• Journal of Ginseng Research
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2024

Fresh ginseng is prone to spoilage due to its high moisture content. For long-term storage, most fresh ginsengs are dried to white ginseng (WG) or steamed for hours at high temperature/pressure and dried to form Korean Red ginseng (KRG). They are further processed for ginseng products when subjected to hot water extraction/concentration under pressure. These WG or KRG preparation processes affect ginsenoside compositions and also other ginseng components, probably during treatments like steaming and drying, to form diverse bioactive phospholipids. It is known that ginseng contains high amounts of gintonin lysophosphatidic acids (LPAs). LPAs are simple lipid-derived growth factors in animals and humans and act as exogenous ligands of six GTP-binding-protein coupled LPA receptor subtypes. LPAs play diverse roles ranging from brain development to hair growth in animals and humans. LPA-mediated signaling pathways involve various GTP-binding proteins to regulate downstream pathways like [Ca²⁺]_i transient induction. Recent studies have shown that gintonin exhibits anti-Alzheimer's disease and antiarthritis effects in vitro and in vivo mediated by gintonin LPAs, the active ingredients of gintonin, a ginseng-derived neurotrophin. However, little is known about how gintonin LPAs are formed in high amounts in ginseng compared to other herbs. This review introduces atypical or non-enzymatic pathways under the conversion of ginseng phospholipids into gintonin LPAs during steaming and extraction/concentration processes, which exert beneficial effects against degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and arthritis in animals and humans via LPA receptors.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.178-184
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• 1996

Aloe(Aloe vera LINNE) has been used as a home medicine for the past several thousand in the world, and has been studied on various chronic degenerative diseases such as atherosclerosis, myocardiac infarction and hypertension. SMAP8, learning and memory impairment animal mode, were fed basic or experimental diets with 1.0% of freeze dried(FD)-Aloe powder for 8 months. This study was designed to investigate the effects of Aloe on body weight gain, grading score of senescence(GSS), triglyceride, total and LDL-cholesterol levels, and atherogenic index in serum of SAMP8, and also designed to investigate the effects of Aloe on cholesterol accumultions in mitochondria and microsome fractions of SAMP8 brain. Body weight gain was consistently lower in aloe group than in control group, but no significantly differences between them. Grading score of senescence resulted ina marked decreases pf 20% in 1.0% Aloe group compared with control group. Administrations of 1.0% aloe resulted ina marked decreases in 15% and 20% of triglyceride and cholesterol levels, respectively, and also significantly decreased in 15% of LDL-cholesterol levels and atherogenic index in serum of SAMP8 compared with control group. Cholesterol accumulations were significantly inhibited in 20% and 10% of mitochondria and microsome fractions of SAMP8 brain, respectively, by administration of 1.0% Aloe. These results suggest that administration of Aloe mau not only effectively inhibit chronic degenerative diseases in serum of SAMP8, but may also improve learning and memory impairments of SAMP8 brain.

• Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.153-161
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• 2013

Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are the major components of brain and retina, and are the essential fatty acids with important physiologically active functions. Thus, PUFAs should be provided to children, and are very important in the brain growth and development for fetuses, newborn infants, and children. Omega-3 fatty acids decrease coronary artery disease and improve blood flow. PUFAs have been known to have anti-inflammatory action and improved the chronic inflammation such as auto-immune diseases or degenerative neurologic diseases. PUFAs are used for metabolic syndrome related with obesity or diabetes. However, there are several considerations related with intake of PUFAs. Obsession with the intake of unsaturated fatty acids could bring about the shortage of essential fatty acids that are crucial for our body, weaken the immune system, and increase the risk of heart disease, arrhythmia, and stroke. In this review, we discuss types, physiologic mechanism of action of PUFAs, intake of PUFAs for children, recommended intake of PUFAs, and considerations for the intake of PUFAs.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.178-190
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• 2021

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an insidious and degenerative neurological disease. It is a new topic for AD patients to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer technology and is gradually explored at present. Preprocessing and correlation analysis on MRI data are firstly made in this paper. Then kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is used to extract features of brain gray matter images. Finally supervised classification schemes such as AdaBoost algorithm and support vector machine algorithm are used to classify the above features. Experimental results by means of AD program Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database which contains brain structural MRI (sMRI) of 116 AD patients, 116 patients with mild cognitive impairment, and 117 normal controls show that the proposed method can effectively assist the diagnosis and analysis of AD. Compared with principal component analysis (PCA) method, all classification results on KPCA are improved by 2%-6% among which the best result can reach 84%. It indicates that KPCA algorithm for feature extraction is more abundant and complete than PCA.

• Mass Spectrometry Letters
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.11-17
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• 2019

Drosophila melanogaster (fruits fly) is a representative model system widely used in biological studies because its brain function and basic cellular processes are similar to human beings. The whole head of the fly is often used to obtain the key function in brain-related diseases like degenerative brain diseases; however the biomolecular distribution of the head may be slightly different from that of a brain. Herein, lipid profiles of the head and dissected brain samples of Drosophila were studied using electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). According to the sample types, the detection of phospholipid ions was suppressed by triacylglycerol (TAG), or the specific phospholipid signals that are absent in the mass spectrum were measured. The lipid distribution was found to be different in the wild-type and the microRNA-14 deficiency model ($miR-14{\Delta}^1$) with abnormal lipid metabolism. A few phospholipids were also profiled by comparison of the head and the brain in two fly model systems. The mass spectra showed that the phospholipid distributions in the $miR-14{\Delta}^1$ model and the wild-type were different, and principal component analysis revealed a correlation between some phospholipids (phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), phosphatidylinositol (PI), and phosphatidylserine (PS)) in $miR-14{\Delta}^1$. The overall results suggested that brain-related lipids should be profiled using fly samples after dissection for more accurate analysis.

• Journal of Radiopharmaceuticals and Molecular Probes
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.116-130
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• 2020

The aging society is globally one of biggest issue because it is related with various degenerative brain disease such as dementia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and cerebrovascular disease. These diseases are characterized by misfolded-protein aggregation; another pathological trait is "neuroinflammation". In physiological state, the resting microglia cells are activated and it removes abnormal synapses and cell membrane debris to maintain the homeostasis. In pathological state, however, microglia undergo morphological change form 'resting' to 'activated amoeboid phenotype' and the microglia cells are accumulated by neuronal damage, the inflammatory reactions induced nerve metamorphosis with a variety of neurotoxic factors including cytokines, chemokines, and reactive oxygen species. Thus, the activated microglia cell with various receptors (TSPO, COX, CR, P2XR, etc.) was perceived as important biomarkers for imaging the inflammatory progression. In this review, we would like to introduce the current status of the development of radiotracers that can image activated microglia.

• BMB Reports
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.87-93
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• 2002

Neural cell survival is an essential concern in the aging brain and many diseases of the central nervous system. Neural transplantation of the stem cells are already applied to clinical trials for many degenerative neurological diseases, including Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, and strokes. A critical problem of the neural transplantation is how to reduce their apoptosis and improve cell survival. Neurotrophic factors generally contribute as extrinsic cues to promote cell survival of specific neurons in the developing mammalian brains, but the survival factor for neural stem cell is poorly defined. To understand the mechanism controlling stem cell death and improve cell survival of the transplanted stem cells, we investigated the effect of plausible neurotrophic factors on stem cell survival. The neural stem cell, HiB5, when treated with PDGF prior to transplantation, survived better than cells without PDGF. The resulting survival rate was two fold for four weeks and up to three fold for twelve weeks. When transplanted into dorsal hippocampus, they migrated along hippocampal alveus and integrated into pyramidal cell layers and dentate granule cell layers in an inside out sequence, which is perhaps the endogenous pathway that is similar to that in embryonic neurogenesis. Promotion of the long term-survival and differentiation of the transplanted neural precursors by PDGF may facilitate regeneration in the aging adult brain and probably in the injury sites of the brain.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.353-358
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• 2021

Parkinson's disease is the second most common degenerative brain disease after Alzheimer's in old age. Symptoms of Parkinson's disease are factors that reduce the quality of life in daily life, such as shaking hands, slowing behavior and cognitive function. Parkinson's disease that can slow the progression of the disease through early diagnosis. To diagnoze Parkinson's disease early, an algorithm was implemented to extract features using wav2vec and to diagnose the presence or absence of Parkinson's disease with deep learning(ANN). As a results of the experiment, the accuracy was 97.47%. It was better than the results of diagnosing Parkinson's disease using the existing neural network. The audio voice file could simply reduce the experiment process and obtain improved results.

• Journal of Integrative Natural Science
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.61-67
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• 2023

Human body ages differently due to environmental, genetic and pathological factors. DNA methylation patterns also differs depending on various factors such as aging and several other diseases. The aging clock model, which uses these differences to predict age, analyzes DNA methylation patterns, recognizes age-specific patterns, predicts age, and grasps the speed and degree of aging. Aging occurs in everyone and causes various problems such as deterioration of physical ability and complications. Alzheimer's disease is a disease associated with aging and the most common brain degenerative disease. This disease causes various cognitive functions disabilities such as dementia and impaired judgment to motor functions, making daily life impossible. It has been reported that the incidence and progression of this disease increase with aging, and that increased phosphorylation of Aβ and tau proteins, which are overexpressed in this disease and accelerates epigenetic aging. It has also been reported that DNA methylation is significantly increased in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex of Alzheimer's disease patients. Therefore, we calculated the biological age using the Epi clock, a pan-tissue aging clock model, and confirmed that the epigenetic age of patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease is lower than their actual age. Also, it was confirmed to slow down aging.

• The Journal of Internal Korean Medicine
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.177-194
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• 1997

This thesis, deduced from studying eastern and western medical records, deals with geriatric demedtia in modern society. The result were obtained as follows : 1. Dementia is a kind of chronic, progressive, degenerative disease. The chief expression and pathogenic change of the disease is organic: e.g., extensive change such as cerebrum - atrophy, and denaturalization result. in such a situation intellectual capacities and the ability to enjoy daily life deteriorate trenendously. 2. A basic internal cause of the disease is Defficiencies of the heart, liver and kidneys. An exterior cause is an Excessiveness of the 'Dam'(痰), 'Blood Stasis', 'Fung'(風) and 'Fire'. In a Western Medical view, the reason for dementia is due to the onset of Alzheimer's disease and Brain anemia resulting from Multi - infarction or some other reason. If the white - matter of the brain is injured, then dementia easily to results. 3. Disease symptoms result in troubles in intellectual functions : e.g., memory, orientation, intelligence, judgement, common sence and calculating abilities. 4. The proper therapeutic treatment depends on the causes. When the Deficiency is serious, Fortification (heart, liver. and kidney deficiency) is applied and Decrease is follow. When Excessiveness of wrong is serious, the Decrease is tried before the supplement measure is used depending on the deficiency, which generally is used together with 'Fortify Right - Decreace Wrong'. 5. If the disease wasn't caused by some mental reason, it's difficult to be cured of the disease. When the degree of the disease is light and it doesn't continue for a long time, the therapeutic treatment can block the disease's progress and improve the patient's symptoms.