• Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.425-431
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• 2015

Estrogen deficiency is associated with increased body weight and fat mass, resulting in obesity-associated complications such as insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, and type-2 diabetes. The present study was performed to investigate the effect of black rice (Oryza sativa L.) extracts (BRE) on body weight and fat mass in ovariectomized rats. Ovariectomized (or sham-operated) rats were randomly blocked into three groups (n=8~10 per group): sham operated group (S), ovariectomized control group (OVX), and ovariectomized group with BRE 30 mg/kg B.W. (BRE). High fat diet (fat calories 45%) was fed to all experimental rats for 12 weeks. Final body weight, weight gain, and body fat weight showed significant increases in the OVX group, whereas they were reduced by BRE supplementation. Serum TAG, T-chol level, and adipocyte size were not significantly different among the three groups. However, ovariectomy-induced hepatic steatosis was improved in BRE-treated group. Moreover, in the BRE group, serum leptin levels was significantly lower and fecal total lipid concentrations was significantly higher compared to the OVX group. The gathered data suggest that BRE is a potentially useful ingredient to protect against estrogen deficiency-related obesity and its related diseases.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.151-157
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• 2013

Purpose: Warfarin is the most widely used anticoagulant drug for preventing cardiovascular diseases after ischemic stroke and thromboembolism related to atrial fibrillation, artificial heart valves, deep vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism. Warfarin is commonly used in combination with other drugs such as diuretics in order to treat the comorbidity. Although several warfarin-diuretics interactions have been reported, the results are conflicting. Therefore, the initial aim of this study was to identify the effects of diuretics on the warfarin response in patients with atrial fibrillation. Methods: One hundred forty six patients with atrial fibrillation who were on anticoagulation therapy with warfarin and maintained INR levels of 2-3 for three consecutive times were followed up, retrospectively. Stable warfarin doses and INR per stable warfarin dose were compared according to age, gender, comorbidity, and concurrent medication. The stable warfarin dose was defined as the maintenance dose of warfarin of the measured patient whose INR was within the target INR range more than 3 times consecutively. Results: The differences of stable warfarin doses in patients with ($3.22{\pm}1.21$ mg/day) and without ($3.58{\pm}1.14$ mg/day) diuretics were marginally significant (P=0.069). On the other hand, stable warfarin doses were $2.97{\pm}1.10$ mg/day in patients with thiazide (n=36) and $3.58{\pm}1.14$ mg/day in patients without diuretics (n=82), which was statistically significant (p=0.009). INR values per stable warfarin dose in patients with diuretics and thiazide were $0.84{\pm}0.31$ and $0.90{\pm}0.34$, respectively, which were statistically different from those without diuretics ($0.72{\pm}0.21$, P=0.010 and P=0.006, respectively). Age, gender, and concurrent use of thiazide diuretics were found to have significant influence on the warfarin response from multivariate analysis. Conclusion: Our study showed that the concurrent use of thiazide diuretics could increase the response of warfarin in patient with atrial fibrillation. Therefore, clinicians should be aware that warfarin dose needs to be adjusted when it is used with thiazide diuretics concomitantly.

• Journal of Ginseng Research
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.475-482
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• 2020

Background: Active natural ingredients, especially small molecules, have recently received wide attention as modifiers used to treat neurodegenerative disease by promoting neurogenic regeneration of neural stem cell (NSC) in situ. 20(S)-protopanaxadiol (PPD), one of the bioactive ingredients in ginseng, possesses neuroprotective properties. However, the effect of PPD on NSC proliferation and differentiation and its mechanism of action are incompletely understood. Methods: In this study, we investigated the impact of PPD on NSC proliferation and neuronal lineage differentiation through activation of the Wnt/glycogen synthase kinase (GSK)-3β/β-catenin pathway. NSC migration and proliferation were investigated by neurosphere assay, Cell Counting Kit-8 assay, and EdU assay. NSC differentiation was analyzed by Western blot and immunofluorescence staining. Involvement of the Wnt/GSK3β/β-catenin pathway was examined by molecular simulation and Western blot and verified using gene transfection. Results: PPD significantly promoted neural migration and induced a significant increase in NSC proliferation in a time- and dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, a remarkable increase in anti-microtubule-associated protein 2 expression and decrease in nestin protein expression were induced by PPD. During the differentiation process, PPD targeted and stimulated the phosphorylation of GSK-3β at Ser9 and the active forms of β-catenin, resulting in activation of the Wnt/GSK-3β/β-catenin pathway. Transfection of NSCs with a constitutively active GSK-3β mutant at S9A significantly hampered the proliferation and neural differentiation mediated by PPD. Conclusion: PPD promotes NSC proliferation and neural differentiation in vitro via activation of the Wnt/GSK-3β/β-catenin pathway by targeting GSK-3β, potentially having great significance for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.107-119
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• 2020

The deep neural networks (DNN) that can replicate the behavior of the human expert who recognizes the characteristics of ECG waveform have been developed and studied to analyze ECG. However, although the existing DNNs can not provide the explanations for their decisions, those trials have attempted to determine whether patients have certain diseases or not and those decisions could not be accepted because of the absence of relating theoretical basis. In addition, these DNNs required a lot of training data to obtain sufficient accuracy in spite of the difficulty in the acquisition of relating clinical data. In this study, a small-sized continuous data processing DNN (C-DNN) was suggested to determine the simple characteristics of ECG wave that were not required additional explanations about its decisions and the C-DNN can be easily trained with small training data. Although it can analyze small input data that was selected in narrow region on whole ECG, it can continuously scan all ECG data and find important points such as start and end points of P, QRS and T waves within a short time. The star and end points of ECG waves determined by the C-DNNs were compared with the results performed by human experts to estimate the accuracies of the C-DNNs. The C-DNN has 150 inputs, 51 outputs, two hidden layers and one output layer. To find the start and end points, two C-DNNs were trained through deep learning technology and applied to a parameter acquisition algorithms. 12 lead ECG data measured in four patients and obtained through PhysioNet was processed to make training data by human experts. The accuracy of the C-DNNs were evaluated with extra data that were not used at deep learning by comparing the results between C-DNNs and human experts. The averages of the time differences between the C-DNNs and experts were 0.1 msec and 13.5 msec respectively and those standard deviations were 17.6 msec and 15.7 msec. The final step combining the results of C-DNN through the waveforms of 12 leads was successfully determined all 33 waves without error that the time differences of human experts decision were over 20 msec. The reliable decision of the ECG wave's start and end points benefits the acquisition of accurate ECG parameters such as the wave lengths, amplitudes and intervals of P, QRS and T waves.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.11-21
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• 2020

Cardio-cerebrovascular diseases (CCD) account for 24% of the causes of death to Koreans and its proportion is the highest except cancer. Currently, the risk of the cardiovascular disease for domestic patients is based on the Framingham risk score (FRS), but accuracy tends to decrease because it is a foreign guideline. Also, it can't score the risk of cerebrovascular disease. CCD is hard to predict, because it is difficult to analyze the features of early symptoms for prevention. Therefore, proper prediction method for Koreans is needed. The purpose of this paper is validating IG-MLP (Information Gain - Multilayer Perceptron) evaluation based feature selection method using CCD data with simulation. The proposed method uses the raw data of the 4^th ~ 7^th of The Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES). To select the important feature of CCD, analysis on the attributes using IG-MLP are processed, finally CCD prediction ANN model using optimize feature set is provided. Proposed method can find important features of CCD prediction of Koreans, and ANN model could predict more accurate CCD for Koreans.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.247-256
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• 2018

3-Hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitors (statins) are widely used drugs for lowering blood lipid levels and preventing cardiovascular diseases. HMG-CoA reductase is a key enzyme to control the biosynthesis of cholesterol. We have tested HMG-CoA reductase-inhibitory activity on the flavonoids of 98 species in vitro. The anti-hypercholesterolemic activities of flavonoids were studied using an HMG-CoA reductase assay equipped with a 96-well UV plate. This assay was based on the spectrophotometric measurement of the decrease in absorbance, which represents the oxidation of NADPH by the catalytic subunit of HMG-CoA reductase in the presence of the substrate HMG-CoA. Among the clinically available statins, pravastatin was used as a positive control. Among the tested compounds, kuraridin, morin and sophoraflavanone G showed strong inhibition activities. In particular, morin and sophoraflavanone G inhibited HMG-CoA reductase by 45.0% and 54.6% at a concentration of $10{\mu}g/ml$, and the $IC_{50}$ values were calculated to $13.31{\mu}g/ml$ and $7.26{\mu}g/ml$ respectively.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.28 no.9
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• pp.999-1006
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• 2018

Obesity is epidemic worldwide and has reportedly been linked to the progression of several metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. The natural products are decreasing the side effects of medicines used for obesity and also have health benefits dut to their numerous bioactive compounds. In this context, Artemisia scoparia is a widespread plant that has been suggested as possessing various types of bioactivity. In this study, the crude extract from A. scoparia (ASE) was tested for its ability to suppress adipogenesis in mouse 3T3-L1 pre-adipocytes. The molecular pathway by which ASE affects differentiation of 3T3-L1 cells was also investigated. The introduction of ASE to differentiating 3T3-L1 pre-adipocytes resulted in suppressed adipogenesis, as confirmed by decreased intracellular lipid accumulation. The differentiating cells treated with 10 and $100{\mu}g/ml$ of ASE showed 21.9 and 29.0% less lipid accumulation, respectively, than untreated adipocytes. In addition, the results indicated that ASE treatment lowered the expression of the adipogenesis-related factors $PPAR{\gamma}$, $C/EBP{\alpha}$, and SREBP-1c. Furthermore, treating with ASE notably decreased levels of phosphorylated p38, ERK, and JNK in 3T3-L1 adipocytes. These results indicate that ASE exhibits significant anti-adipogenesis activity by downregulating the MAPK and $PPAR{\gamma}$ pathways during the differentiation of 3T3-L1 pre-adipocytes. Therefore, A. scoparia may be a potential source of natural products against obesity.

• KSBB Journal
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.376-383
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• 2006

Pine needle(Pinus densiflora sieb, et zucc) extract has been used to improve cardiovascular disorders, detoxification of nicotine, the infirmities of age and curing diseases of unidentified symptoms. It has various useful components including amino acids, vitamin C, terpenoids and chlorophyll. In this study we have identified 8 different yeast strains that are developed spontaneously causing self fermentation in the extract. The self-fermented pine extract(SFPE) inhibited the growth of some bacterial strains like E. coli, Bacillus subtilis and Staphylococcus aureus. The SFPE($0.2{\mu}{\ell}/ml{\sim}0.3{\mu}{\ell}/ml$) showed 90% NBT superoxide scavenging activities which is similar for all tested samples of different ages. The 7 years old SFPE(0.15 mg/ml and 0.3 mg/ml) caused relaxation of spontaneous contraction and relaxation rhythm of thoracic arterial tissues from rat. Therefore, SFPE has useful effects such as antibacterial, antioxidant and improved blood circulation and could be a good source of functional food development.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.88-98
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• 2012

Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) plays an essential role in the regulation of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDLC) and triglyceride levels, which have been closely associated with cardiovascular diseases. Genetic studies in European have shown that LPL single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are strongly associated with lipid levels. However, studies about the influence of interactions between LPL SNPs and lifestyle factors have not been sufficiently performed. Here, we examine if LPL polymorphisms, as well as their interaction with lifestyle factors, influence lipid concentrations in a Korean population. A two-stage association study was performed using genotype data for SNPs on the LPL gene, including the 3' flanking region from 7,536 (stage 1) and 3,703 (stage 2) individuals. The association study showed that 15 SNPs and 4 haplotypes were strongly associated with HDLC (lowest $p=2.86{\times}10^{-22}$) and triglyceride levels (lowest $p=3.0{\times}10^{-15}$). Interactions between LPL polymorphisms and lifestyle factors (lowest $p=9.6{\times}10^{-4}$) were also observed on lipid concentrations. These findings suggest that there are interaction effects of LPL polymorphisms with lifestyle variables, including energy intake, fat intake, smoking, and alcohol consumption, as well as effects of LPL polymorphisms themselves, on lipid concentrations in a Korean population.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.639-648
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• 2013

Metabolic syndrome is the most important risk factors of cardiovascular diseases So, it is judged that Quality of life of persons with metabolic syndrome inevitably deteriorate. For the purpose, the study aims to analyse the number of risk factors, and the relationship between abnormality of each risk factor and Quality of life, targeting adult women aged more than 19. For this study, data from the National Health and Nutrition Behavior Survey in 2007 and 2008 were incorporated and 4,365 subjects were collected for the study. Version 17.0 SPSS was used for data analysis. Statistical significance was defined as p<0.05. As a result of the study, the prevalence rate of metabolic syndrome was 24.2%. According to the number of risk factors of metabolic syndrome the regression coefficient of Quality of life was -0.024 when the number of risk factor was one, -0.048 when there were two risk factors, -0.090 when there were three risk factors, -0.117 when there were four risk factors, and -0.168 when there were five risk factors. The regression coefficient(abnormal/normal)of risk factors of metabolic syndrome were as follows; Waist circumference -0.035, Blood pressure was -0.064, Fasting glucose was -0,026 and HDL cholesterol was -0.012. In conclusion, as it was discovered that risk factors of metabolic syndrome had significant relations with Quality of life, it is suggested that the relations between some significant variables and Quality of life should be actively considered so that adult women can perceive metabolic syndrome properly and endeavor to improve their Quality of life.