No abstract

Consistent with transitioning women's perceived memory difficulties, perimenopause was associated with a decrement in cognitive performance, characterized by women not being able to learn as well as they had during premenopause. Improvement rebounded to premenopausal levels in postmenopause, suggesting that menopause transition-related cognitive difficulties may be time-limited. Hormone initiation prior to the final menstrual period had a beneficial effect whereas initiation after the final menstrual period had a detrimental effect on cognitive performance.

Study design: Cross-sectional study. Objective: To analyze the predictors of severe neurogenic bowel dysfunction (NBD) in persons with spinal cord injury (SCI). Setting: The Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Taiwan. Methods: Two questionnairesFthe NBD score and the Beck Depression Inventory second editionFwere sent to 232 persons with SCI by mail. The demographic factors and injury-related factors were recorded to evaluate any relationships with severe NBD. The associations between the severity of NBD and psychological condition were also measured. Results: In all, 39.4% of the respondents suffered from severe NBD. Multiple logistic regression analysis showed that those with a cervical injury (odds ratios (OR) ¼ 10.5, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.6-67.7) or a thoracic injury (OR ¼ 7.1, 95% CI 1.2-40.3) had a higher risk of severe NBD than those with a lumbar injury. Persons with American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) A had a 12.8-fold higher risk of severe NBD than persons with ASIA D (OR ¼ 12.8, 95% CI 3.3-50.1). Longer duration of injury (X10 years) was another risk factor of severe NBD. Moderate-to-severe depression was associated with reduced bowel function. Conclusions: This study showed that high level of cord lesion, completeness of cord injury and longer duration of injury (X10 years) could predict the severity of NBD in patients with SCI.

The concept of using variable geometry to alter the characteristics of turbomachinery has been in existence for many years. Advanced gas turbine engines, especially for aeronautical and naval applications, will extensively use variable geometry turbines and, therefore, a tool must exist that is capable of evaluating the performance of such turbines right from the conceptual stage. With this in mind, a new method based on the improved flow model originally proposed by Wang is presented. The improvements resolve two aspects of the flow model that restrict its widely used possibility: that is, the flow model can be applied only to turbines that work under a subcritical condition and it cannot be applied to variable geometry turbines. After these improvements, the new method can be applied to both single-stage turbines and multi-stage turbines with variable geometry used in any stage. To prove this, two examples are presented in this article. One example is a single-stage variable geometry turbine; the predicted results are examined against the experimental results and a satisfactory conformity is obtained. The good agreement shows that the new method is capable of predicting the performance of variable geometry turbine accurately. The other example is a four-stage turbine with variable geometry used in the first stage. All the results show that the ‘bottom-up’ method is an effective way to predict the performance of variable geometry turbine and it can be used extensively.