Publications by authors named "Yi Chia Liu"

Article Synopsis
  • This study investigates the impact of SGLT2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) compared to DPP4 inhibitors (DPP4i) on cardiovascular disease (CVD) events in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D), focusing on how effective these treatments are in real-world clinical settings.
  • Conducted at a leading medical center in Taiwan, the research analyzed data from adult T2D patients who started on either SGLT2i or DPP4i drugs between 2016 and 2019, with follow-ups extending up to six years to assess total CVD occurrences and specific types of CVD events.
  • Results showed that SGLT
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Purpose: The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) aims to enhance patient outcomes systematically. However, identifying crucial items and accurately determining PCOC phases remain challenging. This study aims to identify essential PCOC data items and construct a prediction model to accurately classify PCOC phases in terminal patients.

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Background: Indoor CO concentration is an important metric of indoor air quality (IAQ). The dynamic temporal pattern of CO levels in intensive care units (ICUs), where healthcare providers experience high cognitive load and occupant numbers are frequently changing, has not been comprehensively characterized.

Objective: We attempted to describe the dynamic change in CO levels in the ICU using an Internet of Things-based (IoT-based) monitoring system.

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Introduction: Assessment of clinical competence is a significant part of the training for young occupational therapists (OTs). Objective and systematic assessment allows both supervisors and trainees to be aware of the training objectives and monitor the progress. The direct observation of procedural skills (DOPS) is a work-based assessment to evaluate professional knowledge, skills, and attitude in clinical training.

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  • Ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease are forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) caused by abnormal immune responses, and the study focuses on the less understood interactions among immune cells and the mechanisms behind the drug vedolizumab.
  • Researchers used a method called CITE-seq on immune cells from UC patients treated with vedolizumab and applied a computational tool (NicheNet) to study immune cell interactions and transcriptional changes.
  • Findings showed that UC patients who responded to vedolizumab had fewer T helper 17 (TH17) cells and different interaction patterns with other immune cells compared to nonresponders, suggesting that understanding cell communications could enhance treatments for IBD.
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Background: Previous studies have compared the effectiveness of constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) by different training doses. However, whether the dosing schedule, that is, intensive or distributed, influences the effectiveness of CIMT in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (CP) is unknown.

Objective: To investigate the effectiveness of intensive and distributed CIMT for children with unilateral CP.

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Introduction: Crohn's disease (CD) is a major subtype of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a spectrum of chronic intestinal disorders caused by dysregulated immune responses to gut microbiota. Although transcriptional and functional changes in a number of immune cell types have been implicated in the pathogenesis of IBD, the cellular interactions and signals that drive these changes have been less well-studied.

Methods: We performed Cellular Indexing of Transcriptomes and Epitopes by sequencing on peripheral blood, colon, and ileal immune cells derived from healthy subjects and patients with CD.

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During a microbial infection, responding CD8+ T cells give rise to effector cells that provide acute host defense and memory cells that provide sustained protection. An alternative outcome is exhaustion, a state of T cell dysfunction that occurs in the context of chronic infections and cancer. Although it is evident that exhausted CD8+ T (TEX) cells are phenotypically and molecularly distinct from effector and memory CD8+ T cells, the factors regulating the earliest events in the differentiation process of TEX cells remain incompletely understood.

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Background: There is a lack of research on the effect of community-based psychiatric rehabilitation programs (CBPRs) in individuals with severe mental illness. This research used data from a retrospective study to examine the effect of a CBPR in a community rehabilitation center.

Materials And Methods: Clinical outcomes measures from a retrospective study were collected.

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Tissue-resident memory CD8 T (T) cells are a subset of memory T cells that play a critical role in limiting early pathogen spread and controlling infection. T cells exhibit differences across tissues, but their potential heterogeneity among distinct anatomic compartments within the small intestine and colon has not been well recognized. Here, by analyzing T cells from the lamina propria and epithelial compartments of the small intestine and colon, we showed that intestinal T cells exhibited distinctive patterns of cytokine and granzyme expression along with substantial transcriptional, epigenetic, and functional heterogeneity.

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Background: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is associated with an increased risk of heart failure, death and thromboembolism. AF is prevalent in patients with cancer. Although current guidelines suggest the application of oral anticoagulants (OACs) for thromboembolic event prevention in high-risk AF patients, owing to the high thromboembolic and bleeding risks of active-cancer patients, there is no consensus on the use of OACs in such a population.

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Incidence rates for diseases are widely used in the field of medical research because they lead to clear and simple physical and clinical interpretations. In this study, we propose an efficient estimation method that incorporates auxiliary subgroup information related to the incidence rate into the estimation of the Cox proportional hazard model. The results show that utilizing the incidence rate information improves the efficiency of the estimation of regression parameters based on the double empirical likelihood method compared to that for conventional models that do not incorporation such information.

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  • Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a common cancer globally, and identifying risk factors for tumor recurrence is crucial for patient treatment and survival after surgery.
  • Researchers developed a prediction algorithm using four machine learning models (logistic regression, random forest, CART, and support vector machine) based on clinicopathological data from 1,073 patients with stage II and III CRC.
  • The logistic regression model showed the best predictive accuracy (AUC of 0.678), while several significant risk factors for tumor recurrence were identified, including chemotherapy, tumor stage, lymph node involvement, and various invasion types.
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Patients with schizophrenia have difficulties in social cognitive domains including emotion recognition and mentalization, and in sensorimotor processing and learning. The relationship between social cognitive deficits and sensorimotor function in patients with schizophrenia remains largely unexplored. With the hypothesis that impaired visual motor processing may decelerate information processing and subsequently affects various domains of social cognition, we examined the association of nonverbal emotion recognition, mentalization, and visual motor processing in schizophrenia.

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This study investigated the effect of dual task performance of hand dexterity tasks and the relationship to daily functioning in 40 people with chronic schizophrenia and 35 healthy participants. Participants performed the Purdue Pegboard Test, O'Connor Finger Dexterity Test, and the Serial Subtracting Seven Task as the secondary task under single- and dual-task conditions and completed the Activities of Daily Living Rating Scale-III (ADLRS-III). The hand dexterity of all participants declined from the single to the dual tasks, and the discrepancy between single- and dual-task performance was significantly greater in the schizophrenia group than in the control group.

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causes infections in patients with compromised epithelial barrier function. Multiple virulence factors produced by are controlled by quorum sensing (QS) 2-alkyl-4(1)-quinolone (AQ) signal molecules. Here, we investigated the impact of AQs on PAO1 infection of differentiated human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs).

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Interactions between bacterial and fungal cells shape many polymicrobial communities. Bacteria elaborate diverse strategies to interact and compete with other organisms, including the deployment of protein secretion systems. The type VI secretion system (T6SS) delivers toxic effector proteins into host eukaryotic cells and competitor bacterial cells, but, surprisingly, T6SS-delivered effectors targeting fungal cells have not been reported.

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  • The study evaluates the psychometric and clinimetric properties of the Melbourne Assessment 2 (MA2) as an outcome measurement in children with cerebral palsy (CP).
  • Seventeen children participated to assess test-retest reliability and minimal detectable change (MDC), while thirty-five children underwent an 8-week rehabilitation program to determine validity and responsiveness.
  • Results showed that the MA2 demonstrated high reliability, significant relationships with other motor proficiency tests, and established benchmarks for clinically important differences (MCID), confirming its effectiveness as a measurement tool.
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Bacterial cells sense their population density and respond accordingly by producing various signal molecules to the surrounding environments thereby trigger a plethora of gene expression. This regulatory pathway is termed quorum sensing (QS). Plenty of bacterial virulence factors are controlled by QS or QS-mediated regulatory systems and QS signal molecules (QSSMs) play crucial roles in bacterial signaling transduction.

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Bacteria sense their own population size, tune the expression of responding genes, and behave accordingly to environmental stimuli by secreting signaling molecules. This phenomenon is termed as quorum sensing (QS). By exogenously manipulating the signal transduction bacterial population behaviors could be controlled, which may be done through quorum quenching (QQ).

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The Type VI secretion system is a widespread bacterial nanomachine, used to deliver toxins directly into eukaryotic or prokaryotic target cells. These secreted toxins, or effectors, act on diverse cellular targets, and their action provides the attacking bacterial cell with a significant fitness advantage, either against rival bacteria or eukaryotic host organisms. In this review, we discuss the delivery of diverse effectors by the Type VI secretion system, the modes of action of the so-called 'anti-bacterial' and 'anti-eukaryotic' effectors, the mechanism of self-resistance against anti-bacterial effectors and the evolutionary implications of horizontal transfer of Type VI secretion system-associated toxins.

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Macrophages in a tumor microenvironment have been characterized as M1- and M2-polarized subtypes. Here, we discovered the different macrophages' impacts on lung cancer cell A549. The M2a/M2c subtypes promoted A549 invasion and xenograft tumor growth.

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Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that can cause severe infections at compromised epithelial surfaces, such those found in burns, wounds, and in lungs damaged by mechanical ventilation or recurrent infections, particularly in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. CF patients have been proposed to have a Th2 and Th17-biased immune response suggesting that the lack of Th1 and/or over exuberant Th17 responses could contribute to the establishment of chronic P. aeruginosa infection and deterioration of lung function.

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