There are about 10560 clinical studies being (or have been) conducted in Taiwan. The country of the clinical trial is determined by the location of where the clinical research is being studied. Most studies are often held in multiple locations & countries.
The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of STA-1 vs placebo as an add-on treatment to donepezil in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's Disease (AD).
Although a lot of evidence and guidelines recommend that patients have cardiac rehabilitation, in reality, the actual rate cardiac patients entering cardiac rehabilitation program is low, usually less than one third. One of the main hindrances of patients participating cardiac rehabilitation program is insufficient number of medical institutions that can provide rehabilitation services. Patients usually cannot perform exercise program under medical professionals monitoring without having to go far. This spatial and temporal difficulty led to the low rate of patients taking cardiac rehabilitation program. The risk of patients to do exercise is higher than healthy adult. This project will develop the intelligent portable remote care system for cardiopulmonary exercise to provide an instant ECG monitoring service through the integration of front-end wireless ECG measuring devices, expert system, and back-end tele-care platform. Many patients are inconvenient to go to large hospital regularly for cardiac rehabilitation training. This project will help them to exercise at home after once or twice rehabilitation training in clinic for each month and the medical professional will supervise remotely to see how much exercise they did. For that reason the project can help to break through spatial and temporal difficulty of having cardiac rehabilitation, so that cardiac rehabilitation can be help more patients. Patients have this tele-care system while they are doing exercise at home, the built-in heart rate and cardiac rhythm warning function will remind them to take a break, even to take medical treatment. More importantly, the ECG signal can be almost immediately (real time) uploaded by network to the chest pain unit of hospital. The cardiology expert will be aware of the warning at the first moment. This is an important protection to patients' safety of doing rehabilitation sports at home. This randomized control trial will recruit 80 patients who had myocardial infarction within 6 weeks, and are not able to attend a hospital based cardiac rehabilitation program regularly. All patient will undergo a three-month home exercise program under the instruction provided by the physiatrists and physiotherapists. Forty of them (the remote-care group) will use the intelligent portable remote care system for cardiopulmonary exercise to monitor their exercise intensity and cardiac rhythm during exercise. The other 40 patients (the control group) undertake the exercise program at home without using the remote care system. The efficacy and safety of exercise program will be compared between the two groups.
We use the three-dimensional image software reconstruct MRI. The propose of this research purposes as follows: 1. 3D reconstructed image processing from MRI to realize the short term nervous system response after dynamic acupuncture stimulation.2. Realizing the corresponding area in the brain caused by electroacupuncture. 3. Realizing the connection between electroacupuncture stimulation and brain physics, chemistry, and physiology. The implement the two-dimentional image into three-dimensional image by Amira software, in order to find out the difference of the pre-and post- response of the nervous system. In addition, we will use "describe statistics" and "Paired t-test" statistical analysis, compare the statistical difference of blood oxygen concentration.
Introduction Patients with stroke may be silent aspirators or at risk for laryngeal penetration or aspiration because of abnormal oropharyngeal functioning and thus are at risk for aspiration pneumonia and its serious effects. By providing identification of the components of the abnormal swallow, and comparing swallowing across tasks, the investigators may avoid aspiration and can instruct patients on preventative or compensatory swallowing techniques. Materials and methods 1. Oral examination-A neurologist and speech pathologist examine the patient's swallowing function. The patient is interviewed about difficulties with food intake, chewing and swallowing during meals. 2. Ultrasound examination-Ultrasound creates image of areas inside the body using sound waves. With the patient in a sitting position, a 3/4-inch transducer (device for transmitting and receiving sound waves) is placed under the chin to visualize epiglottis movements during swallowing. 3. Modified barium swallow-While standing or sitting, the patient swallows 1/2 teaspoon of flavored barium (a radioactive substance) six times (a total of 3 teaspoons), while the tongue and pharynx (tube leading from the mouth to the esophagus) are scanned and videotaped at the same time epiglottis movement will be trace with ultrasound. The barium is given in three consistencies-thin, medium and thick (pudding-like). The investigators will study the oral, pharyngeal and upper esophageal phases of swallow using videofluoroscopy and correlate with ultrasound tracing of epiglottis movement in patients with stroke conditions. Most of the previous studies of swallowing have utilized diagnostic imaging technique to provide a complete swallowing assessment, but limited capabilities for screening large population of patients. INCLUSION CRITERIA: The Stroke Center inpatients and outpatients with known or suspected dysphagia can be included for study as well as patients who are admitted specifically for this protocol. (Difficulty swallowing food or pills,changed swallowing ability,coughing or choking when eating, shortness of breath during swallowing, food backing up into the mouth or nasal passage, fever or voice changes after swallowing, pain when swallowing, unexplained loss of weight. EXCLUSION CRITERIA: Patients who are severely demented or severely compromised will be excluded if they do not have sufficient cognitive ability to follow directions. Non-ambulatory patients will be excluded if they cannot be braced or supported within the fluoroscopy unit. Highly agitated individuals will also be excluded if they are unable to remain confined in the equipment. Analytic Methods The Student t test will be used to analyze the difference in epiglottis movements during swallowing amongst different phases. Levene's test for equality of variances will be applied to examine the variability of epiglottis movements during swallowing between the groups. All statistical analysis will be performed with SPSS.
National Taiwan University Hospital is the leading center for care of patients with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). The predictable factors associated with outcomes are still lacking in patients with the ECMO support. The aim of this study is to collect the electrical signals stored in the monitor of intensive care units (ICUs), which are analyzed by the bio-informatics software. The pre-, peri-, and post-ECMO heart rate variability, including linear and non-linear analysis is calculated to address the association with outcomes of patients with ECMO. In addition, we collected the demographics, body temperature, respiratory rate, and blood pressure to investigate the causes of heart rate variability.
Androgenic alopecia, the common form of hair loss is a highly heritable disorder of considerable social significance affecting around 40% of adult men and women. A variety of genetic and environmental factors are likely to play a role in androgenetic alopecia. Genetic variants in the human androgen receptor gene (AR) have been reported to be associated with AGA in Caucasians. Other genes involved with hair loss also have been found. One of them being a gene on chromosome 3 (3q26). A recent genome-wide association study in 296 individuals with male-pattern baldness and 347 controls had carried out and five SNPs on chromosome 20p11 were found to be highly significant association for AGA (rs2180439 combined P = 2.7 x 10(-15)). No interaction was detected with the X-chromosomal androgen receptor locus, suggesting that the 20p11 locus has a role in a yet-to-be-identified androgen-independent pathway. The total number of evaluated patients with androgenic alopecia will be at least 300. All patients will be further grouped as good responders or poor responders to conventional medications, such as topical minoxidil and systemic finasteride. Candidate genes potentially involved in gout and its treatment response will be selected from the published literatures; specifically, two resources of candidate genes will be selected: (i) genes which are known to directly link with androgenic alopecia, and (ii) genes are potentially implicated in particular pathways of androgen/estrogen receptors, metabolism and downstream signals, and genes involved in anti-oxidants or hair growth. The SNP genotyping will be performed by MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometry. Data analysis will be performed by comparing SNPs allele frequency between good responder and poor responder to conventional medications of patients with androgenic alopecia and further comparing to the allele frequency of SNPs in healthy controls. A functional study will also be done to prove the genetic association.
Heart failure is a major health problem worldwide. Optimal treatment of this disabling and fatal condition may require functional characterization of the failed left ventricle (LV) and its interaction with the arterial system. Part of the physiological significance of the ventriculo-arterial coupling has been studied experimentally and clinically using the framework of the ratio of effective arterial elastance (Ea) to end-systolic elastance (Ees), with limited clinical applications. From central ascending aorta to terminal arterioles, every segment of the arterial tree contributes to the arterial loads that interact and impact LV performance in both systole and diastole, leads to atrial and ventricular remodeling and hypertrophy, and results in the development of heart failure. On the other hand, the ventricular systole is a complex coordination of multi-directional myocardial fibers involving longitudinal contraction, circumferential shortening, radial thickening, twist, and torsion, the so-called LV deformations. The purposes of the present study are to investigate the relationship between different components of hemodynamic load or arterial abnormalities and different components of LV myocardial deformations or regional LV function, the modulating effects of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) on the ventriculo-arterial coupling, and the therapeutic effects of aliskiren on the components of hemodynamic load and LV myocardial deformations and their couplings. The investigators will also investigate whether the ventriculo-arterial coupling, EPCs, and add-on therapy of aliskiren predict cardiovascular outcomes.
The purposes of this study are: 1. To estimate the prevalence of extended spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL) and/or AmpC among Enterobacteriaceae which cause community-onset urinary tract infections (UTIs) 2. To collect the background, risk factors and clinical outcome of patients with community-acquired uropathogenic condition related to Enterobacteriaceae (both ESBL, AmpC- and non ESBL and/or AmpC producing) after receive different antibiotic regimens. 3. To develop a scoring system to early identify patients at risk of being infected with ESBL- and/or AmpC-producing Enterobacteriaceae by comparing the risk factors for community-onset UTIs caused by ESBL- and/or AmpC-positive against non ESBL -and/or AmpC Enterobacteriaceae 4. To demonstrate the efficacy and safety of ertapenem for the empiric treatment of community-onset UTIs in patients at risk for ESBL- and/or AmpC-producing organism. The study hypothesis (i) Patients infected with community-acquired uropathogenic ESBL- and/or AmpC-producing Enterobacteriaceae who receive regimens other than carbapenems have a worse outcome. (ii) There are certain risk factors predicting the acquisition of community-onset UTIs caused by ESBL- and/or AmpC-producing Enterobacteriaceae. (iii) The use of ertapenem is an effective and safe empirical therapy compared with other agents for community-onset UTIs caused by ESBL- and/or AmpC-producing Enterobacteriaceae.
The purpose of the study is to compare the quality of dying and death of terminal cancer patients from the perspectives of medical staff and main care giver (family). The hypothesis is that their view points will be different.
To study the genomics with cell cycle and lymphocyte differentiation in disease, remission and relapse of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Then correlate these data with age, white cell count, cytogenetic changes, response to the chemotherapy and prognosis.