OBJECTIVE -To determine the efficacy of oolong tea for lowering plasma glucose in type 2 diabetic patients in Miaoli, Taiwan. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS-A total of 20 free-living subjects who had type 2 diabetes and took hyperglycemic drugs as prescribed were enrolled in the present study. Subjects consumed oolong tea (1,500 ml) or water for 30 days each in a randomized crossover design. Tea was not consumed for 14 days prior to treatments.RESULTS -Relative to initial concentrations, oolong tea markedly lowered concentrations of plasma glucose (from 229 Ϯ 53.9 to 162.2 Ϯ 29.7 mg/dl, P Ͻ 0.001) and fructosamine (from 409.9 Ϯ 96.1 to 323.3 Ϯ 56.4 mol/l, P Ͻ 0.01), whereas the water control group had not changed (208.7 Ϯ 61.0 vs. 232.3 Ϯ 63.1 mg/dl for glucose and from 368.4 Ϯ 85.0 to 340.0 Ϯ 76.1 mol/l for fructosamine).CONCLUSIONS -Oolong tea may be an effective adjunct to oral hypoglycemic agents in the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Care 26:1714 -1718, 2003R ecently, consumption of tea has become even more popular in Taiwan, Japan, and China. Consumption of tea leaves in Taiwan increased 2.2 times during last 20 years (1). Tea consumption may have an impact on plasma glucose concentrations. The concept was supported by in vivo studies of tea fed to diabetic rodents (2-4) and by in vitro studies where tea components were incubated with brush border membrane vesicles of rabbit small intestine (5).Caffeine is one of the most important components in tea. There are some studies examining caffeine, for example, in healthy volunteers (6,7), in type 1 diabetes (8 -10), and in type 2 diabetes (11). However, the efficacy of tea in lowering plasma glucose concentrations in humans was limited.There are three types of tea: green, oolong, and black. They are produced from a single plant species, but they are distinguished by the processing technique. Oolong tea is partially fermented during processing, whereas green tea is not fermented, and black tea is fully fermented (12).In general, the amount of the polymerized polyphenols is determined by the level of the fermentation. The degree of fermentation of oolong tea leaves from Taiwan is very low because of the preparation method. In contrast, oolong tea leaves from China contained an especially large amount of polymerized polyphenols, and fermentation was strong (13). For these reasons, oolong tea from China was used in this study.The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of oolong tea to lower plasma glucose concentrations in subjects with type 2 diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS -The ethical committee of Providence University, an institutional review board, approved the study, and subjects gave informed consent. A total of 10 men and 10 women (average age 61.2 years, duration of diabetes 4.8 years) were recruited through their physicians at Chorng Kuang Hospital, Miaoli, Taiwan.The study used a crossover design; sex-matched subjects were randomly assigned to treatment order. Subjects were divided into two groups at random. The washout period was set ...

Conventional methods for identifying gastroenteritis pathogens are time consuming, more likely to result in a false-negative, rely on personnel with diagnostic expertise, and are dependent on the specimen status. Alternatively, molecular diagnostic methods permit the rapid, simultaneous detection of multiple pathogens with high sensitivity and specificity. The present study compared conventional methods with the Luminex xTAG Gastrointestinal Pathogen Panel (xTAG GPP) for the diagnosis of infectious gastroenteritis in northern Taiwan. From July 2015 to April 2016, 217 clinical fecal samples were collected from patients with suspected infectious gastroenteritis. All specimens were tested using conventional diagnostic techniques following physicians’ orders as well as with the xTAG GPP. The multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) approach detected significantly more positive samples with bacterial, viral, and/or parasitic infections as compared to conventional analysis (55.8% vs 40.1%, respectively; P < .001). Moreover, multiplex PCR could detect Escherichia coli O157, enterotoxigenic E coli, Shiga-like toxin-producing E coli, Cryptosporidium, and Giardia, which were undetectable by conventional methods. Furthermore, 48 pathogens in 23 patients (10.6%) with coinfections were identified only using the multiplex PCR approach. Of which, 82.6% were from pediatric patients. Because the detection rates using multiplex PCR are higher than conventional methods, and some pediatric pathogens could only be detected by multiplex PCR, this approach may be useful in rapidly diagnosing diarrheal disease in children and facilitating treatment initiation. Further studies are necessary to determine if multiplex PCR improves patient outcomes and reduces costs.

In the title compound, C16H12BrN3O4, the furan-2(5H)-one ring forms a dihedral angle of 33.19 (9)° with the 4-bromo­benzene unit and is nearly perpendicular to the 4-nitro­benzene segment, making a dihedral angle of 89.93 (10)°. In the crystal, N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules, generating an infinite chain along [010]. The chains are linked into a three-dimensional network by C—H⋯O, C—H⋯π and π–π contacts [centroid–centroid separation = 3.805 (2) Å].

In this paper, a novel type of feed-forward neural network with a simple structure is proposed and investigated for pattern classification. Because the novel type of forward neural network?s parameter setting is mirrored with those of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), it is termed the mirror extreme learning machine (MELM). For the MELM, the input weights are determined by the pseudoinverse method analytically, while the output weights are generated randomly, which are completely different from the conventional ELM. Besides, a growing method is adopted to obtain the optimal hidden-layer structure. Finally, to evaluate the performance of the proposed MELM, abundant comparative experiments based on different real-world classification datasets are performed. Experimental results validate the high classification accuracy and good generalization performance of the proposed neural network with a simple structure in pattern classification.