• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.266-271
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• 2008

Background: Estimation of the probability of a patient having an acute pulmonary embolism (PE) for patients with a suspected PE are well established in North America and Europe. However, an assessment of the prediction rules for a PE has not been clearly defined in Korea. The aim of this study is to assess the prediction rules for patients with a suspected PE in Korea. Methods: We performed a retrospective study of 210 inpatients or patients that visited the emergency ward with a suspected PE where computed tomography pulmonary angiography was performed at a single institution between January 2005 and March 2007. Simplified Wells rules and revised Geneva rules were used to estimate the clinical probability of a PE based on information from medical records. Results: Of the 210 patients with a suspected PE, 49 (19.5%) patients had an actual diagnosis of a PE. The proportion of patients classified by Wells rules and the Geneva rules had a low probability of 1% and 21%, an intermediate probability of 62.5% and 76.2%, and a high probability of 33.8% and 2.8%, respectively. The prevalence of PE patients with a low, intermediate and high probability categorized by the Wells rules and Geneva rules was 100% and 4.5% in the low range, 18.2% and 22.5% in the intermediate range, and 19.7% and 50% in the high range, respectively. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed that the revised Geneva rules had a higher accuracy than the Wells rules in terms of detecting PE. Concordance between the two prediction rules was poor ($\kappa$ coefficient=0.06). Conclusion: In the present study, the two prediction rules had a different predictive accuracy for pulmonary embolisms. Applying the revised Geneva rules to inpatients and emergency ward patients suspected of having PE may allow a more effective diagnostic process than the use of the Wells rules.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.487-522
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• 2016

The main purpose of this research is to investigate Korean adolescents' perception of stress experiences, and related social support. To this end, adolescents were asked about stress events, as well as stress symptoms, in their lives. Also, the adolescents were asked about the people that provided social support and the types of social support provided. The participants were 952 Korean adolescents (Primary 219; Middle 280; High 212; University 241). Among the four measures (stress events, stress symptoms, social supporters, and types of social support), the measure of stress symptoms yielded a reliability of Cronbach α=.88, while the remaining three measures yielded an inter-judger reliability of 89.6%, Kappa=.87. The results were as follows. First, for stress events, the most frequent responses were related to Academic Achievement, followed by Career/Job, Family Relations, Friend Relations, Lack of Capacity, and Financial Difficulties. For high-school students the most frequent responses were related to Academic Achievement, while for university students Career/Job. Second, for stress symptoms there were significant differences among the groups, in that the high-school students showed the highest level of symptoms, while primary school students the lowest. Third, for social supporters, the most frequent responses were related to Friends, followed by Myself, Parents, Teacher, Siblings, and Seniors/Juniors. As the groups aged (from primary to university), support from Friends and Seniors/ Juniors increased, while support from Parents decreased. Fourth, for the types of social support, the most frequent responses were related to Emotional Support, followed by None, Advice, Supporter Directly Solved Problem, and Talked with Me. The highest frequencies of responses were found for Emotional Support among all groups. As the groups aged (from primary to university), Advice increased while Supporter Directly Solved Problem decreased.

• Korean Journal of Adult Nursing
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.559-569
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• 2009

Purpose: This study was to examine the reliability and validity of Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) as a nutritional measurement for stroke patients. Methods: This was a methodological study performed from May 6 to June 10, 2009 at a tertiary university hospital in Seoul. For reliability of PG-SGA, inter-rater reliability was used for statistics. For concurrent validity, BMI and biomarkers were compared between PG-SGA 0 ~ 8 and ${\geq}$ 9. In addition, sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value of PG-SGA compared with SGA were calculated using a contingency table. For predictive validity, hospital day, complications, and readmission within 1-month after discharge were compared between PG-SGA 0 ~ 8 and ${\geq}$ 9. Results: Correlation of PG-SGA score between two observers was 0.83, and kappa value for the agreement of severe malnutrition was 0.78(all $p_s$ < .001). The scored PG-SGA showed high sensitivity and specificity (100% and 96.7%, respectively). Severe undernourished patients (PG-SGA ${\geq}$ 9) had significantly low TLC, protein, albumin, and prealbumin (all $p_s$ < .01) compared with non-undernourished patients (PG-SGA 0 ~ 8). Also, in severe undernourished patients, complications and readmission (all $p_s$ = 0.01) were more often represented, and hospital days (p = .013) were significantly delayed. Conclusion: PG-SGA is a reliable and valid measurement to assess nutritional status for stroke patients.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.44 no.6
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• pp.465-473
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• 2011

Dietary fatty acids are under intense research to identify anti-atherogenic mechanisms, so we investigated green tea powder (GT) as a protector against atherogenesis originating from lipid peroxidation such as 4-hydroxynonemal (4-HNE) and malondialdehyde (MDA) in different dietary fatty acid-treated apo E KO mice. Growth rate and dietary efficiency were lower in apo E KO mice with or without LA compared to wild type. Plasma total cholesterol (TC) and triacylglycerol (TG) did not correspond to values in other tissues, but TG in heart tissue decreased significantly by GT after linoleic acid (LA) or docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) was administered. LA induced apoptosis as evidenced by changes in aorta morphology and immunohistochemistry. Lipid peroxides (LPO) was increased in apo E KO mice with or without LA corresponding to the accumulation of 4-HNE or MDA in the proximal aorta above the atria. GT consumption tended to reduce the primary causal mechanism of atherogenic phenomena such as oxidizability in both LA and DHA treated atherogenic mice. A high polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) diet involved the changes on stress-induced apoptotic signaling by increasing caspase 3, cytochrome c, and nuclear factor-${\kappa}B$ in the heart tissue, but decreasing the bcl-2 protein. However, GT remarkably reduced the expression of apoptotic signaling, in contrast to the PUFA diet. Therefore, the potential of GT as an anti-atherosclerotic dietary antioxidant was tested in this study.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.321-336
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• 2020

We explore automated scoring models of scientific argumentation. We consider how a new analytical approach using a machine learning technique may enhance the understanding of spoken argumentation in the classroom. We sampled 2,605 utterances that occurred during a high school student's science class on molecular structure and classified the utterances into five argumentative elements. Next, we performed Text Preprocessing for the classified utterances. As machine learning techniques, we applied support vector machines, decision tree, random forest, and artificial neural network. For enhancing the identification of rebuttal elements, we used a heuristic feature-engineering method that applies experts' classification of morphemes of scientific argumentation.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.19
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• pp.8351-8359
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• 2014

Background: Recent epidemiological data have implicated human papilloma virus (HPV) infection in the pathogenesis of head and neck cancers, especially oropharyngeal cancers. Although, HPV has been detected in varied amounts in persons with oral dysplasia, leukoplakias and malignancies, its involvement in oral tongue carcinogenesis remains ambiguous. Materials and Methods: HPV DNA prevalence was assessed by PCR with formalin fixed paraffin embedded sections (n=167) of oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma patients and the physical status of the HPV16 DNA was assessed by qPCR. Immunohistochemistry was conducted for p16 evaluation. Results: We found the HPV prevalence in tongue cancers to be 51.2%, HPV 16 being present in 85.2% of the positive cases. A notable finding was a very poor concordance between HPV 16 DNA and p16 IHC findings (kappa<0.2). Further molecular classification of patients based on HPV16 DNA prevalence and p16 overexpression showed that patients with tumours showing p16 overexpression had increased hazard of death (HR=2.395; p=0.005) and disease recurrence (HR=2.581; p=0.002) irrespective of their HPV 16 DNA status. Conclusions: Our study has brought out several key facets which can potentially redefine our understanding of tongue cancer tumorigenesis. It has emphatically shown p16 overexpression to be a single important prognostic variable in defining a high risk group and depicting a poorer prognosis, thus highlighting the need for its routine assessment in tongue cancers. Another significant finding was a very poor concordance between p16 expression and HPV infection suggesting that p16 expression should possibly not be used as a surrogate marker for HPV infection in tongue cancers. Interestingly, the prognostic significance of p16 overexpression is different from that reported in oropharyngeal cancers. The mechanism of HPV independent p16 over expression in oral tongue cancers is possibly a distinct entity and needs to be further studied.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.128.1-128.1
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• 2016

Nitrided-metal gates on the high-${\kappa}$ dielectric material are widely studied because of their use for sub-20nm semiconductor devices and the academic interest for the evanescent states at the Si/insulator interface. Issues in these systems with the Si substrate are the electron mobility degradation and the reliability problems caused from N defects that permeates between the Si and the $SiO_2$ buffer layer interface from the nitrided-gate during the gate deposition process. Previous studies proposed the N defect structures with the gap states at the Si band gap region. However, recent experimental data shows the possibility of the most stable structure without any N defect state between the bulk Si valence band maximum (VBM) and conduction band minimum (CBM). In this talk, we present a new type of the N defect structure and the electronic structure of the proposed structure by using the first-principles calculation. We find that the pair structure of N atoms at the $Si/SiO_2$ interface has the lowest energy among the structures considered. In the electronic structure, the N pair changes the eigenvalue of the silicon-induced gap state (SIGS) that is spatially localized at the interface and energetically located just above the bulk VBM. With increase of the number of N defects, the SIGS gradually disappears in the bulk Si gap region, as a result, the system gap is increased by the N defect. We find that the SIGS shift with the N defect mainly originates from the change of the kinetic energy part of the eigenstate by the reduction of the SIGS modulation for the incorporated N defect.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.123-132
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• 2013

Obesity is consistently increasing in prevalence and can trigger insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Many lines of evidence have shown that macrophages play a major role in inflammation associated with obesity. This study was conducted to determine metformin, a widely prescribed drug for type 2 diabetes, would regulate inflammation through down-regulation of scavenger receptors in macrophages from obesity-induced type 2 diabetes. RAW 264.7 cells and peritoneal macrophages were stimulated with LPS to induce inflammation, and C57BL/6N mice were fed a high-fat diet to generate obesity-induced type 2 diabetes mice. Metformin reduced the production of NO, $PGE_2$ and pro-inflammatory cytokines ($IL-1{\beta}$, IL-6 and $TNF-{\alpha}$) through down-regulation of $NF-{\kappa}B$ translocation in macrophages in a dose-dependent manner. On the other hand, the protein expressions of anti-inflammatory cytokines, IL-4 and IL-10, were enhanced or maintained by metformin. Also, metformin suppressed secretion of $TNF-{\alpha}$ and reduced the protein and mRNA expression of $TNF-{\alpha}$ in obese mice as well as in macrophages. The expression of scavenger receptors, CD36 and SR-A, were attenuated by metformin in macrophages and obese mice. These results suggest that metformin may attenuate inflammatory responses by suppressing the production of $TNF-{\alpha}$ and the expressions of scavenger receptors.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.147-152
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• 2018

This prospective study was aimed to detect acute and chronic ocular toxoplasmosis by comparison of anti-Toxoplasma gondii IgM and IgG antibody levels and IgG avidity test. One hundred and seventeen patients with ocular toxoplasmosis (OT) who referred to the Farabi Eye Hospital, Tehran, Iran were included in this study. Of the patients, 77 cases were positive for anti-T. gondii IgG, and 8 cases were positive for anti-T. gondii IgM. IgG avidity test revealed 11, 4, and 102 cases were low, intermediate, and high, respectively, and 6.8% and 9.4% of cases were positive for IgM and IgG avidity tests, respectively (P=0.632). Agreement (Kappa value) between paired tests IgG-IgM, IgG-IgG avidity, and IgM-IgG avidity was 0.080, 0.099, and 0.721, respectively (P<0.05). This study showed that conventional serologic tests (IgM and IgG levels) and IgG avidity correlate well each other and can be used to differentiate recent infections from old OT. It seems that reactivated old infections rather than recently acquired infections are majority of Iranian OT patients.

• Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.43-54
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• 2011

Gene structure of copper/zinc-superoxide dismutase (Cu/Zn-SOD; sod1) was characterized in Hemibarbus mylodon (Teleostei; Cypriniformes), an endangered freshwater fish species in Korean peninsula. Full-length cDNA of H. mylodon SOD1 consisted of a 796-bp open reading frame sequence encoding 154 amino acids, and the deduced polypeptide sequence shared high sequence homology with other orthologs, particularly with regard to metal-coordinating ligands. Genomic structure of the H. mylodon sod1 gene (hmsod1; 1,911 bp from the ATG start codon to the stop codon) was typical quinquepartite (i.e., five exons interrupted by four introns); the lengths of the exons were similar among species belonging to various taxonomic positions. The molecular phylogeny inferred from sod1 genes in the teleost lineage was in accordance with the conventional taxonomic assumptions. 5'-flanking upstream region of hmsod1, obtained using the genome walking method, contained typical TATA and CAAT boxes. It also showed various transcription factor binding motifs that may be potentially involved in stress/immune response (e.g., sites for activating proteins or nuclear factor kappa B) or metabolism of xenobiotic compounds (e.g., xenobiotic response element; XRE). The hmsod1 transcripts were ubiquitously detected among tissues, with the liver and spleen showing the highest and lowest expression, respectively. An experimental challenge with Edwardsiella tarda revealed significant upregulation of the hmsod1 in kidney (4.3-fold) and spleen (3.1-fold), based on a real-time RT-PCR assay. Information on the molecular characteristics of this key antioxidant enzyme gene could be a useful basis for a biomarker-based assay to understand cellular stresses in this endangered fish species.