Costs of dementia with lewy bodies: A Chinese multicenter cross-sectional study.

INTRODUCTION: Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) significantly increases the economic burden on caregivers and society, but few studies have focused on the costs. This study aims to evaluate the current economic costs of DLB and its related factors. METHODS: A total of 193 patients diagnosed with probable DLB were consecutively enrolled from 6 memory clinics between August 2017 to July 2021. Data were collected from August to December of 2021, patients' per capita annual economic costs related to DLB in the year preceding the interview were evaluated, and factors related to the costs were assessed using regression analysis. RESULTS: Patients with DLB led to per capita annual total costs of US $21,378.3 in 2021, with direct medical costs, direct non-medical costs and indirect costs of US $3471.4, US $3946.4 and US $13,960.5, respectively, accounting for 16.2%, 18.5% and 65.3%, of total costs. Factors related to the costs of DLB showed that impairments in activities of daily living (ADL) and caregivers' subjective burden had a greater impact on the total, direct medical and indirect costs. CONCLUSION: The economic burden of DLB in China is huge, and indirect costs account for the largest proportion, serious impairment of the ADL and the subjective burden of caregivers, which possibly has a greater effect on costs. The substantial contributions made by family members and other unpaid caregivers of DLB should be fully recognized in strategic policy discussions and in case-level planning and assessments.

Crowd Sensing-Enabling Security Service Recommendation for Social Fog Computing Systems.

Fog computing, shifting intelligence and resources from the remote cloud to edge networks, has the potential of providing low-latency for the communication from sensing data sources to users. For the objects from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the cloud, it is a new trend that the objects establish social-like relationships with each other, which efficiently brings the benefits of developed sociality to a complex environment. As fog service become more sophisticated, it will become more convenient for fog users to share their own services, resources, and data via social networks. Meanwhile, the efficient social organization can enable more flexible, secure, and collaborative networking. Aforementioned advantages make the social network a potential architecture for fog computing systems. In this paper, we design an architecture for social fog computing, in which the services of fog are provisioned based on "friend" relationships. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at an organized fog computing system-based social model. Meanwhile, social networking enhances the complexity and security risks of fog computing services, creating difficulties of security service recommendations in social fog computing. To address this, we propose a novel crowd sensing-enabling security service provisioning method to recommend security services accurately in social fog computing systems. Simulation results show the feasibilities and efficiency of the crowd sensing-enabling security service recommendation method for social fog computing systems.

Seamless Insert-Plasmid Assembly at High Efficiency and Low Cost.

Seamless cloning methods, such as co-transformation cloning, sequence- and ligation-independent cloning (SLIC) or the Gibson assembly, are essential tools for the precise construction of plasmids. The efficiency of co-transformation cloning is however low and the Gibson assembly reagents are expensive. With the aim to improve the robustness of seamless cloning experiments while keeping costs low, we examined the importance of complementary single-stranded DNA ends for co-transformation cloning and the influence of single-stranded gaps in circular plasmids on SLIC cloning efficiency. Most importantly, our data show that single-stranded gaps in double-stranded plasmids, which occur in typical SLIC protocols, can drastically decrease the efficiency at which the DNA transforms competent E. coli bacteria. Accordingly, filling-in of single-stranded gaps using DNA polymerase resulted in increased transformation efficiency. Ligation of the remaining nicks did not lead to a further increase in transformation efficiency. These findings demonstrate that highly efficient insert-plasmid assembly can be achieved by using only T5 exonuclease and Phusion DNA polymerase, without Taq DNA ligase from the original Gibson protocol, which significantly reduces the cost of the reactions. We successfully used this modified Gibson assembly protocol with two short insert-plasmid overlap regions, each counting only 15 nucleotides.