Patients with postprandial distress syndrome experience problems with their interoceptive perceptual function to the gastric region, but their heartbeat perception is normal: a case control study.

BACKGROUND: Visceral hypersensitivity in functional dyspepsia can be localized or widespread, and there is no simple method of assessment. Measuring interoceptive accuracy at different sites provides an assessment of perceptual hypersensitivity to specific ecological phenomena. The purpose of this study was to characterize visceral hypersensitivity by comparing gastric sensory and cardiac perceptual tests in patients with postprandial distress syndrome and in healthy volunteers. METHODS: Sixteen patients with postprandial distress syndrome (age = 47.5 ± 17.4, all female) and 16 healthy volunteers (age = 43.3 ± 16.1, all female) participated in the study after a six-hour fast. Each participant answered questionnaires about physical and mental quality of life, depression and anxiety, tendency of alexithymia, and somatosensory amplification. After completing the questionnaire, the participants took the heartbeat tracking task and the five-minute water load test. We performed statistical analysis using the Mann-Whitney U test and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. RESULTS: Subjects with postprandial distress syndrome had a lower drinking capacity than healthy volunteers (postprandial distress syndrome = 360.9 ± 170.0 mL, healthy volunteers = 644.1 ± 297 mL, P = 0.009), but there was no significant difference in the heartbeat perception score (postprandial distress syndrome = 0.599 ± 0.175, healthy volunteers = 0.623 ± 0.181, P = 0.647). There was a negative correlation (r = - 0.509, P < 0.05) between drinking capacity and the heartbeat perception score in healthy volunteers, but no correlation in postprandial distress syndrome (r = - 0.156, P = 0.564). Heartbeat perception score did not correlate with psychological measures. CONCLUSIONS: Compared with healthy volunteers, only the five-minute water load test values were reduced in patients with postprandial distress syndrome, and no difference was observed in the heartbeat tracking task. Combining the 5-minute water load test and the heart rate tracking task revealed a lost cardiac-gastric perceptual relationship in patients with postprandial distress syndrome that was not observed in healthy volunteers, suggesting that there is hypersensitivity in gastric interoceptive perceptual function. Performing sensory examinations at two different sites may be useful in clarifying whether visceral hypersensitivity is localized. TRIAL REGISTRATION: UMIN000057586. Registered11 March 2023(retrospectively registered).

Tailored opening questions to the context of using medical questionnaires: Qualitative analysis in first-visit consultations.

Background: Communication skills required for doctors do not consist of simple uses of particular linguistic forms but include uses that are sensitive to the interactional context. In consultations where the doctors have pre-existing information about their patients, this can complicate the context of problem solicitation. We investigated how doctors tailor opening questions to a context in which they get pre-existing information from a medical questionnaire (MQ) filled out by the patients. Methods: The data for this study were 87 video recordings of first visits to the department of general medicine at a university hospital in Japan. We qualitatively analyzed doctors' practices in problem solicitation in an opening phase using conversation analysis and triangulated it with quantitative analysis. Results: Open-ended questions accounted for 26.4% of opening questions. Among the closed-ended questions, 75.0% were confirming questions about symptoms. In cases with open-ended questions, doctors minimized the relevance of the MQ to problem solicitation by giving license to repeat the description from the MQ. In cases with closed-ended questions, doctors highlighted the relevance of the MQ by sharing the MQ. Through these practices, they avoided patients' possible confusion about problem presentation while simultaneously maximizing the possibility of soliciting the patients' narratives. Conclusions: Doctors adjusted the level of relevance of pre-existing information to problem solicitation through both verbal and nonverbal management of the MQ. It will be useful to instruct such context-dependent practices to improve communication skills in medical school curriculum.

Quasiparticle Trapping at Vortices Producing Josephson Supercurrent Enhancement.

The Josephson junction of a strong spin-orbit material under a magnetic field is a promising Majorana fermion candidate. Supercurrent enhancement by a magnetic field has been observed in the InAs nanowire Josephson junctions and assigned to a topological transition. In this work we observe a similar phenomenon but discuss the nontopological origin by considering the trapping of quasiparticles by vortices that penetrate the superconductor under a finite magnetic field. This assignment is supported by the observed hysteresis of the switching current when sweeping up and down the magnetic field. Our experiment shows the importance of quasiparticles in superconducting devices with a magnetic field, which can provide important insights for the design of qubits using superconductors.

Determination of metal-abundant high-density particles in municipal solid waste incineration bottom ash by a series of processes: Sieving, magnetic separation, air table sorting, and milling.

Valuable non-ferrous (NFe) metals are contained in municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) bottom ash (BA). The applicability of an air table for separating NFe metal-abundant particles in MSWI BA (<8 mm) was studied. A stepwise separation procedure was developed based on the performance tests of the air table conducted by changing three variables (air injection, vibration, and end slope). As a result of the stepwise separation, six bulk density ranges (<0.7 to >1.1 g/cm3 at intervals of 0.1 g/cm3) were prepared from non-magnetic fractions with four size ranges (4-8, 2-4, 1-2, and 0.5-1 mm). The effectiveness of air table sorting was evaluated based on dry particle density and proportion of metals. NFe metals were obtained by sieving (>0.5 mm) after a ball mill process, confirming that NFe metals accounted for 3.2% of the < 8 mm MSWI BA. The highest particle density of each size fraction and the proportion of NFe metals in the fractions were 3.19 g/cm3 and 59.9% (4-8 mm), 2.97 g/cm3 and 28.8% (2-4 mm), 2.78 g/cm3 and 10.4% (1-2 mm), and 2.87 g/cm3 and 4.4% (0.5-1 mm). In the 0.5-2 mm particles, the highest density fraction contained 68.7% of the NFe metals, which were expected to be recovered by applying an air table separator to MSWI BA 0.5-2 mm.

Dominant nonlocal superconducting proximity effect due to electron-electron interaction in a ballistic double nanowire.

Cooper pair splitting (CPS) can induce nonlocal correlation between two normal conductors that are coupled to a superconductor. CPS in a double one-dimensional electron gas is an appropriate platform for extracting a large number of entangled electron pairs and is one of the key ingredients for engineering Majorana fermions with no magnetic field. In this study, we investigated CPS by using a Josephson junction of a gate-tunable ballistic InAs double nanowire. The measured switching current into the two nanowires is significantly larger than the sum of the switching current into the respective nanowires, indicating that interwire superconductivity is dominant compared with intrawire superconductivity. From its dependence on the number of propagating channels in the nanowires, the observed CPS is assigned to one-dimensional electron-electron interaction. Our results will pave the way for the utilization of one-dimensional electron-electron interaction to reveal the physics of high-efficiency CPS and to engineer Majorana fermions in double nanowire systems via CPS.

Equal-Spin Andreev Reflection on Junctions of Spin-Resolved Quantum Hall Bulk State and Spin-Singlet Superconductor.

The recent development of superconducting spintronics has revealed the spin-triplet superconducting proximity effect from a spin-singlet superconductor into a spin-polarized normal metal. In addition recently superconducting junctions using semiconductors are in demand for highly controlled experiments to engineer topological superconductivity. Here we report experimental observation of Andreev reflection in junctions of spin-resolved quantum Hall (QH) states in an InAs quantum well and the spin-singlet superconductor NbTi. The measured conductance indicates a sub-gap feature and two peaks on the outer side of the sub-gap feature in the QH plateau-transition regime increases. The observed structures can be explained by considering transport with Andreev reflection from two channels, one originating from equal-spin Andreev reflection intermediated by spin-flip processes and second arising from normal Andreev reflection. This result indicates the possibility to induce the superconducting proximity gap in the the QH bulk state, and the possibility for the development of superconducting spintronics in semiconductor devices.