Epidemiological characteristics of Asian children with inflammatory bowel disease at diagnosis: Insights from an Asian-Pacific multicentre registry network

BACKGROUND There remains a dearth of Asian epidemiological literature for paediatric inflammatory bowel disease(PIBD).AIM To describe the presenting features of PIBD from 7 Asia-Pacific pediatric gastroenterology centers via a central standardised electronic data platform.METHODS Clinical,endoscopic and radiologic data at diagnosis from the registry were extracted between 1^(st) January 1995 to 31^(st) December 2019.Disease phenotypic characteristics were classified as per the Paris classification system.RESULTS There was a distinct rise in new PIBD cases:Nearly half(48.6%)of the cohort was diagnosed in the most recent 5 years(2015-2019).The ratio of Crohn’s disease(CD):Ulcerative colitis(UC):IBDUnclassified was 55.9%:38.3%:5.8%.The mean age was 9.07 years with a high proportion of very early onset IBD(VEO-IBD)(29.3%)and EO-IBD(52.7%).An over-representation of the Indian/South Asian ethnic group was observed which accounted for 37.0% of the overall Singapore/Malaysia subcohort(6.8%-9.0%Indians in census).Indian/South Asian CD patients were also most likely to present with symptomatic perianal disease(P=0.003).CD patients presented with significantly more constitutional symptoms(fever,anorexia,malaise/fatigue and muscle-wasting)than UC and higher inflammatory indices(higher C-reactive protein and lower albumin levels).CONCLUSION We observed a high incidence of VEO-IBD and an over-representation of the Indian ethnicity.South Asian CD patients were more likely to have symptomatic perianal disease.

Towards optimum Franson interference recurrence in mode-locked singly-filtered biphoton frequency combs

Mode-locked biphoton frequency combs exhibit multiple discrete comblike temporal correlations from the Fourier transform of its phase-coherent frequency spectrum.Both temporal correlation and Franson interferometry are valuable tools for analyzing the joint properties of biphoton frequency combs,and the latter has proven to be essential for testing the fundamental quantum nature,the time-energy entanglement distribution,and the large-alphabet quantum key distributions.However,the Franson recurrence interference visibility in biphoton frequency combs unavoidably experiences a falloff that deteriorates the quality of time-energy entanglement and channel capacity for longer cavity round trips.In this paper,we provide a new method to address this problem towards optimum Franson interference recurrence.We first observe mode-locked temporal oscillations in a5.03 GHz free-spectral range singly filtered biphoton frequency comb using only commercial detectors.Then,we observe similar falloff trend of time-energy entanglement in 15.15 GHz and 5.03 GHz free-spectral range singly filtered biphoton frequency combs,whereas,the optimum central time-bin accidental-subtracted visibility over 97%for both cavities.Here,we find that by increasing the cavity finesse F,we can enhance the detection probability in temporal correlations and towards optimum Franson interference recurrence in our singly filtered biphoton frequency combs.For the first time,via a higher cavity finesse F of 45.92 with a 15.11 GHz free-spectral range singly filtered biphoton frequency comb,we present an experimental≈3.13-fold improvement of the Franson visibility compared to the Franson visibility with a cavity finesse F of 11.14 at the sixth time bin.Near optimum Franson interference recurrence and a time-bin Schmidt number near 16 effective modes in similar free-spectral range cavity are predicted with a finesse F of 200.Our configuration is versatile and robust against changes in cavity parameters that can be designed for various quantum applications,such as high-dimensional time-energy entanglement distributions,high-dimensional quantum key distributions,and wavelength-multiplexed quantum networks.