Publications by authors named "Yuen Ho"

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that insomnia plays an important role in the development of depression, supporting insomnia intervention as a promising approach to prevent depression in youth. This randomized controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of app-based cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) in preventing future onset of major depressive disorder (MDD) in youth.

Methods And Findings: This was a randomized, assessor-blind, parallel group-controlled trial in Chinese youth (aged 15-25 years) with insomnia disorder and subclinical depressive symptoms.

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Background: Affect recall is key to psychological assessment and decision-making. However, self-concepts (self-beliefs) may bias retrospective affect reports such that they deviate from lived experiences. Does this experience-memory gap apply to solitude experiences? We hypothesized that individuals misremember how they feel overall and when in solitude, in line with self-concepts of introversion, self-determined/not-self-determined solitude motivations, and independent/interdependent self-construal.

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Healthcare professionals (HCPs) have vital roles in providing evidence-based care to promote healthy micronutrient nutrition in early life. Providing such care requires scalable training to strengthen knowledge and confident application of effective behaviour change skills. Among 33 public and private HCPs (primarily dietitians) in South Africa, we evaluated the behaviour change aspects of a technology-enabled National Qualification Sub-Framework level 6 programme, Improving Early Nutrition and Health in South Africa ('ImpENSA').

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Background: Drawing on the extensive utilization of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to combat COVID-19 in Mainland China, experts designed a series of TCM anti-epidemic strategies. This study aims to understand Hong Kong CM practitioners' application of and opinions on the "Chinese Medicine Anti-epidemic Plans."

Methods: Online focus group interviews were conducted, and purposive sampling was employed to invite 22 CM practitioners to voluntarily participate in three interview sessions.

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Article Synopsis
  • A randomized clinical trial evaluated the impact of self-administered acupressure (SAA) on reducing knee osteoarthritis (OA) pain in adults aged 50 and older in Hong Kong.
  • The study involved 314 participants who were divided into two groups: one received SAA training alongside knee health education, while the control group only received education.
  • Results showed that the SAA group had a significant reduction in pain scores and a slight improvement in health utility scores compared to the control group after 12 weeks, indicating that SAA may be a cost-effective intervention for knee OA pain relief.
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Background And Aims: We investigated whether empagliflozin reduces hepatic steatosis in patients with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease without diabetes mellitus.

Approach And Results: This was an investigator-initiated, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial recruiting adult subjects from the community. Eligible subjects without diabetes mellitus (fasting plasma glucose < 7 mmol/L and HbA1c < 6.

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Background And Objective: Cardiorespiratory polygraphy (CRP) is the predominant technology used to diagnose obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) in tertiary centres in the UK. Nocturnal pulse oximetry (NPO) is, however, cheaper and more accessible. This study evaluated the ability of NPO indices to predict OSA in typically developing (TD) children.

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Transcranial pulse stimulation has been proven effective to improve cognition, memory and depressive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, but supporting evidence on other neurological diseases or neuropsychiatric disorders remains limited. This study aimed to investigate the effects of transcranial pulse stimulation on the right temporoparietal junction, which is a key node for social cognition for autism spectrum disorder, and to examine the association between transcranial pulse stimulation and executive and social functions. This double-blinded, randomized, sham-controlled trial included 32 participants (27 males), aged 12-17 years with autism spectrum disorder.

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Ionic liquid viscosity is one of the most important properties to consider for practical applications. Yet, the connection between local structure and viscosity remains an open question. This article explores the structural origin of differences in the viscosity and viscoelastic relaxation across several ionic liquids, including cations with alkyl, ether, and thioether tails, of the imidazolium and pyrrolidinium families coupled with the NTf anion.

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Breast cancer is the most common cancer in reproductive age women. The aim of this study is to assess the knowledge, attitude and intention on fertility preservation among women diagnosed to have breast cancer. This is a multi-centre cross-sectional questionnaire study.

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Previous research has used stationary eye-tracking in the lab to examine age differences in attentional deployment, showing that older adults display gaze patterns toward positive stimuli. This positive gaze preference sometimes improves older adults' mood compared to their younger counterparts. However, the lab environment may lead to different emotion regulation behavior among older adults compared to what they do in their everyday life.

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The prevalence of symptoms of anxiety is increasing, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. A home use transdermal neurostimulation device might help to minimize the severity of anxiety disorder. To the best of our knowledge, there is no clinical trial using transdermal neurostimulation to treat individuals with symptoms of anxiety in Asia.

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Background: Foetal and early childhood development contributes to the risk of adult non-communicable diseases such as hypertension and cardiovascular disease. We aimed to investigate whether kidney size at birth is associated with markers of kidney function at 7-11 years.

Methods: Foetal kidney dimensions were measured using ultrasound scans at 34 weeks gestation and used to derive kidney volume (cm) in 1802 participants in the Born in Bradford (BiB) birth cohort.

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Background: Protein-protein interaction (PPI) data is an important type of data used in functional genomics. However, high-throughput experiments are often insufficient to complete the PPI interactome of different organisms. Computational techniques are thus used to infer missing data, with link prediction being one such approach that uses the structure of the network of PPIs known so far to identify non-edges whose addition to the network would make it more sound, according to some underlying assumptions.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Transcranial pulse stimulation (TPS) has shown promise in enhancing cognitive functions in Alzheimer’s patients, but its effectiveness for major depressive disorder (MDD) had not been previously tested on a wide scale until this trial.
  • - In a 2-week study with 30 participants aged 18-54, who were split into a TPS group and a waitlist control group, results indicated a significant reduction in depressive symptoms for those receiving TPS therapy as measured by the Hamilton depression rating scale-17.
  • - The findings revealed that TPS not only effectively reduced depression severity but also showed strong and lasting effects observed during a follow-up three months post-treatment.
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Matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP9) and total amyloid-beta (Aβ) are prospective biomarkers of ocular ageing and retinopathy. These were quantified by ELISA in the vitreous and blood from controls ( = 55) and in a subset of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) patients ( = 12) for insights and possible additional links between the ocular and systemic compartments. Vitreous MMP9 levels in control and AMD groups were 932.

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Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common developmental disorder in children. The latest non-intrusive brain stimulation (NIBS) technology-transcranial pulse stimulation (TPS)-has been proven effective in older adults with mild neurocognitive disorders and adults with major depressive disorder. Nonetheless, there is so far no robust randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted on adolescents with ASD nationwide.

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The global pandemic of COVID-19 has caused huge causality and unquantifiable loss of social wealth. The innate immune response is the first line of defense against SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, strong inflammatory response associated with dysregulation of innate immunity causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and death.

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Background: Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been lots of published work examining the association between COVID-19 and mental health, particularly, anxiety and depression in the general populations and disease subpopulations globally. Depression is a debilitating disorder affecting individuals' level of bio-psychological-social functioning across different age groups. Since almost all studies were cross-sectional studies, there seems to be a lack of robust, large-scale, and technological-based interventional studies to restore the general public's optimal psychosocial wellbeing amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Endstage kidney failure rates are higher in South Asians than in White Europeans. Low birth weight is associated with adult chronic kidney disease and is more common in South Asians. Foetal kidney size was smaller in South Asians in the Born in Bradford (BiB) birth cohort.

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Background: The health benefits of urban green space have been widely reported in the literature; however, the biological mechanisms remain unexplored, and a causal relationship cannot be established between green space exposure and cardiorespiratory health.

Objective: Our aim was to conduct a panel study using personal tracking devices to continuously collect individual exposure data from healthy Chinese adults aged 50 to 64 years living in Hong Kong.

Methods: A panel of cardiorespiratory biomarkers was tested each week for a period of 5 consecutive weeks.

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Objectives: Optimistic bias refers to the phenomenon that individuals believe bad things are less likely to happen to themselves than to others. However, whether optimistic bias could vary across age and culture is unknown. The present study aims to investigate (a) whether individuals exhibit optimistic bias in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and (b) whether age and culture would moderate such bias.

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Scars affect millions of patients worldwide, yet their treatment efficacy and options clinically remain limited. In recent years, increased understanding of scar formation pathways leading to developments in nanotechnology have opened many opportunities for scar detection, prevention, and treatment due to the nanoscale features and therapeutic delivery capabilities of such technologies. Led by nanoparticles (NPs) and nanofibers, these novel strategies can aid in reducing scar contracture, improving wound-healing efficacy, and advancing progress towards scarless wound healing.

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Different microclimates can have significant impact on the physiology of succulents that inhabit arid environments such as the Mojave Desert (California). We investigated variation in leaf physiology, morphology and anatomy of two dominant Mojave Desert monocots, (Joshua tree) and , growing along a soil water availability gradient. Stomatal conductance ( ) and leaf thickness were recorded in the field at three different sites (north-western slope, south-eastern slope, and alluvial fan) in March of 2019.

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