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Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive memory deficits, cognitive decline, and spatial disorientation. Non-pharmacological interventions to treat AD have been reported in many meta-analyses (MAs), but robust conclusions have not been made because of variations in the scope, quality, and findings of these reviews.Objective: This work aimed to review existing MAs to provide an overview of existing evidence on the effects of five non-pharmacological interventions in AD patients on three outcomes: Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), activities of daily living (ADL), and Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-cognitive section (ADAS-cog).Methods: The databases PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, and Web of Science were searched to collect MAs of non-pharmacological interventions for AD. Two reviewers independently conducted literature screening, data extraction, and quality assessment. We assessed the quality of MAs with the Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) 2 and assessed the evidence quality for significant outcomes using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) system.Results: We found 10 eligible MAs, which included between three (133 patients) and 15 randomized trials (1,217 patients), and five non-pharmacological interventions, namely, acupuncture therapy (40%), exercise intervention (30%), music therapy (10%), cognitive intervention (10%), and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) (10%). All the included MAs were critically low to low quality by AMSTAR 2. Acupuncture therapy and exercise intervention showed the preliminary potential to improve ADL and MMSE. rTMS and acupuncture therapy show benefits in decreasing ADAS-cog, and there were some evidence of improved MMSE with cognitive intervention. All these outcomes scored very low quality to moderate quality of evidence on the GRADE system.Conclusions: Non-pharmacological therapy shows promise for the treatment of AD, but there is still a lack of high-quality evidence. In the future, the quality of the original research needs to be improved, and strictly designed MAs should be carried out following methodological requirements.

We have performed a systematic study on the effect of microporosity on the energy stability and electronic properties of graphene-like materials, including 2D C, B and B–C allotropes. We used a modified crystal structure-search method to yield planar structures by systematically varying microporosity. Our results show that the energy stability of allotropes is strongly correlated with the microporosity and that the trends for C and B allotropes are qualitatively different. The formation energies of the most stable C allotropes with the same microporosity increase quickly with the microporosity, which shows a parabolic relationship. In contrast, B allotropes show a much weaker and linear dependence on microporosity. Our calculations also reveal that basic electronic properties such as metallicity and band gaps also depend strongly on the porosity. The allotropes with low microporosity and low formation energies tend to be metallic, and the semiconducting allotropes appear more often with high microporosity. In contrast to the general trend, our study identified a C allotrope with low microporosity that is quite stable and has a large band gap of 0.58 eV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the differences between consonants and vowels of Mandarin Chinese and Thai sound systems which are considered to create the difficulties in L2 pronunciation, according to the contrastive analysis hypothesis. As well, this research aims to re-check the accuracy of contrastive analysis's predictive power by comparing the differences of Mandarin Chinese pronunciation performance by native Thai speakers. Research findings show that, first, it is possible to find out the similarity and difference between L1 and L2 by contrastive analysis. Second, L2 pronunciations are influenced by L1. Third, some differences between L1 and L2 do not cause difficulty in L2 learning, while some similarities do. In other words, the difficulty of L2 learning is not merely the sum of its differences. Fourth, there are other factors influencing the pronunciation of a L2 learner. As a result, the accuracy of a contrastive analysis's predictive power is not as high as it has been claimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]