To confirm concurrent validity of the final revision of the self-rating Barthel index (SB) and its test-retest reliability, we investigated 171 stroke outpatients without severe aphasia or dementia who were seen by a doctor on predetermined days at eight different hospitals. For 41 patients, the differences in scores among the original Barthel index (BI) and Granger's BI and SB were examined by the Friedman two-way analysis of variance and Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test, and the difference in scores between Functional Independence Measure motor score (FIM-MS) and three-level scale FIM-MS was determined by the Wilcoxon's matched-pairs signed-ranks test. Concurrent validity of the SB was confirmed by Spearman's correlation coefficients with the original BI and FIM-MS, and internal consistency of the five measuring instruments was examined. For all 171 patients test-retest reliability of the SB was examined with the Spearman's correlation coefficient for total scores and kappa coefficients for each ADL item. Regression analysis was performed to determine what factors were related with test-retest reliability. Total scores of the SB and Granger's BI and the three-level scale FIM-MS were significantly higher than those of the original BI and FIM-MS, respectively. Correlation coefficients of the SB with the original BI and FIM-MS were 0.994 and 0.904, respectively, and its α-coefficient was 0.842. Test-retest reliability of the total score was 0.835 by the correlation coefficient, and kappa coefficients of 1 and 12 ADL items were fair and good, respectively. Regression analysis revealed that self-rating by a patient with a high SB total score is more accurate. Therefore, the SB has good concurrent validity and is well-related with the original BI and FIM, and its test-retest reliability is sufficiently high for practical use.

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A formaldehyde gas generator using paraformaldehyde was developed and basic generation characteristics of the generator were studied experimentally. Solid paraformaldehyde was packed in a glass column and formaldehyde gas was obtained at a constant concentration by introducing air into the column. The generated gas concentration was measured under various experimental conditions, such as, different air flow rates, temperatures and packed amounts of paraformaldehyde. At low temperatures, the generated gas concentration increased with the increasing temperature. When the temperature was the same, the gas concentration increased with the increasing amount of paraformaldehyde and the air flow rate. However, when the temperature was greater than 30℃, the gas concentration was independent of the temperature, gas flow rate and the amount of paraformaldehyde.

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The effects of age on the cytotoxicity and mutagenicity of N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU) in human peripheral blood T-lymphocytes were investigated using colony-forming assay in vitro. ENU was shown to induce a dose-dependent increase in cell killing and in mutation frequencies (MF). No significant correlation between age and ENU-induced 6-thioguanine-resistant (TG^r) MF at the hypoxanthine phosphoribosyl transferase (HPRT) locus of the X-chromosome was found after treatment with the same concentration of ENU (1 mM or 2 mM). There were also no significant differences among different donor age groups and the sensitivity parameters for exposure to ENU. As X-rays, the cytotoxic and mutagenic effects of ENU in cultured human T-lymphocytes appear not to be associated with age. These results suggest that the repair of mutagen-induced DNA lesions does not decline with age. Such knowledge has implications for risk assessment and protection against environmental mutagens.

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The clinicopathological features and operative results were analyzed in 21 patients undergoing an operation for cancer of the remnant stomach between 1979 and 1997. The twenty-one patients were divided into two groups: Group A; n=9: who had undergone a gastrectomy for benign gastric disease, Group B; n=12: who had undergone the same operation for gastric cancer. In Group A, the interval between the first gastrectomy and the second was longer than in Group B. In both groups, a large number of advanced cancers (n=16, 76.2%) and undifferentiated carcinomas (n=15, 71.4%) were seen. Five-year-survival rates in Group A and Group B were 23.7%, 19.0%, respectively. The incidence of gastric stump cancer following partial gastrectomy was 80% in the patients on whom BillrothⅡ reconstruction had been performed after gastrectomy. It is suggested that the residual stomach in the BillrothⅡ reconstruction patients is susceptible to cancer development. Consideration of the reconstruction method and a systemic follow-up is needed to improve a prognosis.

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The major determinant factors for the mechanical property of bone include the mass, structure and "quality" of bone. The quality indicates the factors which affect the strength of bone other than the mass and the structure. In the spinal cancellous bone, the power-law relationship has been observed and the bone strength increases in proportion to the square (the power number 2) of the bone mass value. The power number represents the quality of cancellous bone, including various factors such as the micro-structure at the tissue level and the physico-chemical bonding at the molecular level. For the long cortical bone, the number or density of the cracks in the tissue represents the quality. The cortical bone strength decreases exponentially with the increase in the number of cracks in the tissue. The increase in the number of cracks with age is observed in the human skeleton. When a crack is made in the bone, the osteoclasts invade the region, refreshing the damaged tissue. Then, the osteoblasts are recruited to appose the new bone tissue, filling the gap made by the crack. Thus, the "quality" of bone is regulated by the bone cell functions as well as by the mass and the structure. Therefore, the regulation of the bone quality is another important target for bone cell biology.

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An analysis of the recent local area network (LAN) traffic statistics at the University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Japan was examined. The following points were confirmed. IP packets occupied 88 percentage of the Ethernet traffic. Nntp and Nfs were the most traffic in the application protocol. Ethernet traffic has decreased during the last nine months. This suggested that Ethernet traffic dispersed into new ATM networks. The traffic between the inside of the university and the outside depended on the amount of network news articles.

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Conditional sentences and reason sentences have an underlying identical inference structure. If the speaker does not commit himself to the truth of the protasis, the sentence is realized as a conditional sentence. On the other hand, if the speaker believes the truth of the protasis, the sentence instantiates as a reason sentence. This paper is mainly concerned with what Akatsuka (1985) calls "newly-learned information", to the truth of which she claims the speaker cannot commit. I examine several counterexamples to her hypothesis and argue that they can be explained in terms of the interaction between the inherent semantic properties of conditional and reason sentences on the one hand and discourse factors on the other.

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