BACKGROUND Alosetron is a potent and selective 5-HT3 receptor antagonist, which has been shown to be beneficial in the treatment of female patients with non-constipated irritable bowel syndrome. AIMS To investigate the effect of alosetron on whole gut, small bowel and colonic transit in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (Study 1) and healthy volunteers (Study 2). SUBJECTS Thirteen pati...

This paper proposes a novel model for determining the optimal number of transit operators and the allocation of new lines in an oligopolistic transit market. The proposed model consists of three interrelated sub-models that are associated with three types of players; namely, transit authority, transit operators, and transit passengers. In practice, the operating cost per unit of transit line of...

Transit travelers expend a great deal of time and energy on out-of-vehicle walking and waiting, which significantly affects their perceived burdens of travel. Accordingly, this article is concerned with ways to reduce the perceived burdens of out-of-vehicle time spent walking, waiting, and transferring to improve users’ experience at transit stops and stations. We surveyed 749 transit users at ...

Transit OD matrix is of vital importance when planning urban transit system. Traditional transit OD matrix constructing method needs a large range of spot check survey. It is expensive and needs long cycle time to process information. Recently transit IC card charging systems have been widely applied in big cities. Being processed reasonably, transit passenger information stored in IC card data...

Public transit service is a promising travel mode because of its potential to address urban sustainability. However, current ridership of public transit is very low in most urban regionsö particularly those in the United States. Low transit ridership can be attributed to many factors, among which poor service quality is key. Transit service quality may potentially be improved by decreasing the ...

This paper investigates merge-in-transit as an approach to reengineering assembly, warehouse and billing processes for electronic commerce. Merge-in-transit is de®ned and some examples are given to illustrate its use. Processes necessary to accomplish merge-in-transit are developed, while advantages and disadvantages of merge-in-transit are studied. Additional issues arising from merge-in-trans...

BACKGROUND There have been results showing the influence of bolus viscosities and consistency on esophageal motility and transit. However, there is no description about the influence of two different viscous boluses on esophageal contractions, bolus transit and perception of transit. Our objective in this investigation was to evaluate the esophageal transit and contraction after swallows of two...

Functional dyspepsia (FD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are common gastrointestinal (GI) diseases; however, there is frequent overlap between FD and IBS patients. Emerging evidence links the activation of corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) receptors with stress-related alterations of gastric and colonic motor function. Therefore, we investigated the effect of peripheral CRF peptide and w...

Background/Aims After exclusion of structural diseases, chronic constipation may be associated with normal or slow transit or rectal evacuation disorders. We evaluated: (1) clinical features and anorectal function, (2) difference of regional colonic transit according to the presence or absence of evacuation disorders, and (3) association of colonic transit with gender in patients with objective...