Objectives To investigate the relationship between metabolically healthy obesity and cardiovascular disease risk in Taiwanese individuals. Methods Taiwanese individuals were recruited from a nationwide, representative community-based prospective cohort study and classified according to body mass index as follows: normal weight (18.5–23.9 kilogram (kg)/meter(m)2) and obesity/overweight (≥24 kg/m2). Participants without diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia and who did not meet the metabolic syndrome without waist circumference criteria were considered metabolically healthy. The study end points were cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality. Multivariable adjusted hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals were obtained from a Cox regression analysis. Results Among 5 358 subjects (mean [standard deviation] age, 44.5 [15.3] years; women, 48.2%), 1 479 were metabolically healthy with normal weight and 491 were metabolically healthy with obesity. The prevalence of metabolically healthy obesity/overweight was 8.6% in the Taiwanese general population, which included individuals who were >20 years old, not pregnant, and did not have CVD (n = 5,719). In the median follow-up period of 13.7 years, 439 cardiovascular disease events occurred overall and 24 in the metabolically healthy obesity group. Compared with the reference group, the metabolically healthy obesity group had a significantly higher cardiovascular disease risk (adjusted hazard ratio: 1.74, 95% confidence interval: 1.02, 2.99). Conclusions Individuals with metabolically healthy obesity have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and require aggressive body weight control for cardiovascular disease control.

This article describes a theoretical model and computer program for calculating the pressure–volume ( PV ) diagram and the efficiency of an oil-injected screw compressor. The proposed model considers the mass and energy conservation laws, the heat transfer between air and oil, the leakages through various paths, and the discharges of air and oil. The proposed program, which uses seven empirical constants to account for the difference between the flow and the heat-transfer rates in the screw compressor and those estimated by available correlations, solves for the efficiency and the pressure curve of the compressed air. A systematic methodology for the determination of the seven empirical constants is presented in this article. Optimization is carried out to determine the seven empirical constants. With the empirical constants, which are determined with four sets of experiments, the maximum difference between the calculated and measured results in the training process, the verification process and the total process is 2.0 per cent for the volumetric and isentropic efficiencies and 5 per cent for the pressure curve. In the discharge process, the pressure in the compression chamber is noted to be affected by the area of the outlet port and the pressure in the neighbouring chambers.

Background: To investigate the standardized incidence ratios (SIR) of stroke in patients with head and neck cancer and their relationship to radiotherapy. Methods: Patients with head and neck cancer ages 20–85 years were enrolled from 2007 to 2016 using the Taiwan Cancer Registry. The study endpoint was fatal and non-fatal ischemic stroke, ascertained by the National Health Insurance Research Database. Age- and sex-adjusted SIRs, categorized by 10-year age standardization, were used to compare the patients with head and neck cancer with a randomly selected 2,000,000 general population. We compared the risk of stroke in patients with head and neck cancer who received radiotherapy or surgery alone. Multivariable adjusted hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were obtained from Cox regression analysis with competing risk. Results: Among 41,266 patients (mean age, 54.1 years; men, 90.6%) in the median follow-up period of 3.9 years, 1,407 strokes occurred. Compared with the general population, the overall SIR of stroke was 1.37 (95% CI, 1.30–1.44) in patients with head and neck cancer. In patients with head and neck cancer, the fully adjusted HR of stroke in those who received radiotherapy was 0.96 (95% CI, 0.83–1.10), compared with those who received surgery alone. Conclusions: Patients with head and neck cancer had a higher risk of fatal or non-fatal ischemic stroke. The risk of stroke was not higher in patients initially treated with radiotherapy. Impact: Oncologists should emphasize stroke prevention in all patients with head and neck cancer, not only in those who received radiotherapy.