Publications by authors named "Phoebe Chung"

Objectives: The rate of organ donation in Hong Kong is among the lowest in developed regions. Since medical students will play an important role in counselling patients for organ donation and identifying potential donors in the future, their knowledge, attitudes and action for organ donation are important. This study aims to understand knowledge, attitudes and actions with regard to organ donation among medical students and investigate the factors determining the knowledge and attitudes.

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: Mental disorders have been found to be positively associated with temperature in cool to cold climatic regions but the association in warmer regions is unclear. This study presented the short-term association between temperatures and mental disorder hospitalizations in a subtropical city with a mean annual temperature over 21 °C. : Using Poisson-generalized additive models and distributed-lagged nonlinear models, daily mental disorder hospitalizations between 2002 and 2011 in Hong Kong were regressed on daily mean temperature, relative humidity, and air pollutants, adjusted for seasonal trend, long-term trend, day-of-week, and holiday.

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Previous studies in humans have shown that bilateral loss of vestibular function is associated with a significant bilateral atrophy of the hippocampus, which correlated with the patients' spatial memory deficits. More recently, patients who had recovered from unilateral vestibular neuritis have been reported to exhibit a significant atrophy of the left posterior hippocampus. Therefore, we investigated whether bilateral vestibular deafferentation (BVD) would result in a decrease in neuronal number or volume in the rat hippocampus, using stereological methods.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigated cell proliferation and survival in the vestibular nucleus complex of adult rats after bilateral vestibular deafferentation (BVD), using a method called bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) injection.
  • Results showed that cell proliferation was significantly higher in the BVD group compared to sham surgery controls, peaking at 48 hours after treatment.
  • However, by one month, the survival rate of newly formed cells was similar between both the BVD and sham groups, raising questions about the functional importance of the increased cell proliferation after vestibular damage.
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