BACKGROUND Self-stigma has been highlighted and researched in relation to patients with chronic illnesses, as it may have a negative impact on their treatment adherence. However, self-stigma has not yet been investigated in patients with type 2 diabetes. In order to evaluate the extent to which patients with type 2 diabetes experience self-stigma, which may result in their poor self-care manage...

Migraine is a common, debilitating condition affecting up to 15% of the population. The ventroposteromedial nucleus of the thalamus relays trigeminal sensory input to the primary somatosensory cortex. In vivo electrophysiological recordings were made from the cell bodies of thalamocortical relay neurons in rats. We investigated whether microiontophoretic ejection of beta antagonists could inhib...

Certain applications such as person re-identification in camera network, surveillance photo verification, forensic identification etc. suffer from a small sample size (SSS) problem severely. Conventional face recognition methods face a great challenge on SSS as the trained feature space is overfitted to the small training set. Interest in combination of multiple base classifiers to solve the SS...

In this study, we examined subjective social status (SSS) and self-esteem as potential mediators between the association of psychological suzhi and problem behaviors in a sample of 1271 Chinese adolescents (44.5% male, grades 7-12). The results showed that SSS and self-esteem were fully mediating the relationship between psychological suzhi and problem behaviors. Moreover, the indirect effect w...

OBJECTIVES To investigate whether a difference exists between DAS28 from CRP and DAS28 from ESR in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and secondary Sjögren's syndrome (sSS). MATERIAL AND METHODS One group comprised patients with RA and sSS, the control group comprised patients with RA. The inclusion criteria for the RA and sSS group have been specified as follows: presence of at least on...

OBJECTIVE Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) is a nonpharmacological intervention used to manage pain using skin surface electrodes. Optimal electrode placement is unclear. We hypothesized that better analgesia would occur if electrodes were placed over sites with lower skin impedance. Optimal site selection (OSS) and sham site selection (SSS) electrode sites on the forearm were...

OBJECTIVES We assessed whether a combination of summed stress scores (SSS) using exercise myocardial perfusion SPECT (Ex-SPECT) and maximal heart rate accurately predicts cardiac events through a sub-analysis of J-ACCESS (Japanese Assessment of Cardiac Events and Survival Study by Quantitative Gated SPECT) which was conducted to evaluate the prognosis of Japanese patients with suspected ischemi...

Measuring the sea surface during tropical cyclones (TC) is challenging due to severe weather conditions that prevent shipboard measurements and clouds which mask the sea surface for visible satellite sensors. However, sea surface emission in the microwave L-band can penetrate rain and clouds and be measured from space. The European Space Agency (ESA) MIRAS L-band radiometer on the Soil Moisture...

PARSSS* is a parallel formulation of SSS* that is suitable for shared-memory multiprocessor systems. It is based on the distributed tree search paradigm of Ferguson and Korf. The main difficulty in parallelizing SSS* lies in achieving proper coordination between processes running on different subtrees of the game tree. This has been resolved in PARSSS* by the use of a shared array which maintai...

Sintered stainless steel (SSS) microfiltration membranes, which served as electrode directly, were used for the experiment of separating Alamin, a calcium salt and protein containing particles, found in dairy processing. Fouling and cleaning of the SSS membranes under the application of an external electric field were studied. The imposed electric field was found, diverging the pH of permeate a...