Publications by authors named "Cheng-Wei Huang"

Salt stress has a detrimental impact on crop yield and survival rates, which salt-tolerant cultivars can resist through numerous adaptive mechanisms. Most models of salt stress impacts on productivity and water use employ empirical or simplified schemes to represent salt-adaptive traits. However, with an increased understanding of these physiological tolerance mechanisms and emergent measurement techniques for monitoring key salinity dynamics, the potential for developing mechanistic agrohydrological models of the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum has grown.

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Habituation to painful stimuli reflects an endogenous pain alleviation mechanism, and reduced pain habituation has been demonstrated in many chronic pain conditions. In ethology, animals exhibit reduced fear responses while habituating to repeated threatening stimuli. It remains unclear whether pain habituation in humans involves a fear reduction mechanism.

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Top badminton players must carefully schedule tournaments to perform well and improve their rankings. This study examines how players plan their tournament participation and whether their scheduling strategies affect their rankings and performance, especially during Olympic and non-Olympic years. Data were extracted from the Badminton World Federation (BWF) ranking system for the top 50 men's and women's singles players from May 2014 to May 2019.

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Rationale: Chylothorax is a rare adverse effect that is associated with dasatinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor administered for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) treatment. Most reported cases have described standard dosing. In this case report, we described a 43-year-old male patient with CML who developed chylothorax after 4 years of low-dose dasatinib therapy.

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Evidence indicates that neurodegenerative diseases spread through distinct brain networks. For Parkinson's disease (PD), somatosensory abnormalities may accompany motor dysfunction in early disease stages when dopaminergic degeneration is limited to the basal ganglia. It remains unclear whether, based on the network-spread account, these abnormalities emanated from aberrant functional connectivity with the basal ganglia, and whether interventions normalizing this connectivity could reverse these abnormalities.

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Article Synopsis
  • * In a study involving healthy participants, reducing anticipatory anxiety and increasing pleasantness were shown to lessen pain modulation linked to negative and positive expectations, respectively.
  • * Brain imaging revealed that anxiety affects the processing of negative expectations, while positive expectations rely on emotional brain areas, highlighting the importance of emotions in shaping pain experiences.
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Background: The effectiveness and safety of mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists (MRA) in acute heart failure (HF) is uncertain. We sought to describe the prescription of spironolactone during acute HF and whether early treatment is effective and safe in a real-world setting.

Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study of adult (≥18 years) nonpregnant patients hospitalized with new-onset HF with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF, defined by ejection fraction ≤40%) within 15 Kaiser Permanente Southern California medical centers between 2016 and 2021.

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Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a chronic and progressive interstitial lung disease; its cause is unknown, and it leads to notable health problems. Currently, only two drugs are recommended for IPF treatment. Although these drugs can mitigate lung function decline, neither can improve nor stabilize IPF or the symptoms perceived by patients.

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Transitional care management (TCM) services after hospital discharge are critical for continuity of care, and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to telehealth modes of delivery. This study examined the shift from face-to-face to telehealth care around the start of the pandemic (April-July 2020) compared with the same months in 2019 and 2021 and the corresponding 30-day readmission rates. We compared the rates of face-to-face and telehealth TCM as well as face-to-face and telehealth non-TCM services and observed a dramatic shift to telehealth in 2020 with a slight drop-off in 2021.

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With the aging population and the popularity of implant prostheses, an increasing number of postmenopausal osteoporosis (PMOP) patients require implant restorations; however, poor bone condition affects the long-term stability of implant prostheses. This study aimed to investigate the therapeutic effect of quercetin (QR) compared with alendronate (ALN), the primary treatment for PMOP, on mandibular osteoporosis (OP) induced by ovariectomy (OVX) in female rats. Adult female rats were treated with QR (50 mg/kg/day), ALN (6.

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Article Synopsis
  • In a study examining newly diagnosed heart failure patients, researchers found that coronary artery disease (CAD) testing is not commonly used, despite its potential benefits.
  • The study analyzed data from 2729 hospitalized patients with HFrEF and found that those who underwent CAD testing had a significantly lower risk of hospital readmission or death over a follow-up period.
  • However, the timing of the testing (early vs. late) did not influence the outcomes, suggesting that testing within 90 days of hospitalization is valuable regardless of when it occurs.
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Peri-implantitis is one of the most prevalent and impactful complications of dental implant prostheses. This study aimed to identify area focuses and emerging trends in peri-implantitis research. A literature search was conducted in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC), employing a bibliometric approach for data evaluation.

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  • Researchers developed the COVID Hospitalized Patient Deterioration Index (COVID-HDI) to better predict serious health declines in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, improving on an existing model not tailored for respiratory issues related to the virus.
  • The study involved analyzing data from COVID patients at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, applying machine learning techniques and various predictors to create an effective model for identifying high-risk patients.
  • With a high accuracy rate (0.83) and the ability to classify 74% of patients as low-risk during hospitalization, COVID-HDI aids in clinical decisions regarding patient discharge and care escalation.
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  • * A study reviewed hospitalization data from Kaiser Permanente Southern California between January 2021 and August 2023 to analyze the occurrence of DKA related to empagliflozin usage among 21,630 aHF cases.
  • * Results showed that only 0.1% of patients using empagliflozin developed DKA, similar to the rate in non-users, suggesting that empagliflozin may be a safe option during hospitalizations for aHF.
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Cardiac arrest poses a large public health burden. Acute kidney injury (AKI) is an adverse marker in survivors of cardiac arrest following the return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) after successful cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Conversely, recovery of kidney function from AKI is a predictor of favorable neurological outcomes and hospital discharge.

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Background: Kidney fibrosis is the final manifestation of chronic kidney disease, a condition mainly caused by diabetic nephropathy. Persistent tissue damage leads to chronic inflammation and excessive deposition of extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is involved in a variety of tissue fibrosis and is a process during which epithelial cells transform into mesenchymal-like cells and lose their epithelial functionality and characteristics Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP4) is widely expressed in tissues, especially those of the kidney and small intestine.

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Differentiation of cardiac fibroblasts into myofibroblasts is a critical event in the progression of cardiac fibrosis that causes pathological cardiac remodeling. Cardiac fibrosis is a hallmark of heart disease and is associated with a stiff myocardium and heart failure. This study investigated the effect of caffeic acid ethanolamide (CAEA), a novel caffeic acid derivative, on cardiac remodeling.

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Background/aim: The effect of pelvic neoadjuvant radiotherapy (nRT) for stage M1a rectal adenocarcinoma patients treated with systemic therapy followed by proctectomy and metastasectomy was scarcely investigated in the literatures.

Patients And Methods: The eligible rectal cancer patients diagnosed between 2011-2019 were identified via the Taiwan Cancer Registry. In the primary analysis, we used propensity score weighting to balance observable potential confounders and compared the hazard ratio (HR) of death for the nRT group vs.

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Background: Cognitive impairment is prevalent in patients hospitalized for heart failure (HF). We aimed to generate further evidence on the value of dementia screening in hospitalized HF patients by examining whether and when dementia would be an independent risk factor for 30-day readmission while modeling permutations of known risk factors such as patient demographics, disease burden, prior utilization, and index hospitalization characteristics.

Methods And Results: A retrospective cohort study was employed, consisting of 26,128 patients (2,075 or 7.

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