Oral adsorbents used in the primary treatment of paraquat intoxication were studied in saline to evaluate their effectiveness in terms of removal ratio and removal rate.
Forty kinds of materials were tested as paraquat adsorbents.
Although cation exchange resin had the greatest removal ratio for paraquat, a high removal ratio was registered by an activated carbon derived from petroleum pitch. A significant correlation between removal ratio and the degree of crosslinkage in the resin was found.
The degree of paraquat concentration decrease was high when cation exchange resin was used. A significant correlation was found between the kinetic constant, which was calculated from the equation for a first-order reaction, and the degree of crosslinkage in the resin.

The effects of the food intake pattern on the activity and fraction pattern of serum γ-glutamyl transpeptidase (γ-GTP) were examined in 257 healthy Japanese men.
Applying the technique of factor analysis to the food intake data, the following three factors were extracted. The first factor (F1): meats, eggs, and vegetables had a highly positive factor loading. The second factor (F2): wheat had a highly positive factor loading, while rice had a highly negative factor loading. This factor was considered to be a “wheat versus rice factor”. The third factor (F3) could not be explained simply in terms of its factor. The scores of the first two factors for the 257 subjects were calculated.
Significantly negative correlations were observed between the percentage of GT₁ fraction and the factor score of F1 (r=-0.230, p<0.01), between the percentage of GT₁ fraction and the factor score of F2 (r=-0.187, p<0.01). The total serum γ-GTP activity was not correlated with the factor score. These results suggested that the percentage of GT₁ fraction is influenced by the pattern of food intake.

Because of societal aging, Japanese pharmacists have an increasingly important role in home medical care. This is particularly true because more pharmacists are required to perform physical assessments to optimize patient treatment. However, few investigations have examined whether patients understand the role of pharmacists and the importance of home medical care. In this study, a questionnaire was provided to 260 patients aged 20-90 years to determine patients’ attitudes toward home medical care and pharmaceutical interventions. After conducting factor analysis, items related to home medical care were excluded at the stage of exploratory factor analysis, indicating that patients are not interested in home medical care. However, regarding pharmaceutical interventions, the questionnaire revealed that 42% of the patients required the pharmacists to provide information regarding the prescribed drugs during home medical care visits. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that 85% of the patients were unaware that physical assessments are also perform by pharmacists. In contrast, >50% of the patients believed that pharmacists had an important role in physical assessment interventions.