• Preventive Nutrition and Food Science
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.145-155
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• 2014

Vascular dementia is characterized by white matter lesions involving the demyelination and activation of astrocytes and microglia. In a previous study, we showed that the supernatant of a laboratory-scale, hot water extract of ground whole wheat (TALE) attenuated white matter injury and astrocytic activation in a rat model of bilateral common carotid artery occlusion (BCCAO). In the present study, we made several modifications to the hot water extraction process to remove starch and enable large-scale production. We used wheat bran (WB), which contains less starch, instead of ground whole wheat. In addition, we removed starch granules with a decanter before hot water extraction. The final product, wheat bran extract (WBE), contained 2.42% arabinose, a surrogate marker of arabinoxylan, which is an active constituent of WBE. Supplementation of the rat model of BCCAO with WBE (400 mg/kg/day) for 33 days attenuated white matter injury, which was assessed by Luxol Fast Blue staining, in the corpus callosum (cc) and optic tract (opt) regions. Attenuation of white matter injury in the opt region was accompanied by improvement of the pupillary light reflex. Immunochemical staining revealed that supplementation with WBE reduced astrocytic activation in the cc and opt regions and reduced microglial activation in the opt region. These findings indicate that supplementation with WBE is effective at attenuating white matter injury accompanied by the inhibition of astrocytic and microglial activation. Therefore, extracts from WB, a cheap by-product of wheat milling, can be developed as a nutraceutical to prevent vascular dementia, a disease for which there is no approved pharmaceutical treatment.

• Journal of Korean Physical Therapy Science
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.12-24
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• 2020

Purpose: This study was to investigate effects of aerobic exercise based korean traditional dance on vascular health, muscle strength and balance in the elderly with dementia. Design: Quasi-experiment design. Methods: Forty-two elderly participated in this study. All subjects were assigned experimental group (n=21), control group (n=21). Data were collected March to September 2019. Subjects in the experimental group performed aerobic exercise based korean traditional dance(three times a week, 30-50 minutes session, 24 sessions). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, independent t-test with the SPSS version 25.0 Results: The experimental group showed significantly increased vascular health (p<0.05), upper extremity strength (p=.022), dynamic balance (p=.026) compared to the control group. Conclusion: These results suggest that aerobic exercise based koran traditional dance is recommend a regular exercise program to enhance on vascular health, muscle strength and balance in the elderly with dementia.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.102-111
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• 2007

Dementia is a major burden for many countries including South Korea, where life expectancy is continuously growing and the proportion of aged people is rapidly growing. Neurodegenerative disorders, such as, Alzheimer disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal degeneration, Huntington disease, can cause dementia, and cerebrovascular disease also can cause dementia. Depression or hypothyroidism also can cause cognitive deficits, but they are reversible by management of underlying cause unlike the forementioned dementias. Therefore these are called pseudodementia. We are entering an era of dementia care that will be based upon the identification of potentially modifiable risk factors and early disease markers, and the application of new drugs postpone progression of dementias or target specific proteins that cause dementia. Efficient pharmacologic treatment of dementia needs not only to distinguish underlying causes of dementia but also to be installed as soon as possible. Therefore, differential diagnosis and early diagnosis of dementia are utmost importance. F-18 FDG PET is useful for clarifying dementing diseases and is also useful for early detection of the diseases. Purpose of this article is to review the current value of FDG PET for dementing diseases including differential diagnosis of dementia and prediction of evolving dementia.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.30-71
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• 1999

There has been a dramatic increase in public awareness regarding dementia during recent years. However, dementia remains a family affair and patients do not receive adequate care in Korea. This study aims to assist patients and their caregivers by establishing Home and Community based Long-Term Care in a city. The data collected for analysis include five main categories: dementia prevalence, limitations of daily activities of patients, burden of caregivers, the services that patient's family want to utilize, the resources that handle dementia in the community. Major findings can be summarized as follows: 1)The prevalence rate of dementia for elderly people is 13.1 per 100 persons. Alzheimer's disease amount to 38.9% of dementia patients and vascular dementia account for 36.7% of them 2)Eight out of ten patients have mild dementia. Almost all patients have normal ADL. IADL, however, shows different picture. In every items of IADL, about 60% of patients reveals some limitations. 3)The proportion of patients who had medical diagnosis is as low as 20%. Families of patients think dementia as normal aging process and medical doctors in the community do not give special concern to dementia patients. 4)Caregivers does not have proper social support. They suffer from long care time, experience large obstacles in respect of health, daily living, and social activity. 5)Health center and Community welfare center have launched some programs-consultation, home-visiting nursing, day care center, voluntary force mobilization and so on-for dementia patients. But they do not perform expected roles and functions because of lack of skilled personnels and inadequate coordination of relevant organizations for dementia care. 6)Families of dementia patients prefer home helper and home-visiting nurse to hospitalization. For the future, however, demand for institution-based long-term services will increase. We develope community dementia care model based on above findings as follows: 1)Health center execute community cardiovascular control program for the prevention of vascular dementia. 2)Refer to epidemiologic characteristics of patients and preference of family, the most urgent task for dementia care in this city is to expand and organize Home and Community based Long-Term Care. 3)For the continuous and comprehensive care, care plan for a patient must be prepared. Case management team should be builded to prepare this plan and coordinate relevant resources. 4)Special long-term care unit for dementia will be needed in a near future. This unit should have multiple functions, such as day-care center, short stay facility, training center for relevant personnels, besides long-term nursing home considering effective care of dementia and efficient operation of the facility. 5)Voluntary workers deserve their due efforts. Incentive mechanisms must be developed to activate voluntary activities.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.5150-5155
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• 2011

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VD) are the most common dementia. In this paper, we proposed a region selection for classification of AD, VD and normal (NOR) based on micro-Raman spectra from platelet. The preprocessing step is a smoothing followed by background elimination to the original spectra. Then we applied the minmax method for normalization. After the inspection of the preprocessed spectra, we found that 725-777, 1504-1592 and 1632-1700 $cm^{-1}$ regions are the most discriminative features in AD, VD and NOR spectra. We applied the feature transformation using PCA (principal component analysis) and NMF (nonnegative matrix factorization). The classification result of MAP(maximum a posteriori probability) involving 327 spectra transformed features using proposed local region showed about 92.8 % true classification average rate.

• Journal of Society of Preventive Korean Medicine
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.51-67
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• 2011

The average human life span has increased due to the development of modern medicine and science, resulting in prolonged life expectancy and increase in the population counts of the geriatric age group. In particular, a dramatic increase of elderly patients suffering from senile disorders including neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's disease(AD), and vascular dementia has become a serious social problem in public health. Thus, this study is aimed to summarize available clinical trial data on several commonly used medicines include donepezil, rivastigmine, galantamine, memantine and oriental medicine, and examine the effect of oriental medicine combined with western medicine in the treatment of patients with senile disorders using the data from literature reviews and survey studies.

• Dementia and Neurocognitive Disorders
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.59-70
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• 2022

Background and Purpose: Neurofilament light chain (NfL) has been considered as a biomarker for neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease (AD). We measured plasma NfL levels in older adults with cognitive complaints and evaluated their clinical usefulness in AD. Methods: Plasma levels of NfL, measured by using the single molecule array method, were acquired in a total of 113 subjects consisting of subjective cognitive decline (SCD; n=14), mild cognitive impairment (MCI; n=37), or dementia of Alzheimer type (DAT; n=62). Plasma NfL level was compared among three groups, and its association with cognitive and functional status was also analyzed. Results: After adjusting for age, plasma NfL level was higher in subjects with DAT (65.98±84.96 pg/mL), compared to in subjects with SCD (16.90±2.54 pg/mL) or MCI (25.53±10.42 pg/mL, p=0.004). NfL levels were correlated with scores of the mini-mental state examination (r=-0.242, p=0.021), clinical dementia rating (CDR) (r=0.291, p=0.005), or CDR-sum of boxes (r=0.276, p=0.008). Just for participants who performed amyloid positron emission tomography (PET), the levels were different between subjects with PET (-) (n=17, 25.95±13.25 pg/mL) and PET (+) (n=16, 63.65±81.90 pg/mL, p=0.010). Additionally, plasma NfL levels were different between vascular dementia and vascular MCI, and between Parkinson's disease- dementia and no dementia. Conclusions: This pilot study shows that in subjects with DAT, plasma NfL levels increase. Plasma NfL level correlated with cognitive and functional status. Further longitudinal studies may help to apply the plasma NfL levels to AD, as a potential biomarker for the diagnosis and predicting progression.

• Toxicological Research
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• v.17
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• pp.257-261
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• 2001

Recently, a traditional medicine called Gouteng-san, which consists of eleven herbs, was reported to be effective in treating vascular dementia with a double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Gout-eng-san is also used for patients with vascular dementia in combination with Si-Wu-Tang. The effect of Gouteng-san and Si-Wu-Tang on deficit of learning behavior was investigated using step-down passive avoidance task in mice. Hot-water extract of Gouteng-san (1.5 and 6 g/kg, p.o.) significantly prolonged the step-down latency shortened by scopolamine. The extract of Uncaria hook (150 mg/kg, p.o.), one of the component herb of Gouteng-san, significantly prevented the decrease in the latency after scopolamine. Hot-water extract of Si-Wu-Tang (1.5 and 6 g/kg of dried herbs, p.o.) prevented dose-dependently scopola-mine-induced disruption qf learning behavior. Si-Wu-Tang also prevented the ischemia-induced deficit of learning behavior. Both hot water extract of peony and angelica (1.5 g/kg, p.o.), which are component herbs qf Si-Wu-Tang, prevented the scopolamine-induced learning behavior deficit. Scopolamine (10 uM) suppressed long-term potentiation (LTP) of population spike in the CA1 region of the rat hippocampal slices. Peoniflorin (0.1~ 1uM) extracted from paeony root significantly ameliorated scopolamine-induced inhibition of LTR These results suggest that improvement of deficit of learning behavior by Gouteng-san and Si-Wu-Tang is mediated by direct and/or indirect activation of the cholinergic system in the brain.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.30 no.8
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• pp.1253-1262
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• 2006

This research explored the clothing behavior of dementia inpatient according to the dementia severity, dementia type and demographic characteristics. Data were collected by surveying 149 dementia inpatients and their caregivers. The collected data were analysed through frequency analysis, $X^2$-test, one way ANOVA, Duncan's multiple range test and t-test. The results were as follows: First, the dementia severity was classified into the severe, moderate and mild dementia by K-MMSE and the dementia types were composed of Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia and the others. The severe dementia group and Alzheimer's disease group included the more aged and more female inpatients. And the severe dementia group was lower self-support of the basic activities of daily living than the mild dementia group. Second, the change motions of the dementia inpatient's clothing differed from the clothing item and dementia severity. That is, the motions for pants were more difficult than those for upper garment. And the motions for severe dementia group were more difficult than those for the mild dementia group. Third, there were significant differences among the three groups by dementia severity and between the male and female dementia inpatient in the clothing behavior. Most of abnormal clothing behaviors were found in the severe dementia group. The positive clothing behaviors appeared in the mild dementia group. And interests of clothing and appearance appeared in the female inpatients.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.383-390
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• 2020

The present study was conducted to examine the differences and correlations between verbal fluency and story comprehension according to the working memory(WM) capacity, and to find out what WM factors influence the linguistic competence in Alzheimer's disease(AD) and vascular dementia(VaD) groups each consisting of 15 patients. The results of their performance produced firstly significant differences in phonemic fluency, story comprehension, delayed recall and recognition task between the two groups. Further analysis shows that VaD group had significant correlations between the scores of story comprehension and the recognition test scores additionally. These findings suggest that it is possible to differentiate the two groups even by story comprehension tasks and WM. In conclusion, the clinical application of the results is likely to contribute to appropriate treatment plans and effective interventions for elderly with AD and VaD as well as to improve the classification criteria for both types of dementia.