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\"This book focuses on cultures that shape contemporary Asian tourist experiences. The book consists of 10 chapters, which are organised into two themes: Collectivist Culture and Wellbeing. The chapters cover emerging forms of tourism (e.g., wedding and bridal photography tourism, roots/affinity tourism and shamanic tourism), investigate a wide range of topics (e.g., tourist motivation, tourist anxiety and decision making) and consider Asian perspectives from diverse backgrounds (e.g., China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Nepal). The book provides tourism researchers, students and practitioners a consolidated, comprehensive and updated reference for the understanding of Asian tourists\"--Back cover.

Background Sarcopenia, the age‐related loss of muscle mass and function, brings multiple adverse outcomes including disability and death. Several sarcopenia consensuses have newly introduced the premorbid concept of possible sarcopenia and recommended early lifestyle interventions. Bidirectional transitions of premorbid states have been revealed in several chronic diseases yet not clarified in sarcopenia. This study aims to investigate the underlying transition patterns of sarcopenia states. Methods The study utilized three waves of data from a nationally representative survey, the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), and included community‐dwelling individuals aged 60 years and older with at least two sarcopenia states assessments based on the Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia criteria 2019 (AWGS2019) between 2011 and 2015. The estimated transition intensity and probability between non‐sarcopenia, possible sarcopenia, sarcopenia, and death were investigated using multi‐stage Markov (MSM) models. Results The study comprised 4395 individuals (49.2% female, median age 67 years) with a total of 10 778 records of sarcopenia state assessment, and the mean follow‐up period was 3.29 years. A total of 24.5% of individuals with a current state of possible sarcopenia returned to non‐sarcopenia, 60.3% remained possible sarcopenia, 6.7% progressed to sarcopenia, and 8.5% died by the next follow‐up. The transition intensity of recovery to non‐sarcopenia (0.252, 95% CI 0.231–0.275) was 2.8 times greater than the deterioration to sarcopenia (0.090, 95% CI 0.080–0.100) for individuals with possible sarcopenia. For individuals with possible sarcopenia, the estimated probabilities of recovering to non‐sarcopenia, progressing to sarcopenia, and transitioning to death within a 1‐year observation were 0.181, 0.066, and 0.035, respectively. For individuals with sarcopenia, the estimated probabilities of recovering to non‐sarcopenia, recovering to possible sarcopenia, and transitioning to death within 1‐year observation were 0.016, 0.125, and 0.075, respectively. In covariables analysis, age, sex, body mass index, physical function impairment, smoking, hypertension, and diabetes are important factors influencing bidirectional transitions. Conclusions The findings highlight the bidirectional transitions of sarcopenia states among older adults and reveal a notable proportion of possible sarcopenia show potential for recovery in the natural course. Screening and intensifying interventions based on risk factors may facilitate a recovery transition.

This book offers a bird's-eye view of the current trends, opportunities, and challenges related to Asian youth travellers, and it also presents a holistic framework for future research to build upon. Managerial and policy implications are provided for the tourism and hospitality industry and government agencies to better accommodate the needs of Asian youth travellers - a unique and diverse market that is yet to be fully unveiled to the world. The book investigates the key characteristics that define contemporary Asian youth travellers, adopting a broad definition of Asia. While it includes relatively mature markets, it also features emerging markets in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia. The book looks at different forms of tourism undertaken by Asian travellers, encompassing educational tourism, adventure tourism, working holiday, self-driving tourism, dark tourism, volunteer tourism, and cultural tourism. A wide range of topics are discussed, from history to current trends, from motivations to constraints, from the influence of culture and religion on travel behaviour to the search of social freedom through travel, and from destination choice to destination avoidance. The findings and interpretations are drawn from diverse and novel research methods, such as netnography, visual anthropology, historiography, interview, focus group, survey, and document analysis.

The use of foodstuff as natural medicines has already been established through studies demonstrating the pharmacological activities that they exhibit. Knowing the nutritional and pharmacological significance of foods enables the understanding of their role against several diseases. Among the foods that can potentially be considered as medicine, is sesame or Sesamum indicum L., which is part of the Pedaliaceae family and is composed of its lignans such as sesamin, sesamol, sesaminol and sesamolin. Its lignans have been widely studied and are known to possess antiaging, anticancer, antidiabetes, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Modern chronic diseases, which can transform into clinical diseases, are potential targets of these lignans. The prime example of chronic diseases is rheumatic inflammatory diseases, which affect the support structures and the organs of the body and can also develop into malignancies. In line with this, studies emphasizing the anti-inflammatory and anticancer activities of sesame have been discussed in this review.

Trillions of intestinal bacteria in the human body undergo dynamic transformations in response to physiological and pathological changes. Alterations in their composition and metabolites collectively contribute to the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The role of gut microbiota in Alzheimer’s disease is diverse and complex, evidence suggests lipid metabolism may be one of the potential pathways. However, the mechanisms that gut microbiota mediate lipid metabolism in Alzheimer’s disease pathology remain unclear, necessitating further investigation for clarification. This review highlights the current understanding of how gut microbiota disrupts lipid metabolism and discusses the implications of these discoveries in guiding strategies for the prevention or treatment of Alzheimer’s disease based on existing data.

The oil market is undergoing fundamental change. New technologies are increasing the supply of oil from old and new sources, while rising concerns over the environment are seeing the world gradually moving away from oil. This spells a significant challenge for oil-exporting countries, including those of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) who account for a fifth of the world's oil production. The GCC countries have recognized the need to reduce their reliance on oil and are all implementing reforms to diversify their economies as well as fiscal and external revenues. Nevertheless, as global oil demand is expected to peak in the next two decades, the associated fiscal imperative could be both larger and more urgent than implied by the GCC countries' existing plans.

High-precision and high-efficiency Semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images is a challenge. Existing models typically require a significant amount of training data to achieve good classification results and have numerous training parameters. A novel model called MST-DeepLabv3+ was suggested in this paper for remote sensing image classification. It’s based on the DeepLabv3+ and can produce better results with fewer train parameters. MST-DeepLabv3+ made three improvements: (1) Reducing the number of model parameters by substituting MobileNetV2 for the Xception in the DeepLabv3+’s backbone network. (2) Adding the attention mechanism module SENet to increase the precision of semantic segmentation. (3) Increasing Transfer Learning to enhance the model's capacity to recognize features, and raise the segmentation accuracy. MST-DeepLabv3+ was tested on international society for photogrammetry and remote sensing (ISPRS) dataset, Gaofen image dataset (GID), and practically applied to the Taikang cultivated land dataset. On the ISPRS dataset, the mean intersection over union (MIoU), overall accuracy (OA), Precision, Recall, and F1-score are 82.47%, 92.13%, 90.34%, 90.12%, and 90.23%, respectively. On the GID dataset, these values are 73.44%, 85.58%, 84.10%, 84.86%, and 84.48%, respectively. The results were as high as 90.77%, 95.47%, 95.28%, 95.02%, and 95.15% on the Taikang cultivated land dataset. The experimental results indicate that MST-DeepLabv3+ effectively improves the accuracy of semantic segmentation of remote sensing images, recognizes the edge information with more completeness, and significantly reduces the parameter size.

The spectrum of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) ranges from simple hepatic steatosis, commonly associated with obesity, to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, which can progress to fibrosis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. NAFLD pathophysiology involves environmental, genetic and metabolic factors, as well as changes in the intestinal microbiota and their products. Dysfunction of the intestinal barrier can contribute to NAFLD development and progression. Although there are technical limitations in assessing intestinal permeability in humans and the number of patients in these studies is rather small, fewer than half of the patients have increased intestinal permeability and translocation of bacterial products. Microbe-derived metabolites and the signalling pathways they affect might play more important roles in development of NAFLD. We review the microbial metabolites that contribute to the development of NAFLD, such as trimethylamine, bile acids, short-chain fatty acids and ethanol. We discuss the mechanisms by which metabolites produced by microbes might affect disease progression and/or serve as therapeutic targets or biomarkers for NAFLD.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is increasingly recognized as a systemic disorder with a substantial metabolic disorder component, where the liver significantly impacts the brain via the liver-brain axis. Key mechanisms include the liver’s role in clearing peripheral β-amyloid (Aβ), the influence of hepatic enzymes and metabolites on cognitive decline, and the systemic effects of metabolic disorders on AD progression. Hepatokines, liver-secreted proteins including fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-21, selenoprotein P (SELENOP), Fetuin-A, Midbrain astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor (MANF), apolipoprotein J (ApoJ), sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), Adropin and Angiopoietin-like protein 3 (ANGPTL3), could regulate insulin sensitivity, lipid metabolism, oxidative stress, immune responses, and neurotrophic support. These pathways are closely linked to core AD pathologies, including Aβ aggregation, tau hyperphosphorylation, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. Lifestyle interventions, including exercise and dietary modifications, that regulate hepatokines expression may offer novel preventive and therapeutic strategies for AD. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the liver-brain crosstalk in AD, emphasizing the mechanistic role of liver in bridging metabolic dysfunction with neurodegeneration and underscores the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of hepatokines in addressing AD’s complex pathology.