Classification of Dementia Severity in Taiwan Based on History-Based Clinical Diagnosis System.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: This study used HAICDDS screening questionnaire to classify the severity of dementia in Taiwan based on the clinical dementia rating scale. METHODS: LDA was applied to 6,328 Taiwanese clinical patients for classification purposes. Clustering method was used to identify the associated influential symptoms for each severity level. RESULT: LDA shows only 36 HAICDDS questions are significant to distinguish the 5 severity levels with 80% overall accuracy and it increased to 85.83% when combining normal and MCI groups. Severe dementia patients have the most serious declination in most cognitive and functionality domains, follows by moderate dementia, mild dementia, MCI and normal patients. CONCLUSION: HAICDDS is a reliable and time-saved diagnosis tool in classifying the severity of dementia before undergoing a more in-depth clinical examination. The modified CDR may be indicated for epidemiological study and provide a solid foundation to develop a machine-learning derived screening instrument to detect dementia symptoms.

The point-of-care Bilistick method has very short turn-around-time and high accuracy at lower cutoff levels to predict laboratory-measured TSB.

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to determine the accuracy of a point-of-care Bilistick method for measuring total serum bilirubin (TSB) and its turn-around-time (TAT) against hospital laboratory methods. METHODS: This prospective study was carried out on 561 term-gestation jaundiced neonates in two Malaysian hospitals. Venous blood sample was collected from each neonate for contemporary measurement of TSB by hospital laboratories and Bilistick. TAT was the time interval between specimen collection and TSB result reported by each method. RESULTS: The mean laboratory-measured TSB was 194.85 (±2.844) µmol/L and Bilistick TSB was 169.37 (±2.706) µmol/L. Pearson's correlation coefficient was: r = 0.901 (p < 0.001). The mean difference of [laboratory TSB- Bilistick TBS] was 26.48 (±29.41) µmol/L. The Bland-Altman plots show that the 95% limits of agreement (-31.1577, 84.11772) contain 94.7% (=531/561) of the difference in TSB readings. Bilistick has a 99% accuracy and 100% sensitivity to predict laboratory TSB levels of ≥80 µmol/L and ≥360 µmol/L at lower Bilistick TSB levels of ≥55 and ≥315 µmol/L, respectively. TAT of Bilistick TSB (2.0 min) was significantly shorter than TAT (105 min) of laboratory TSB (p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Bilistick has shorter TAT. The accuracy and sensitivity of Bilistick TSB for predicting laboratory TSB is high at lower cutoff levels.

Enhanced conflict monitoring via a short-duration, video-assisted deep breathing in healthy young adults: an event-related potential approach through the Go/NoGo paradigm.

OBJECTIVES: Practitioners of mindfulness are reported to have greater cognitive control especially in conflict monitoring, response inhibition and sustained attention. However, due to the various existing methods in each mindfulness practices and also, the high commitment factor, a barrier still exists for an individual to pick up the practices. Therefore, the effect of short duration deep breathing on the cognitive control is investigated here. METHODS: Short duration guided deep breathing videos consisting of 5, 7 and 9 min respectively were created and used on subjects training. The effect on cognitive control was assessed using a Go/NoGo task along with event-related potential (ERP) measurements at Fz, Cz, and Pz. RESULTS: From the study, the significant outcome showed at the follow-up session in which participants engaged for 5 min deep breathing group showed a profound NoGo N2 amplitude increment as compared to the control group, indicating an enhanced conflict monitoring ability. An inverse relationship between the NoGo N2 amplitude and the breathing duration is observed as well at the follow-up session. CONCLUSION: These results indicated the possibility of performing short duration deep breathing guided by a video to achieve an enhanced conflict monitoring as an alternative to other mindfulness practices and 5 min is found to be the optimum practice duration. SIGNIFICANT: This study is the first to establish a relationship between deep breathing and conflict monitoring through ERP. The study population of young adults taken from the same environment reduces the variance in ERP results due to age and environment. LIMITATION: A larger sample size would provide a greater statistical power. A longer duration of deep breathing should be investigated to further clarify the relationship between the practice duration and the NoGo N2 amplitude. The result can be split by gender and analyzed separately due to the different brain structure of males and females.