Publications by authors named "Yau S"

Previous epidemiological studies have shown that diabetes is associated with an increased risk of several cancers, including bladder cancer. However, prediction models for bladder cancer among diabetes patients remain scarce. This study aims to develop a scoring system for bladder cancer risk prediction among diabetes patients who receive routine care in general outpatient clinics using a machine learning-guided approach.

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Physical exercise is recognized as an effective intervention to improve mood, physical performance, and general well-being. It achieves these benefits through cellular and molecular mechanisms that promote the release of neuroprotective factors. Interestingly, reduced levels of physical exercise have been implicated in several central nervous system diseases, including ocular disorders.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The text outlines a scoping review protocol aimed at investigating how gamification can enhance clinical reasoning skills in medical education by increasing engagement and knowledge retention in healthcare professionals.
  • - Using the Arksey and O'Malley framework and guidelines from the Joanna Briggs Institute, the review will systematically search major databases for relevant literature, focusing on studies that employ gamified strategies in clinical reasoning education.
  • - The findings will provide a synthesis of the different gamification methods used in the educational context, identify gaps in current research, and do so without requiring ethical approval, following established reporting guidelines to ensure transparency.
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Background: Acute otitis externa (AOE) is an inflammatory condition of the outer ear seen in Australian general practice and is prevalent in tropical climates like North Queensland.

Objective: This article aims to delineate key facets of AOE, identify high-risk populations and propose a streamlined management approach aligned with the American Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) guideline, emphasising the role of primary care in optimal patient care.

Discussion: Outlined within this article are key elements of AOE, from anatomy to risk factors, examination, diagnosis, differentials, management, prevention and indications for referral.

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Despite being challenging, elucidating the systematic control mechanisms of multifactorial drug responses is crucial for pharmacogenomic research. We describe a new form of statistical mechanics to reconstruct informative, dynamic, omnidirectional, and personalized networks (idopNetworks), which cover all pharmacogenomic factors and their interconnections, interdependence, and mechanistic roles. IdopNetworks can characterize how cell-cell crosstalk is mediated by genes and proteins to shape body-drug interactions and identify key roadmaps of information flow and propagation for determining drug efficacy and toxicity.

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Article Synopsis
  • Geniposide (GP) and shanzhiside methyl ester (SM) are key compounds in the Yueju Pill, a traditional Chinese herbal medicine known for its antidepressant effects, and their combined action may enhance these effects.
  • This study examined how chronic treatment with GP and SM influences antidepressant-like responses linked to the neuropeptide PACAP in a model of depression induced by neuroinflammation.
  • Results showed that GP and SM treatment improved depression-related behaviors, increased PACAP expression, and altered inflammatory and neuroplasticity signaling pathways in the brains of mice, suggesting a synergistic effect and supporting the potential of these compounds as antidepressants.
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Background: Foreign bodies (FBs) in the ears and nose are common presentations among paediatric patients, necessitating prompt and appropriate management to avoid potential complications.

Objective: This article presents a standardised approach for FB retrieval based on local clinical data from a tertiary paediatric centre, addressing the challenges of identifying patients requiring specialist referral.

Discussion: The approach involves a detailed initial consultation and succinct examination to determine the most suitable retrieval method.

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Background: Within long-term care facilities, paraprofessional nursing assistants account for the largest proportion of the health care workforce and provide essential direct care to older people with complex care needs. There is a gap in developing a theory-driven, systematic synthesis of the job characteristics and well-being outcomes specific to this occupational group, as most existing studies evaluate either professional health care workers or both professional and nursing assistants.

Aim: Develop an occupation-specific conceptual model on the job characteristics and well-being of nursing assistants in long-term care facilities drawing upon the job demands-resources model.

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Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most frequently diagnosed cancer worldwide. Diabetes and CRC share many overlapping lifestyle risk factors such as obesity, heavy alcohol use, and diet. This study aims to develop a risk scoring system for CRC prediction among diabetes patients using routine medical records.

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11-acryloylamino undecanoic acid (AAUA) is a versatile polymerizable surfactant that has been applied to coat medical devices, and these applications can benefit from a fundamental understanding of its interaction with a metal substrate. Cyclic voltammetry and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) were used to examine the adsorption configuration of AAUA molecules on an ordered Au(111) electrode and their mutual interactions, as AAUA was adsorbed from a methanol dosing solution. In addition to the van der Waals force between the aliphatic groups, the hydrogen bonding between the carboxylic acid and acrylamide groups was also important to guide the spatial arrangement of AAUA admolecules on the Au electrode.

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Interactions among the underlying agents of a complex system are not only limited to dyads but can also occur in larger groups. Currently, no generic model has been developed to capture high-order interactions (HOI), which, along with pairwise interactions, portray a detailed landscape of complex systems. Here, we integrate evolutionary game theory and behavioral ecology into a unified statistical mechanics framework, allowing all agents (modeled as nodes) and their bidirectional, signed, and weighted interactions at various orders (modeled as links or hyperlinks) to be coded into hypernetworks.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Unicellular green picophytoplankton, part of the Mamiellales order, are common in marine ecosystems and can be infected by prasinoviruses, large DNA viruses.
  • - Researchers developed a new method to enrich and sequence these viruses, successfully assembling 80 prasinovirus genomes from samples in the South China Sea, and found strong links between genome similarity and host range with 94% accuracy.
  • - The study revealed unexpected host-switching among different algal lineages and instances of horizontal gene transfer, indicating active viral evolution and co-evolutionary dynamics that influence marine virus-host interactions.
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Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, susceptible to noise arising from biological variability and technical errors, can distort gene expression analysis and impact cell similarity assessments, particularly in heterogeneous populations. Current methods, including deep learning approaches, often struggle to accurately characterize cell relationships due to this inherent noise. To address these challenges, we introduce scAMF (Single-cell Analysis via Manifold Fitting), a framework designed to enhance clustering accuracy and data visualization in scRNA-seq studies.

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It is important to understand the geometry of genome space in biology. After transforming genome sequences into frequency matrices of the chaos game representation (FCGR), we regard a genome sequence as a point in a suitable Grassmann manifold by analyzing the column space of the corresponding FCGR. To assess the sequence similarity, we employ the generalized Grassmannian distance, an intrinsic geometric distance that differs from the traditional Euclidean distance used in the classical k-mer frequency-based methods.

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Article Synopsis
  • Using thinning in forests can help reduce problems caused by drought because of global warming.
  • Soil microbes play an important role in how forests work and respond to drought, but we still don't fully understand how they interact with each other.
  • Researchers created a model to study these microbes and how they change over time, using data from an experiment on tree plantations to find important interactions among them.
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Predicting the strength of promoters and guiding their directed evolution is a crucial task in synthetic biology. This approach significantly reduces the experimental costs in conventional promoter engineering. Previous studies employing machine learning or deep learning methods have shown some success in this task, but their outcomes were not satisfactory enough, primarily due to the neglect of evolutionary information.

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Ethnopharmacological Relevance: Jiawei-Xiaoyao Pill (JWX), a classic formula in traditional Chinese medicine, is derived from Xiaoyao Pill by adding significant amounts of Gardeniae Fructus (GF) and Moutan Cortex (MC). It is frequently used for the treatment of depression. JWX has been demonstrated to uniquely elicit rapid antidepressant-like effects within the prescribed dosage range.

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JOURNAL/nrgr/04.03/01300535-202505000-00027/figure1/v/2024-07-28T173839Z/r/image-tiff Cerebral ischemia is a major health risk that requires preventive approaches in addition to drug therapy. Physical exercise enhances neurogenesis and synaptogenesis, and has been widely used for functional rehabilitation after stroke.

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Linoleic acid (LA) is required for neuronal development. We have previously demonstrated sex-specific changes in cardiovascular and hepatic function in rat offspring from mothers consuming a high-LA diet, with some effects associated with reduced LA concentration in the postnatal diet. At this time, the impact of a high-maternal-LA diet on offspring brain development and the potential for the postnatal diet to alter any adverse changes are unknown.

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The highly variable SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic frequently undergoes mutations, leading to the emergence of new variants that present novel threats to public health. The determination of these variants often relies on manual definition based on local sequence characteristics, resulting in delays in their detection relative to their actual emergence. In this study, we propose an algorithm for the automatic identification of novel variants.

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Background: The development of ketamine-like rapid antidepressants holds promise for enhancing the therapeutic efficacy of depression, but the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Implicated in depression regulation, the neuropeptide pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) is investigated here to examine its role in mediating the rapid antidepressant response.

Methods: The onset of antidepressant response was assessed through depression-related behavioral paradigms.

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Background: Most liver cancer scoring systems focus on patients with preexisting liver diseases such as chronic viral hepatitis or liver cirrhosis. Patients with diabetes are at higher risk of developing liver cancer than the general population. However, liver cancer scoring systems for patients in the absence of liver diseases or those with diabetes remain rare.

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Importance: Multidisciplinary disease management efforts enable the improvement in lung function among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but there is little evidence of its association with risks of adverse health outcomes and health care service use.

Objective: To examine the association between the use of a nurse- and allied health-led primary care clinic for respiratory patients, namely the Nurse and Allied Health Clinic-Respiratory Care (NAHC-Respiratory), and their risks of mortality and morbidity and health care service use.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This territory-wide, population-based, propensity-matched, retrospective cohort study used data from the electronic health records of all patients who used public health care services in Hong Kong, China, from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2019.

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Augmentative alternative communication (AAC) devices or systems are often prescribed to minimally verbal or nonspeaking autistic individuals and other individuals with complex communication needs to facilitate communication or as an alternative to spoken language. AAC use can result in communication gains and improved quality of life for minimally verbal or nonspeaking individuals. Despite this, AAC abandonment is high, limiting societal participation of the individual on the autism spectrum with complex communication needs.

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Background: Attracting and supporting a sustainable long-term care (LTC) workforce has been a persistent social policy challenge across the globe. To better attract and retain a sustainable LTC workforce, it is necessary to adopt a unified concept of worker well-being. Meaning of work is an important psychological resource that buffers the negative impacts of adverse working conditions on workers' motivation, satisfaction, and turnover intention.

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