Effectiveness of Oral Health Education Program on Prevention of Periodontal Disease in Japanese Pregnant Women

The prevalence of periodontal disease among pregnant women increases with gestational age. Therefore, oral health education in the early stage of pregnancy should prevent periodontal disease and decrease the risk of an adverse pregnancy outcome such as preterm delivery and low birth weight. However, there has been no study on oral health care intervention for prevention of periodontal disease during pregnancy. The purpose of this study was to examine the efficiency of an oral health education program on periodontal disease among Japanese low-risk pregnant women. A total of 207 pregnant women before 20 weeks of gestation were recruited. The first 131 of them were assigned to the control group and the remaining 76 to the experimental group. The experiment participants received an oral health education program including the toothpick brushing method in their early stage of pregnancy. Improvement of the self-assessment score of periodontal symptoms was used as a binary outcome variable. A logistic regression analysis indicated that the intervention (OR = 3.83) and proficiency of the toothpick brushing method (OR = 24.93) were statistically significant predictors of the outcome in the late stage of pregnancy. The positive outcome appeared after practice of the toothpick method brushing for 20 or more weeks, and was associated with the decrease in the log-transformed proportion of the count of Candida species in salivary microbiota (p = 0.026).

Enhancement of current density using effective membranes electrode assemblies for water electrolyser system

The goal of this study was to develop and design a composite proton exchange membrane（PEM） and membrane electrode assembly（MEA） that are suitable for the PEM based water electrolysis system. In particular,it focuses on the development of sulphonated polyether ether ketone（SPEEK） based membranes and caesium salt of silico-tungstic acid（Cs Si WA） matrix compared with one of the transition metal oxides such as titanium dioxide（TiO2）, silicon dioxide（SiO2） and zirconium dioxide（ZrO2）. The resultant membranes have been characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, ion exchange capacity（IEC）, water uptake and atomic force microscopy. Comparative studies on the performance of MEAs were also conducted utilizing impregnation-reduction and conventional brush coating methods. The PEM electrolysis performance of SPEEK-Cs Si WA-ZrO2 composite membrane was more superior than that of other membranes involved in this study. Electrochemical characterization shows that a maximum current density of 1.4 A/cm^2 was achieved at 60 °C, explained by an increased concentration of protonic sites available at the interface.

An Anti-aliasing Algorithm Suitable to Map Publishing Symbol

On the basis of analysis of various algorithms, an anti-aliasing algorithm called brush method was presented, which is suitable to map publishing symbol. After introducing the basic principle and implementation of brush method in detail, the result and efficiency were evaluated through experiments.