may be closer to the life experiences of Chinese older adults. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the life review program on cognitive ability, life satisfaction, meaning of life, and ego integrity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground/objective: Productive engagement can be a strategy to reduce stress and chaos. Physical activity, a basic type of productive activity, could benefit older adults. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how productive engagement in physical activity may influence older adults in maintaining their health-related quality of life when they live in a long-term care facility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The rising population of older adults is transforming Taiwan society. Although many long-term care facilities now operate for older adults, the transition from the home environment to long-term facilities may cause multiple issues, including relocation stress syndrome, for new residents. Autonomy is a critical element of the human experience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSingle-molecule tracking (SMT) offers rich information on the dynamics of underlying biological processes, but multicolor SMT has been challenging due to spectral cross talk and a need for multiple laser excitations. Here, we describe a single-molecule spectral imaging approach for live-cell tracking of multiple fluorescent species at once using a single-laser excitation. Fluorescence signals from all the molecules in the field of view are collected using a single objective and split between positional and spectral channels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Population aging is an increasing phenomenon in many countries around the world. It has been estimated that more than one quarter of all older adults experience a mental or neurological disorder or disease such as dementia, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Reminiscence is a popular treatment for enhancing well-being in older adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSample preparation is critical to biological electron microscopy (EM), and there have been continuous efforts on optimizing the procedures to best preserve structures of interest in the sample. However, a quantitative characterization of the morphological changes associated with each step in EM sample preparation is currently lacking. Using correlative EM and superresolution microscopy (SRM), we have examined the effects of different drying methods as well as osmium tetroxide (OsO4) post-fixation on cell morphology during scanning electron microscopy (SEM) sample preparation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper intend to investigate the effects of biodiesel fuel blends comprising of waste-cooking oil and butanol-diesel (B10W10-B10W40) under steady-state conditions. Both particulate organic carbon (OC) and PM including PM and PM significantly decreased with the increasing percentage of biodiesel fuel blends. The fuel blend of B10W40 also demonstrated the most effective function in reducing the emissions of PM and PM in the volume by 59.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtein-protein interactions (PPIs) are key molecular events to biology. However, it remains a challenge to visualize PPIs with sufficient resolution and sensitivity in cells because the resolution of conventional light microscopy is diffraction-limited to ~250 nm. By combining bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) with photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), PPIs can be visualized in cells with single molecule sensitivity and nanometer spatial resolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
June 2015
Rat sarcoma (Ras) GTPases regulate cell proliferation and survival through effector pathways including Raf-MAPK, and are the most frequently mutated genes in human cancer. Although it is well established that Ras activity requires binding to both GTP and the membrane, details of how Ras operates on the cell membrane to activate its effectors remain elusive. Efforts to target mutant Ras in human cancers to therapeutic benefit have also been largely unsuccessful.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSuper resolution microscopy (SRM) has overcome the historic spatial resolution limit of light microscopy, enabling fluorescence visualization of intracellular structures and multi-protein complexes at the nanometer scale. Using single-molecule localization microscopy, the precise location of a stochastically activated population of photoswitchable fluorophores is determined during the collection of many images to form a single image with resolution of ~10-20 nm, an order of magnitude improvement over conventional microscopy. One of the key factors in achieving such resolution with single-molecule SRM is the ability to accurately locate each fluorophore while it emits photons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the Life Review Program-Taiwan (LRP-TW) on outpatients with mild to moderate dementia. Ten individuals were selected through purposive sampling and tested using a single group pretest-posttest design. The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Loewenstein Occupational Therapy Cognitive Assessment-Geriatric (LOTCA-G) and the Geriatric Depression Scale-Short Form (GDS-SF) were used as outcome measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTumour-repopulating cells (TRCs) are a self-renewing, tumorigenic subpopulation of cancer cells critical in cancer progression. However, the underlying mechanisms of how TRCs maintain their self-renewing capability remain elusive. Here we show that relatively undifferentiated melanoma TRCs exhibit plasticity in Cdc42-mediated mechanical stiffening, histone 3 lysine residue 9 (H3K9) methylation, Sox2 expression and self-renewal capability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) has been widely used to visualize protein-protein interactions (PPIs) in cells. Until now, however, the resolution of BiFC has been limited by the diffraction of light to ∼250 nm, much larger than the nanometer scale at which PPIs occur or are regulated. Cellular imaging at the nanometer scale has recently been realized with single molecule superresolution imaging techniques such as photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhysical activities are recommended to reduce neuropsychiatric symptoms of nursing home residents with mild dementia. However, relevant information is not available for community-dwelling persons with cognitive impairment. Therefore, this cross-sectional study examined the effects of leisure-time physical activities on cognitively impaired persons' neuropsychiatric symptoms and their family caregivers' distress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSuper resolution microscopy (SRM) has overcome the historic spatial resolution limit of light microscopy, enabling fluorescence visualization of cellular structures and multi-protein complexes at the nanometer scale. Using single-molecule localization microscopy, the precise location of a stochastically activated population of photoswitchable fluorophores is determined during the collection of many images to form a single image with resolution of ~10-20 nm, an order of magnitude improvement over conventional microscopy. However, the spectral resolution of current SRM techniques are limited by existing fluorophores with only up to four colors imaged simultaneously, limiting the number of intracellular components that can be studied in a single sample.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtein functions are largely affected by their conformations. This is exemplified in proteins containing modular domains. However, the evolutionary dynamics that define and adapt the conformation of such modular proteins remain elusive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReactive oxygen species (ROS) have been shown to play crucial roles in regulating various cellular functions, e.g. focal adhesion (FA) dynamics and cell migration upon growth factor stimulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA major hurdle for molecular mechanistic studies of many proteins is the lack of a general method for fluorescence labeling with high efficiency, specificity and speed. By incorporating an aldehyde motif genetically into a protein and improving the labeling kinetics substantially under mild conditions, we achieved fast, site-specific labeling of a protein with ∼100% efficiency while maintaining the biological function. We show that an aldehyde-tagged protein can be specifically labeled in cell extracts without protein purification and then can be used in single-molecule pull-down analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF