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Objectives: This study was performed to test the clinical applicability of a new taste test—the waterless empirical taste test (WETT). Methods: Sixty healthy volunteers and 20 patients with oral cancer were enrolled. They all received the conventional solution-based whole-mouth suprathreshold taste test (WMTT), which contained sucrose, citric acid, sodium chloride, and caffeine solutions for tastants, along with the WETT. The WETT used plastic strips to deliver tastants. The strip was embedded with sucrose, citric acid, sodium chloride, caffeine, or monosodium glutamate taste enhancer in 4 different concentrations. Each strip was tested twice. Thirty of the healthy volunteers received the WETT again to measure a retest reliability. Case–control matching by age and gender was used to compare the scores of WMTT and WETT between 13 healthy volunteers and 13 patients with oral cancer. Results: The correlation was not high between the WMTT and WETT (r < 0.7) whether in the healthy volunteers or in patients with oral cancer. In terms of retest reliability of the WETT, the mean total score was 24.9 ± 7.3 for the first test and 25.8 ± 8.4 for the second test. The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.85 (P <.001). When case–control matching was performed, the WMTT scores were not significantly different between 13 healthy volunteers and 13 patients with oral cancer (P =.266), but the WETT scores were significantly lower in patients with oral cancer (P =.017). Conclusion: This study showed that the results of the WETT were not highly correlated with those of the WMTT. However, its retest reliability was high, and its results were significantly different between the healthy volunteers and the patients with oral cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Summary: The nasal cavity and its related structures make significant contributions to human phonation, especially the resonance of voice spectra. The voice spectra of the nasal consonant-vowel (CV), [TEXT NOT [...]

Hypernasality is associated with various diseases and interferes with speech intelligibility. A recently developed quantitative index called voice low tone to high tone ratio (VLHR) was used to estimate nasalization. The voice spectrum is divided into low-frequency power (LFP) and high-frequency power (HFP) by a specific cutoff frequency (600 Hz). VLHR is defined as the division of LFP into HFP and is expressed in decibels. Voice signals of the sustained vowel [a :] and its nasalization in eight subjects with hypernasality were collected for analysis of nasalance and VLHR. The correlation of VLHR with nasalance scores was significant (r = 0.76, p < 0.01), and so was the correlation between VLHR and perceptual hypernasality scores (r : 0.80, p < 0.01). Simultaneous recordings of nasal airflow temperature with a thermistor and voice signals in another 8 healthy subjects showed a significant correlation between temperature rate of nasal airflow and VLHR (r = 0.76, p < 0.01), as well. We conclude that VLHR may become a potential quantitative index of hypernasal speech and can be applied in either basic or clinical studies. Index Terms--Hypernasal speech, hypernasality, VLHR, voice spectrum.

Objectives/hypothesis: To evaluate the prediction value of saliva pepsin detection for an 8-week proton pump inhibitor (PPI) response in patients with a Reflux Symptoms Index (RSI) score ≥13, which indicates possible laryngopharyngeal reflux.Study Design: Prospective individual single-cohort study.Methods: Patients were recruited who had experienced chronic laryngopharyngeal symptoms (RSI score ≥13) for more than 3 months after excluding other etiologies. The patients received PPI (40 mg of esomeprazole once daily) treatment for 8 weeks. Prior to treatment, the patients submitted saliva/sputum samples that were collected during the time symptoms were observed. The samples were taken for pepsin detection, and performed using the commercially available Peptest lateral flow device. The association of the Peptest results and PPI response were statistically analyzed with the χ2 test.Results: Seventy-four patients completed the study, and upon completion of PPI treatment, the mean RSI score was significantly reduced from 19.22 ± 5.18 to 8.99 ± 5.69. Forty-four (59.5%) patients exhibited a good response as defined by an RSI score reduction ≥50%. The results of the Peptest were semiquantitatively graded as 0, 1, 2, 3 (negative, weak positive, moderate positive and strong positive, respectively) based upon the visual intensity of the test sample line as compared to the control line. Twenty-four patients (32.4%) exhibited grade 3 strong positive results. The Peptest strong positive results (P < .05) were significantly associated with a good PPI response, with the positive predictive value being 79.2%.Conclusions: Analysis of strong positive results for pepsin detection in saliva/sputum samples may be a useful, noninvasive method for predicting better PPI response in patients with suspected reflux induced chronic laryngopharyngeal symptoms.Level Of Evidence: 2 Laryngoscope, 129:709-714, 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the stock capitalization and book-to-price (B/P) ratio can affect the VaR (value-at-risk) estimation performances in six VaR estimation methodologies. Examining on the daily returns on Taiwan stock market, we find that the market capitalization is not a significant factor in VaR estimation, while the B/P ratio is generally positively related to VaR estimates. Among various VaR estimation models, the historical simulation model performs the best, and the followers are the Student-t and extreme value theory models. Reversely, normal distribution model performs the worst, and the GARCH-family models frequently extremely over-estimate or under-estimate the individual daily VaR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Ching-Ping Wang, David Shyu, Y. Chris Liao, Ming-Chi Chen, Miao-Ling Chen This study focuses on the problem of investors in optimising dynamic asset allocation to maximise expected utility under the value-at-risk (VaR) constraint. Although Basak and Shapiro presented this topic, they assumed a complete market and employed the martingale approach to determine a dynamic asset allocation strategy. However, a complete market does not exist in the real world and the martingale approach is not suitable for portfolio selection. Consequently, this study relaxes these limitations and firstly provides a solving method to derive the dynamic asset allocation under the VaR constraint. A simple case and a general case of derivation of optimal dynamic asset allocation are explored. A continuous probability distribution also can be approximated by the discrete probability distribution discussed in this study.