by Gerhard Litscher

Received: 07 November 2017;  Published: 10 November 2017;  doi: 10.21926/obm.icm.1704004

The treatment by auricular therapy has a long history. Ear acupoint research has been advancing step by step worldwide [1-17] . The introduction of lasers into medicine brought besides the already existing stimulation with needles, electricity, pressure and liquids an additional technique to auricular acupuncture.

by Khac An DAO  , Hong Trang PHAM  and Van Vuong HOANG

Received: 01 September 2022;  Published: 31 January 2023;  doi: 10.21926/cr.2301006

Recently the GexOy nanomaterials have been studying intensively due to their interesting electronic materials, which have many particular properties and applications in nanotechnology and nano-devices fabrication. Much work has been done on many different synthesis methods and their properties of Ge and GexOy nanomaterials. However, the effects of the different Ge substrate surface states and Au catalyst layer thicknesses on the formation of different forms/morphologies of nanomaterials (nanowires, nanorods, nanopa [...]

by Zeel Maheshwari  and Rama Ramakumar

Received: 29 August 2021;  Published: 21 January 2022;  doi: 10.21926/jept.2201006

Rural and remote communities are more vulnerable to damage caused by extreme events as compared to urban areas. Natural disasters can disrupt basic supplies such as domestic water supply and cooking needs in addition to electricity outages. The recognition of the interlinked nature of food, water and energy has gained momentum over the past few years. Smart Integrated Renewable Energy System (SIRES) has been proposed to handle basic needs such as cooking, domestic and irrigation water supply, and electricity to rem [...]

by Margaret M Esiri

Received: 27 November 2019;  Published: 04 February 2020;  doi: 10.21926/obm.geriatr.2001103

In this article I wish to put the case for a change of emphasis in the approach to finding a prevention/treatment for Alzheimer’s disease from a focus on beta amyloid to one on tau. In particular, I make the case for aiming to prevent the spread of abnormal tau from the medial temporal lobe to widespread areas of association cortex that are anatomically linked to this critical region. I pose an analogy with cardiovascular disease in which the initiating pathology, lipid streaks, are left untreated until they are so [...]

by Morkoss M. Fakhry  , Asmaa R. Abdel-Hamed  , Noha M. Mesbah  , Dina M. Abo-Elmatty  , Mohamed M. Sayed-Ahmed  , Abdel-Moneim M. Osman  and Ola S. Ahmed

Received: 27 November 2023;  Published: 26 February 2024;  doi: 10.21926/obm.genet.2401215

Breast cancer (BC) is the most common cause of cancer-related death and is the malignancy most frequently diagnosed in females worldwide. BC incidence is predicted to continue increasing worldwide. Without interventions, annual new cases will reach over 3 million by 2030. Genetic abnormalities account for almost 70% of all BC cases worldwide. Biological pathways implicated include non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). MiRNAs are small non-coding RNA molecules that play a role in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expressi [...]

by Bo Pang  , Qi Zhang  , Guang-Yu Cheng  , Wei-Ping Cheng  , Daniela Litscher  , Lu Wang  , Zemin Sheng  , Ingrid Gaischek  , Zhong-Ren Sun  and Gerhard Litscher

Received: 08 June 2016;  Published: 23 August 2016;  doi: 10.21926/obm.icm.1601003

(1) Background: Within this study, we assessed the effects of acupuncture on heart rate variability (HRV) in Chinese post-stroke patients. (2) Methods: In 30 Chinese post-stroke patients (14 f, 16 m; mean age ± SD 64.3 ± 3.8 years; range 40 - 80 years) electrocardiographic signals before, during and after acupuncture at the left Weizhong acupoint (BL40) were recorded in Harbin and analyzed in Graz using teleacupuncture via internet. HRV data were analyzed in the time and frequency domain and a protoco [...]

by James Hackley  , Alison Dixon  , Carol Royle  , Christopher Moss  , Richard Brown  and Tobyn Bell

Received: 29 January 2024;  Published: 27 March 2024;  doi: 10.21926/obm.icm.2401021

Compassion-focused chairwork has become a recent focus of empirical investigation. This study extended this area of research by exploring how participants with depression experienced the ‘compassionate other’ imagery exercise enacted via chairwork methods. Eight individuals from primary care NHS mental health services were interviewed about their experience of the practice. The resultant data were analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Three group experiential themes were identified: care that [...]

by Petr A. Fedotov  , Maria A. Simonenko  , Yulia V. Sazonova  , Mariya A. Bortsova  , Artem N. Kostomarov  and Mariya Yu. Sitnikova

Received: 01 February 2019;  Published: 05 August 2019;  doi: 10.21926/obm.transplant.1903077

Background: To estimate the survival of patients in the heart transplantation waiting list (HTx WL) at Almazov National Medical Research Centre (V.A. Almazov NMRC), Saint-Petersburg, Russia, from 2010 to 2017 and to define risk factors for death among these patients. Methods: It was a single-center retrospective study involving 151 patients with advanced chronic heart failure (CHF) in the HTx WL. Results: Mortality in the HTx WL for the period 2010-2017 was found to decrease. Based on the results of constructing th [...]

by Michael J Eiswerth  and Joel Wedd

Received: 30 November 2024;  Published: 17 April 2025;  doi: 10.21926/obm.transplant.2502247

The prevalence of alcohol use disorder (AUD) and alcohol-related liver disease (ALD) has increased in the last two decades. ALD is currently the most common indication for both waitlist additions and liver transplant (LT) in the United States, including alcohol-associated cirrhosis, alcohol-associated hepatitis (AH), and acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). ALD also has a significant global disease burden. LT in ALD is a complex paradigm that poses both medical and ethical challenges, requiring a multidisciplinar [...]

by Suman Lahkar  , Richa Brahma  and Swapan Kumar Dolui

Received: 15 September 2022;  Published: 04 January 2023;  doi: 10.21926/cr.2301002

The development of noble metal-free catalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is the primary challenge in fuel production to replace fossil fuels. Here, we have synthesized Fe-doped TiO2/PANI nanocomposite via facile in situ polymerization method and studied its electrocatalytic activity towards HER. The composite catalyzes HER efficiently with an overpotential value of -180 mV vs. RHE in 0.5 M H2SO4 solution to achieve the current density of 10 mA cm-2 and also possesses unique stability of 8 h. However, a un [...]

by William E Vargas  , Federico Muñoz-Rojas  , Esteban Avendaño  , Victoria Quirós-Cordero  and Marcela Hernández-Jiménez

Received: 30 July 2022;  Published: 12 October 2022;  doi: 10.21926/rpm.2204019

Spectrophotometry has been widely used to retrieve the dielectric function of a bulk iridium sample using an extended version of the Drude–Lorentz model. The parameters of the model are optimized using a spectral-projected-gradient-method-assisted acceptance-probability-controlled simulated annealing approach. Furthermore, optimized values of Drude parameters corresponding to the optical response of electrons and holes (scattering frequency of electrons, the ratio between scattering frequencies of holes and electro [...]

by Courtney Tate  , Jason P Butler  , Cameron Curley  , Siok-Keen Tey  , Glen A Kennedy  and Ashleigh P Scott

Received: 23 June 2020;  Published: 23 October 2020;  doi: 10.21926/obm.transplant.2004121

Acquired Severe Aplastic Anaemia (SAA) is a rare bone marrow failure syndrome, for which allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) is a proven curative therapy. Despite excellent outcomes for matched sibling SAA recipients in terms of engraftment and survival, HSCT remains highly challenging in older matched-unrelated-donor (MUD) recipients, due to increased non-relapse mortality (NRM) from causes such as graft versus host disease (GVHD), organ failure and infection. We sought to evaluate our local HSCT [...]

by Claire Sanderson  and Paul D. Loprinzi

Received: 15 July 2019;  Published: 09 October 2019;  doi: 10.21926/obm.neurobiol.1904043

Objective: Reversal learning requires an individual to alter their behavior when previously learned reward-based contingencies are reversed. Reversal learning is heavily influenced by cognitive flexibility, which has been shown to be enhanced with acute exercise. However, minimal work has directly evaluated the effects of acute exercise on reversal learning, which was the purpose of this experiment. Methods: A between-subject randomized controlled intervention was employed. Participants (N=60) were randomized into [...]

by Mingyu Wang  , Jie Liu  , Jinpeng Li  and Tiesheng Li

Received: 21 March 2022;  Published: 14 April 2022;  doi: 10.21926/cr.2202010

A new chiral cyclopalladated ferrocenyl imine catalyst (called 4a2) was designed and synthesized, and its self-assembly catalytic polymeric brush supported on silicon (denoted as Si@PB4a2) was also fabricated by surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and characterized. The catalytic properties of monomer 4a2 in homogeneous and Si@PB4a2 in heterogeneous in Heck and Suzuki cross-coupling were investigated, respectively. They exhibited higher catalytic activity in Heck, and Suzuki coupling react [...]

by Qing Ye  , Yijen L. Wu  , Lesley M. Moley  , Parker H. Mills  , Fang-Cheng Yeh  , Haosen Zhang  , Danielle F. Eytan  , Li Liu  , T. Kevin Hitchens  and Chien Ho

Received: 07 January 2019;  Published: 29 August 2019;  doi: 10.21926/obm.transplant.1903083

Background: Cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) remains a major obstacle to long-term heart allograft survival. A number of studies show that immune mechanisms are involved in CAV. Using non-invasive cellular MRI (CMRI) to explore indicators of CAV lesions and characterize its development could provide new insights into the target immune cells that are responsible for the progression of CAV and reveal early markers of the disease before irreversible changes occur. Methods and Results: Rat heart transplant allograf [...]

by Ivan V. Maksimovich

Received: 24 July 2021;  Published: 21 October 2021;  doi: 10.21926/obm.icm.2104036

The present research is dedicated to the application of intracerebral laser PBMT for the treatment of the consequences of ischemic stroke. The effectiveness of intracerebral laser PBMT is compared to that of the conservative therapy methods. Recent studies have demonstrated a high potential of laser technology PBMT in the treatment of various ischemic lesions of the brain. A total of 836 patients who had experienced ischemic strokes of different degrees of severity in the period ranging from 6 months to 6 years pri [...]

by Rebecca MacDonald  and Anna Zumbansen

Received: 26 February 2023;  Published: 13 June 2023;  doi: 10.21926/obm.icm.2302024

Group singing as a social musical activity can be used to improve the quality of life, well-being, and overall health of people with dementia and caregivers. Online choirs have gained awareness since the COVID-19 pandemic; however, singing in an online choir is an unsatisfying experience for most choir members in the general population. In order to report on the feasibility of creating an online choir for people with dementia, we studied a successful case of such a choir. This choir began and continued online for o [...]

by Hamidreza Shamsi  , Ehsan Haghi  , Manh-Kien Tran  , Sean Walker  , Kaamran Raahemifar  and Michael Fowler

Received: 11 March 2022;  Published: 25 December 2022;  doi: 10.21926/jept.2204043

Road traffic is a significant source of air pollution that has a harmful impact on human health. To reduce the health and environmental impacts of fossil fuel consumption in the transportation sector, many countries have implemented policies to promote the deployment of electric vehicles (EVs). A vital factor to consider when designing policies to support EV use is the monetized health impacts of fossil fuel consumption. This research aims to investigate the health benefit of replacing internal combustion engine ve [...]

by Rui Wang  , Husain E. Ashkanani  , Bingyun Li  and Badie I. Morsi

Received: 01 August 2022;  Published: 13 October 2022;  doi: 10.21926/jept.2204033

A unique two-Pathways process using aqueous sodium glycinate for CO2 capture from a split flue gas stream emitted from 600 MWe post-combustion coal power plant was developed in Aspen Plus v.10. The split gas flow rate used was 44.75 ton/h and contained 0.0023 mol% SO2 and 13.33 mol% CO2. The process includes a washing unit, a CO2 absorption unit, a reverse osmosis unit, and a solvent regeneration unit or an ultrafiltration unit. The washing unit uses deionized water to completely remove SO2 and the CO2 absorption u [...]

by Christiana Chioma Efe-Onakpojeruo  , Mehdi Seraj  and Huseyin Ozdeser

Received: 11 March 2024;  Published: 26 September 2024;  doi: 10.21926/aeer.2403018

This study addresses the critical issue of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, focusing on understanding the intricate interplay between four major variables Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPC), Renewal Energy (RE), Fossil Fuel energy consumption (FF), and Patent application (PTS). This research is crucial due to the emerging negative impacts of climate change, which will create a disastrous future for human beings. It focuses on three decades from 1990 to 2020 and compares the results between the United States an [...]

by Vardan Apinyan

Received: 30 March 2023;  Published: 24 June 2023;  doi: 10.21926/rpm.2302026

This paper considers a finite-sized two-leg ladder of spin-1/2 particles with local inter-chain Ising interaction. We include the effects of an external magnetic field by incorporating a Zeeman-type coupling between the magnetic field and the spins localized on the lattice sites. To analyze the system, we utilize the transfer-matrix formalism to calculate the partition function. We compute the magnetization for different configurations by varying the system's parameters. We observe the presence 3of spontaneous magn [...]

by Le Thanh Mai Pham  , Kai Deng  , Trent R. Northen  , Steven W. Singer  , Paul D. Adams  , Blake A. Simmons  and Kenneth L. Sale

Received: 26 July 2022;  Published: 20 September 2022;  doi: 10.21926/cr.2203028

Lignin is the most abundant renewable source of aromatics on earth, and conversion of it to chemicals and fuels is needed to build an economically viable renewable biofuels industry. Biological routes to converting lignin to fuels and chemicals involve depolymerizing lignin using lignin-degrading enzymes that catalyze the breaking of ether and carbon-carbon bonds in the phenolic and non-phenolic subunits of lignin. Laccases are a crucial class of lignin-degrading enzymes and are copper-containing enzymes capable of [...]

by Jordan Ensz  and Changiz Mohiyeddini

Received: 06 March 2023;  Published: 19 September 2023;  doi: 10.21926/obm.icm.2303038

Burnout is a chronic state of exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. Medical training has been shown to leave many medical students vulnerable to burnout, which can negatively impact their health and patient care. While resilience has been associated with lower burnout, the mechanisms through which resilience reduces burnout are not well established. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether difficulties with emotion regulation mediate the relationship between resilience and burnout among medical students. [...]

by G.-Fivos Sargentis

Received: 05 February 2025;  Published: 02 April 2025;  doi: 10.21926/rpse.2502007

This study investigates the relationship between entropy and societal dynamics, with a particular focus on the origins and implications of war. By using entropy as a measure of uncertainty and inequality, the research examines societal stability through patterns of stratification and wealth distribution. Employing simplified models of various wealth distributions, the study explores their effects on social stratification and the potential for conflict. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, it delves into [...]

by Anju Khairwa

Received: 14 September 2022;  Published: 22 November 2022;  doi: 10.21926/obm.genet.2204172

Cervical carcinoma is most common in Indian women of which Rural women are predominantly affected. The most common etiological factor is human papillomavirus (HPV ). The present study aims to assess the diagnostic accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and different patterns of cervical Pap smears by comparing histological findings. The index study is a retrospective cross-sectional analytical study. The data was collected at the pathology department from May 2017 to December 2019 according to hospital ethical protoco [...]