• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.170-177
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• 2022

In mountainous regions, wild herbs which can also be edible in nature for humans and animals possess a wide array of biologically diversified properties. It is because of the fact that due to the cold weather of mountains; they are enriched in certain kinds of phytochemicals such as anti-oxidants, anti-inflammatory and many more. One such kind of an herb is Aster scaber (AS) in Korean. It is a widely cultivated culinary herb in Korean peninsula and used as a side dish in Korean culinary cuisine. In view of its extensive use in cuisine, we geared to unravel the anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory effects of AS in murine alveolar macrophage cell line (MH-S). 2,2'-Azino-bis-3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS) and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picryl-hydrazyl-hydrate (DPPH) assays revealed a dose dependent (7.8~1,000 ㎍/mL) inhibition of oxidation by AS 70% ethanol (ASE) extract as compared to Trolox and Ascorbic acid respectively. Nitric oxide assay (NO) showed a dose dependent decrease (5~40 ㎍/mL) in MH-S cells with ASE when stimulated with Coal Fly Ash (CFA). Moreover, this dose for NO reduction was also found to be least cytotoxic for cells as determined by cellular viability (MTT) assay. The gene expression of pro-inflammatory mediators (iNOS and COX-2) and cytokines (IL-6 and IL-1β) and were also dose dependently inhibited by ASE in MH-S cells through RT-PCR. Therefore, in light of these findings, AS exhibited a strong anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory agent. These results also justify the extensive use of this mountainous herb in culinary practices for beneficial effects on human health.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.10-21
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• 2022

In the South Korea, 47% of abandoned mines are suffering from the mining hazards such as the mine drainage (MD), the mine tailings and the waste rocks. Among them the mine drainage which has a low pH and the high concentration of heavy metals can directly contaminate rivers or soil and cause serious damages to human health. The natural/artificial treatment facilities by using neutralizers and coagulants for the mine drainage have been operated in domestic and most of heavy metals in mind drainage are precipitated and removed in the form of metal hydroxide, alumino-silicate or carbonate, generating a large amount of mine drainage treated sludge ('MDS' hereafter) by-product. The MDS has a large surface area and many functional groups, showing high efficiency on the fixation of heavy metals. The purpose of this study is to develop a ingenious heavy metal stabilizer that can effectively stabilize arsenic (As) and heavy metals in soil by recycling the MDS (two types of MDS: the acid mine drainage treated sludge (MMDS) and the coal mine drainage treated sludge (CMDS)). Various analyses, toxicity evaluations, and leaching reduction batch experiments were performed to identify the characteristics of MDS as the stabilizer for soils contaminated with As and heavy metals. As a result of batch experiments, the Pb stabilization efficiency of both of MDSs for soil A was higher than 90% and their Zn stabilization efficiencies were higher than 70%. In the case of soil B and C, which were contaminated with As, their As stabilization efficiencies were higher than 80%. Experimental results suggested that both of MDSs could be successfully applied for the As and heavy metal contaminated soil as the soil stabilizer, because of their low unit price and high stabilization efficiency for As and hevry metals.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.184-202
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• 2023

Purpose: This study investigates the necessary educational materials from the perspective of caregivers managing food allergies of preschoolers. Methods: An online survey enrolled 400 caregivers of preschoolers with food allergies. The study was conducted in July 2022, and data were analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 25. Results: The caregivers of preschoolers with food allergies showed low food allergy knowledge. The highest percentage of incorrect answers were for items related to the cause (74.2%) and response (65.2%) to food allergies. Moreover, categorizing the levels of knowledge as high, medium, and low, we found that caregivers with younger children exhibited a better understanding of food allergies. Approximately 56.9% of subjects in the high class were caregivers with preschoolers under three years, whereas caregivers with preschoolers over four years comprised 43.2% of the high-class subjects. Regarding food allergy treatment, four questions measured how well the caregivers tended to the children. With higher levels of knowledge, caregivers were more likely to read nutrient information and check for food allergens. The caregivers of preschoolers who were clinically diagnosed with food allergies demonstrated a higher percentage of using separate ingredients and cooking utensils. Conclusion: This study shows how the caregivers' knowledge levels are critical in managing and treating food allergies among preschoolers. With caregivers' lower knowledge of food allergies and preschoolers younger than four years, self-diagnosis of food allergies and existing food allergies were not managed efficiently. Hence, customized education for caregivers is essential to improve their knowledge level regarding limiting foods that may cause allergies, reading food labels, and using ingredients and cooking utensils separately.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.67 no.4
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• pp.335-341
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• 2022

Proso millet (Pacnicum miliaceum L.) has a various of functional substances, so the demand is increasing as interest in human health benefits. In particular, miliacin, a triterpenoid in proso millet, is known to be effective in hair loss due to its promoting metabolism and proliferation of keratinocytes and showing protective effects from apoptosis. In this study, proso millet oil was extracted and analyzed by GC/MS using the extraction method of unsaponifiable substances after saponification reaction. The components of proso millet oil were confirmed through qualitative analysis by GC/MS. The miliacin content of 5 varieties of proso millet and 2 varieties of foxtail for comparison was analyzed. In the result, components of pentacyclic triterpenes such as β-amyrine and lupeol were detected in proso millet, and the content of miliacin was highest in Hallachal at 370.38±0.04 ㎍/100 mg oil. In addition, the content of miliacin was not detected in Samdachal and Samdamae, which are varieties of foxtail millet.

• Korean journal of applied entomology
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• v.61 no.3
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• pp.481-496
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• 2022

In order to establish an effective pest control strategy, we investigated the occurrence of lepidopteran insects in the major trees growing in urban forests from 2019 to 2021. In total, we recorded 76 species of 14 families in Prunus spp., 40 species of eight families in Acer spp., 43 species of 10 families in Zelkova serrata, 28 species of seven families in Rhododendron spp., and 10 species of four families in Hibiscus syriacus. Among these, Hyphantria cunea and Lymantria dispar were recorded from all five tree taxa monitored. The most frequently occurring species in the different tree groups were as follows: H. cunea and Phalera flavescens in Prunus yedoensis, Epinotia ulmicola in Z. serrata, and Rehimena surusalis in H. syriacus. H. cunea also occurred in Rhododendron spp. and Acer spp., although the numbers were lower than those recorded in Prunus spp. and Z. serrata. Our results highlight the importance of focusing on the frequency of occurrence of lepidopteran insects in Prunus spp. and Z. serrata, whereas the presence of these insects in both Acer spp. and Rhododendron spp. Appears to be less problematic. From the perspective of reducing the risks to human health, our findings indicate that the application of pheromones for monitoring lepidopteran species and the use of mating disruptors would be desirable approaches that would contribute to minimizing the spraying of pesticides in urban forests.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.231-239
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• 2023

Public sewage treatment facilities are a necessary infrastructure for public health that treat sewage generated in cities and basin living areas and discharge it into rivers or seas. Recently, the role of public sewage treatment is receiving attention as a place of use of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), which analyzes human specific metabolic emissions or biomarkers present in sewage to investigate the environment to which the population is exposed in the water drain. WBE is mainly applied to investigate legal and water-law drug use or to predict and analyze the lifestyle of local residents. WBE has also been applied to predict and analyze the degree of infectious diseases that are prevalent worldwide, such as COVID-19. Since sewage flowing into public sewage treatment facilities includes living information of the population living in the drainage area, it is easy to collect basic data to predict the confirmation and spread of infectious diseases. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a new role of public sewage treatment facilities as an infrastructure necessary for WBE that can obtain information on the confirmation and spread of infectious diseases other than the traditional role of public sewage treatment. In South Korea, the sewerage supply rate is about 95.5% and the number of public sewage treatment facility is 4,209. This means that the infrastructure of sewerage is fully established. However, to successfully drive for WBE , research on monitoring and big-data analysis is needed.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.41-46
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• 2023

Human urine is a process of excreting waste products in the blood, and it is easy to collect and contains various substances. Urinalysis is used to check for diseases, health conditions, and urinary tract infections. There are three methods of urinalysis: physical property test, chemical test, and microscopic test, and chemical test results can be easily confirmed using urine test strips. A variety of items can be tested on the urine test strip, through which various diseases can be identified. Recently, with the spread of smart phones, research on reading urine test strips using smart phones is being conducted. There is a method of detecting and reading the color change of a urine test strip using a smartphone. This method uses the RGB values and the color difference formula to discriminate. However, there is a problem in that accuracy is lowered due to various environmental factors. This paper applies a deep learning model to solve this problem. In particular, color discrimination of a urine test strip is improved in a smartphone using a lightweight CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) model. CNN is a useful model for image recognition and pattern finding, and a lightweight version is also available. Through this, it is possible to operate a deep learning model on a smartphone and extract accurate urine test results. Urine test strips were taken in various environments to prepare deep learning model training images, and a urine test service application was designed using MobileNet V3.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.1245-1246
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• 2022

Walkability is an indicator of how much pedestrians are willing to walk and how well a walking environment is created. As walking can promote pedestrians' mental and physical health, there has been increasing focus on improving walkability in different ways. Thus, plenty of research has been undertaken to measure walkability. When measuring walkability, there are many objective and subjective variables. Subjective variables include a feeling of safety, pleasure, or comfort, which can significantly affect perceived walkability. However, these subjective factors are difficult to measure by making the walkability index more reliant on objective and physical factors. Because many subjective variables are associated with human emotional states, understanding pedestrians' emotional states provides an opportunity to measure the subjective walkability variables more quantitatively. Pedestrians' emotions can be examined through surveys, but there are social and economic difficulties involved when conducting surveys. Recently, an increasing number of studies have employed physiological data to measure pedestrians' stress responses when navigating unpleasant environmental barriers on their walking paths. However, studies investigating the emotional states of pedestrians in the walking environment, including assessing their positive emotions felt, such as pleasure, have rarely been conducted. Using wearable devices, this study examined the various emotional states of pedestrians affected by the walking environment. Specifically, this study aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of monitoring biometric data, such as electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate variability (HRV), using wearable devices as an indicator of pedestrians' emotional states-both pleasant-unpleasant and aroused-relaxed states. To this end, various walking environments with different characteristics were set up to collect and analyze the pedestrians' biometric data. Subsequently, the subjects wearing the wearable devices were allowed to walk on the experimental paths as usual. After the experiment, the valence (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant) and arousal (i.e., activated or relaxed) scale of the pedestrians was identified through a bipolar dimension survey. The survey results were compared with many potentially relevant EDA and HRV signal features. The research results revealed the potential for physiological responses to indicate the pedestrians' emotional states, but further investigation is warranted. The research results were expected to provide a method to measure the subjective factors of walkability by measuring emotions and monitoring pedestrians' positive or negative feelings when walking to improve the walking environment. However, due to the lack of samples and other internal and external factors influencing emotions (which need to be studied further), it cannot be comprehensively concluded that the pedestrians' emotional states were affected by the walking environment.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Laboratory Science
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.132-142
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• 2023

Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing was performed in the diagnostic immunology laboratory of the Seoul National University Hospital. Among 611 HLA-DR tests, specific bead reactions suspected of being false positive and false negative in Lot 20 reagents were found. Therefore, we aimed to identify the factors causing cut-off corrections by examining cases where cut-off corrections were not made for 533 test results and cases where cut-off corrections were made for 78 cases after the cut-off corrections of specific beads. Frequency analysis was conducted to verify the demographic characteristics, and descriptive statistics were used to assess the humidity in the laboratory as a variable. Cross-tabulation was done to examine the association between cut-off corrections and demographic characteristics. Independent samples t-tests were conducted to verify the difference in humidity based on cut-off corrections. Finally, logistic regression analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between humidity levels and the rate of cut-off corrections, and results showed as the humidity level in the laboratory highs, the number of cut-off corrections decreased by a factor of 0.986. This suggests cut-off corrections rate increases when the humidity lowers. Therefore, it indicates that humidity in the laboratory is also a factor that affects HLA typing results.

• Nutrition Research and Practice
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.228-240
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• 2023

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Cocoa consumption is associated with health benefits due to its high content of polyphenols. However, the effects of short-term cocoa consumption remain unclear. We aimed to determine the effects generated by cocoa consumption (for 7 days) in young adults in normoweight and class II obesity. SUBJECTS/METHODS: Before-and-after study was carried out in normoweight (NW) (n = 15) and class II obesity (CIIO) (n = 15) young adults. The NW and CIIO participants consumed 25 and 39 g of cocoa, respectively, per day for 7 days. The effect of cocoa consumption was evaluated on the lipid profile, insulin resistance (IR), and inflammation. Oxidative damage was also examined by assessing the biomarkers of oxidative damage in plasma. In addition, recombinant human insulin was incubated with blood obtained from the participants, and the molecular damage to the hormone was analyzed. RESULTS: Cocoa consumption resulted in decreased low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol in both groups (P = 0.04), while the total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and triglycerides were maintained at the recommended levels. Initially, IR was detected in the CIIO group (homeostasis model assessment [HOMA] = 4.78 ± 0.4), which is associated with molecular damage to insulin. Interestingly, intervention with cocoa resulted in improved IR (HOMA = 3.14 ± 0.31) (P = 0.0018) as well as molecular damage to insulin. Finally, cocoa consumption significant decreased the arginase activity (P = 0.0249) in the CIIO group; this is a critical enzymatic activity in the inflammatory process associated with obesity. CONCLUSIONS: The short-term consumption of cocoa improves the lipid profile, exerts anti-inflammatory effects, and protects against oxidative damage. Results of this study indicate that cocoa consumption can potentially improve IR and restore a healthy redox status.