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BACKGROUND: Acupuncture, traditional Chinese herb hot compress and rehabilitation training is useful in post-stroke shoulder–hand syndrome (SHS), but it is less commonly used in combination. OBJECTIVE: To analyse the therapeutic efficacy of a combination of acupuncture, traditional Chinese herb hot compress and rehabilitation training in SHS patients. METHOD: Patients diagnosed with post-stroke SHS and treated from January 2022 to March 2023 at Beijing Friendship Hospital and Beijing Pinggu Hospital were selected and randomly divided into three groups (A, B and C). Group A received conventional rehabilitative treatment (35 cases), Group B underwent conventional rehabilitative treatment + acupuncture (35 cases), and Group C received conventional rehabilitative treatment + acupuncture + traditional Chinese herb hot compress treatment (35 cases). The post-treatment effectiveness rate, visual analogue scale (VAS) score, activities of daily living (ADL) score, Fugel–Meyer assessment (FMA) score, SHS assessment scale (SHSS) score and shoulder joint mobility were compared among the three groups. RESULTS: The post-treatment VAS score ( F VAS score = 232.512, P < 0.001), FMA score ( F FMA score = 239.412, P < 0.001), ADL score ( F ADL score = 412.634, P < 0.001), SHSS score ( F SHSS score = 212.542, P < 0.001) and shoulder joint mobility ( F Shoulder Joint Mobility = 197.531, P < 0.001) all showed statistically significant differences. The VAS and SHSS scores decreased in the order of Group A > Group B > Group C, while the FMA, ADL and shoulder joint mobility scores increased in the order of Group C > Group B > Group A. The post-treatment effectiveness rates (χ 2= 48.510, P < 0.001) also exhibited statistically significant differences, decreasing in the order of Group C (94.29%) > Group B (82.86%) > Group A (71.43%). CONCLUSION: The treatment efficacy of the combined acupuncture, traditional Chinese herb hot compress and rehabilitation training for SHS patients is significant, warranting its clinical promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Incontinence seriously affects the lives of middle‐aged and older people. Pelvic floor muscle assessment is very important for incontinence, and handgrip strength can be used as an auxiliary diagnostic tool. Our study aims to find new cutoff points of handgrip strength as early indicators of incontinence and analyze the association between low handgrip strength and incontinence among Chinese middle‐aged and older people. Methods: Participants were recruited from the 2015 China Health and Retirement Longevity Study. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to find the handgrip strength cutoff point. Logistic regression analysis was performed to explore other incontinence‐related risk factors. Results: The study included 10,229 middle‐aged and older people. Compared with normal handgrip strength participants, medium strength participants had 1.510 [men, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.017–2.243] and 1.792 (women, 95% CI = 1.294–2.480) times greater risk of incontinence, and low strength participants had 2.420 (men, 95% CI = 1.787–3.277) and 1.516 (women, 95% CI = 1.130–2.032) times greater risk of incontinence. Trend test results showed that the risk of incontinence increased with decreasing handgrip strength in middle‐aged and older people. Conclusions: Our study suggests that handgrip strength < 31 kg in men and < 20.5 kg in women is significantly associated with higher risk of incontinence in Chinese middle‐aged and older people. The risk of incontinence increases with decreasing handgrip strength. Handgrip strength should be measured in routine physical examinations in middle‐aged and older people for timely assessment and intervention in incontinence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives The present study expands on previous research by examining whether the spouse's retirement affects individual depression both directly, by the changes in individual health investment, and indirectly, through the social interaction effect of the couples' depression. Methods Using the panel data from the 2010–2018 China Family Panel Studies, we investigate the direct and indirect spillover effects of the spouse's retirement on depression among Chinese urban-worker couples (men aged 50–70, women aged 40–60; n  = 10,466). To address the potential endogeneity and reflect the social interaction effect of the couples' depression, we combine the Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity method with simultaneous equations. Results Overall, a spouse's retirement would improve an individual's depression, with the direct spillover dominating compared to the indirect spillover. Gender heterogeneity indicates that husbands' depression is improved by wives' retirement mainly because husbands might receive more healthcare and companionship provided by their retired wives, while wives' depression is aggravated by husbands' retirement because of the decline in household income and the lesser health investment. This difference is more evident when wives retire earlier and both spouses retire in the same year. With the spouse's retirement years increasing, husbands' depression improves and wives' depression declines each year. Moreover, spouses' depression is significantly interactive, and wives' depression is more vulnerable to husbands' depression. Discussion The results highlight that the health spillover effects of the spouse's retirement need greater attention in future research and retirement reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the association between anemia status and the risk of heart failure (HF) in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) based on a multi-center, large-sample and retrospective cross-sectional study including 89,207 patients. Heart failure was categorized as HF with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), and HF with mid-range ejection fraction (HFmrEF). In multi-adjusted models, compared with patients without anemia, mild anemia (odds ratio [OR] 1.71; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.53–1.91; P <.001), moderate anemia (OR 3.68; 95% CI, 3.25–4.17; P <.001), and severe anemia (OR 8.02; 95% CI, 6.50–9.88; P <.001) were associated with the risk of HF among CHD patients. Men aged <65 years were more likely to develop HF. In subgroup analyses, the multi-adjusted ORs and 95% CI of HFpEF, HFrEF, and HFmrEF related to anemia were 3.24 (95% CI 1.43–7.33), 2.22 (95% CI 1.28–3.84), and 2.55 (95% CI 2.24–2.89), respectively. These findings suggest that anemia might be associated with increased risk of different types of HF, especially HFpEF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After studying a list of words that are semantically associated to a critical lure, participants are more likely to attribute a falsely recognised critical lure to the context of its strong than weak semantic associates. This is known as the source-strength effect. The current study investigated the roles of automatic and controlled processing in context retrieval in false recognition that is demonstrated by the source-strength effect. The results revealed that the source-strength effect was impervious to forewarning (Experiment 1) and remained intact when attentional resources at encoding were reduced (Experiment 2), suggesting that context retrieval in false recognition is based on automatic processes that are not amenable to conscious control and do not require many attentional resources. This interpretation is consistent with the associative activation theory, which proposes that context retrieval in false recognition is based on memory associations between contexts and critical lures that are automatically created when critical lures become automatically activated via spreading activation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]