Emotional distress of FCs was the most important factor determining the overall and negative aspects of FCs' QOL, whereas various environmental factors were associated with positive coping. Appropriate support programs directed at these factors are needed to maintain and improve FCs' QOL.

Lack of family support is associated with and may be a cause of diminished resilience. And more concern should be paid to FCs to improve FCs' health and emotional status. Education programs might be effective for improving caregivers' resilience. Further research with supportive interventions is indicated.

BaTiO 3 ( BTO )/ SrTiO 3 ( STO ) artificial superlattices have been made on MgO (100) substrates. The periodicity of the BTO/STO layers in the superlattice was varied from one-unit cell to 125-unit cell thickness. The dielectric constant and its nonlinearity (or voltage tunability) showed similar behavior as the periodicity was varied. The voltage tunability of the superlattice increased with decreasing stacking periodicity of the BTO/STO within the critical thickness. Similarly, the lattice distortion, i.e., the ratio of the lattice parameter along surface normal to parallel, of the BTO and STO layers increased with decreasing the periodicity. Remarkable enhancement of the voltage tunability has been achieved. The superlattice exhibited large voltage tunability (94%, the highest value to date) at the periodicity of BTO2-unit cell/STO2-unit cell at which the maximum lattice distortion of each layer was obtained. This suggests that the nonlinear dielectric property of the superlattice is closely related with the lattice distortion of the individual layers.

We developed the new OPS, without clinician's survival estimates but including a new prognostic factor (LDH). This new instrument demonstrated accurate prediction of the 3-week survival. The OPS had acceptable accuracy in this study population (training set). Further validation is required on an independent population (testing set).

Enhancement of dielectric properties has been demonstrated in BaTiO3 (BTO)/SrTiO3 (STO) strained artificial lattice. Large variation of lattice distortion in the consisting BTO and STO layers was achieved by varying a stacking sequence of BTO and STO layers. From this strain manipulation, it is found that BTO and STO lattices have a dielectric constant sensitively influenced by the lattice distortion and, more importantly, maximum dielectric constant at a certain degree of lattice distortion. An appropriate degree of lattice distortions of the consisting layers is needed to obtain the large dielectric constant and its nonlinearity of the artificial lattice. The artificial lattice exhibited the large dielectric constant (1230) and extremely large nonlinearity (94%) at the periodicity of BTO2 unit cell/STO2 unit cell. These results suggest that the strain is a macroscopically important factor to influence the dielectric properties and can be manipulated via oxide artificial lattice to obtain large dielectric constant and its nonlinearity.