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Background: Mental illness is a huge public health issue. Patients with severe mental illness (SMI) are at risk of developing metabolic syndrome (MetS). Therefore, this cross-sectional study aimed to determine the associations between personal, clinical and lifestyle factors with MetS in patients with SMI. Materials and Methods: 151 patients attending psychiatric outpatient clinics in two government hospitals in Klang Valley participated in this study. The Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) was used to diagnose patients with SMI by a psychiatrist. MetS was defined based on the 2009 Joint Interim Statement (JIS) criteria. Information needed on socio-demographic background, clinical characteristics (types and duration of illness and medication), lifestyle factors (physical activity level, smoking behaviour and alcohol consumption) were collected through a face-to-face interview. Body weight, height, waist circumference, percentage of body fat and blood pressure were measured by the researchers. Blood test results were obtained from the medical records. Result: Nearly half of the respondents (48.3%) had MetS, in which it was higher among males (48.5%), married respondents (61.5%), older age group (66.7%) and schizophrenic patients (50.7%). Overweight (AOR=3.64, 95% CI=1.55-8.58) and obese (AOR=15.06, 95% CI=5.27-43.09) patients were more likely to develop MetS. Moreover, middle-aged and older patients were about 3 times (AOR=3.31, 95% CI=1.38-7.94) and 6 times (AOR=5.65, 95% CI=1.62-19.73), respectively, more likely to develop MetS compared to younger patients. Conclusion: This study demonstrated high prevalence of MetS among patients with SMI. It also highlighted the need of regular assessment of BMI among patients with SMI to prevent MetS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, a simple model is developed to explore the electron thermionic emission from a single-layer graphene. This study is based on our prior efforts in showing that electron emission mechanisms from single-layer graphene is quite different from the traditional models, such as graphene field emission, and graphene laser-induced over-barrier emission, etc.. Now, we establish a new scaling for thermionic emission from graphene, quite different from the conventional Richardson's law responsible for bulk materials. Our analytical formula obtained in this work is demonstrated to agree well with numerical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), as promising alternative plasmon supporting materials to graphene, exhibit potential applications in sensing. Here, we propose a TMDCs-mediated long range surface plasmon resonance (LRSPR) imaging biosensor, which shows tremendous improvements in both imaging sensitivity ( 2) and detection accuracy ( 10) as compared to conventional surface plasmon resonance (cSPR) biosensors. It is found that the imaging sensitivity of the LRSPR biosensor can be enhanced by the integration of TMDC layers, which is different from the previously reported graphene-mediated cSPR imaging sensor, whose imaging sensitivity decreases with the number of graphene layers. This imaging sensitivity enhancement effect for the TMDCs-mediated LRSPR sensor originates from the propagating nature of the LRSPR at both interfaces of sensing medium/gold and gold/cytop layer (with a matching refractive index as sensing medium). By tuning the thickness of gold film and cytop layer, it is possible to achieve optimized imaging sensitivity for LRSPR sensors with any known integrated number of TMDC layers and an analyte refractive index. The proposed TMDCs-mediated LRSPR imaging sensor could provide potential applications in chemical sensing and biosensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study electrical transport properties in exfoliated molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) back-gated field effect transistors at low drain bias and under different illumination intensities. It is found that photoconductive and photogating effect as well as space charge limited conduction can simultaneously occur. We point out that the photoconductivity increases logarithmically with the light intensity and can persist with a decay time longer than 104 s, due to photo-charge trapping at the MoS2/SiO2 interface and in MoS2 defects. The transfer characteristics present hysteresis that is enhanced by illumination. At low drain bias, the devices feature low contact resistance of ON current as high as 105 ON–OFF ratio, mobility of ∼1 cm2 V−1 s−1 and photoresponsivity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We illustrate that a triple-well potential structure on a monolayer graphene can be treated as a five-layer optical waveguide. The transfer matrix method was used to deduce the dispersion equation for the graphene waveguide. It is found that the results have the similar dispersion equation, equivalent to the transverse electric wave in dielectrics. The symmetric and anti-symmetric oscillating guided modes are determined and studied in details for the triple-well potential. From the results, we conclude that the oscillating guided modes appear either in the middle well or in all three wells. The results may be helpful in designing various novel graphene-based devices, such as electronic fiber and directional coupler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]