This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Despite the persistent belief that Asians are the "model minority" there is accumulating evidence of health concerns within Asian subgroups. In this study, we implemented a cross-sectional participatory community health assessment in an urban city in Massachusetts, to understand differences and similarities in demographics, health and healthcare access in Chinese and Vietnamese adults. We gathered qualitative data from community stakeholders to inform the development of a community health assessment tool. The tool elicited information on healthcare access, health status, behavioral health and chronic disease history and treatment. Healthcare access issues and poor health status, particularly among Chinese participants and mental health symptomotology in both groups were areas of concern. These findings revealed important health concerns in two Asian ethnic groups. Studies are needed to better understand these concerns and inform programs and policies to improve health outcomes in these Asian ethnic groups.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Lercanidipine is as effective as amlodipine in the reduction and stabilization of BP in hypertensive patients after a stroke, and presents some advantages in terms of safety. Larger studies are necessary to further evaluate these preliminary findings.

NT-ProBNP is a high value cardiac biomarker and widely applies in many cardiovascular diseases. The evaluation of concentration of NT-ProBNP needs the concern about age, gender, obesity and especially we need each cut-off point for each cause of cardiovascular disease in evaluation and clinical application. Because NT-ProBNP is a new cardiac marker and has been researched in 5 recent years, the cut-off of NT-ProBNP is still being studied for the clinical application in cardiovascular diseases. Only the cut-off of NT-ProBNP in diagnosis heart failure was guided by European Society of Cardiology. The meaning of introduce cut-off value of value plays an role as pilot study for the other relate study and brings the NT-ProBNP closely approach to clinical application.