Fracture of the posterior lumbar ring apophysis or vertebral cartilaginous end plate is unusual, having previously been described only in adolescent males. In this report, we present 3 such cases involving 2 adolescent males and 1 adolescent female. All patients had a bony ridge or fragment projecting into the spinal canal, usually from the lower border of L4 vertebral body; a defect in the posteroinferior aspect of the vertebral body. Preoperative myelogram and computerized tomogram including plain X-ray appear to be helpful in demonstrating bone within the canal and preoperative diagnosis can facilitate selection of the appropriate surgical approach. The radiographic findings, including the myelogram and computerized tomographic appearance are detailed and the previous literatures are reviewed.
Adolescent ; Diagnosis ; Female ; Humans ; Male ; Spinal Canal

No abstract available.
Foot* ; Free Tissue Flaps* ; Leg* ; Muscle, Skeletal*

No abstract available.
Angiomyolipoma* ; Lymph Nodes*

BACKGROUND: Triage and transportations are important and life-saving medical task performed at the site of mutiple-casualty incidents(MCIs). We pursued three road traffic accidents victims to find out any problem in triaging and transporting them, and to provide an information for equipping an local disaster planning. METHODS: The medical records of 70 consecutive patients who were transported to five emergency facilities in Kangnung, on three MCIs from 1998 to 2000, were analysed, retrospectively. The intervals and types of transport vehicles were analysed. We compared the prehospital time between severity-based groups, which were graded into 3 groups according to the Triage score(0, 1~8, 9). RESULTS: Among the 70 patients, 33 patients(47.1%), 21 patients(30%), and 16 patients(22.9%) were transported to Level I, Level II, and Level III trauma centers, respectively. The time elapsed from scenes to the Level I trauma center was significantly shorter(p=0.003) than to others, but no differences in the mean Triage score between trauma centers were seen(p>0.05). The 119 rescue services transported 58.6%(41 patients) of victims to emergency facilities, and 58.5%(24 patients) of them was concentrated to Level I. There were no significant differences in the prehospital time between three Triage score groups(p>0.05). CONCLUSION: There was no medical control such as triage and transportation in the cases of three MCIs. In the construction of emergency medical service system(EMSS) preparing MCIs or disasters, we suggest the integration and unification of 119 rescue services and emergency medical information centers for effective medical control. We propose to making a new and simple triage guideline. The prehospital personnel should be educated and disaster drills should be performed under the guideline.
Accidents, Traffic ; Disaster Planning ; Disasters ; Emergencies ; Emergency Medical Services ; Humans ; Information Centers ; Medical Records ; Retrospective Studies ; Transportation* ; Trauma Centers ; Triage*

OBJECTIVE: For disease prevention and health promotion, it is important that individual health information is managed continuously and can be retrieved easily when necessary. We propose a model for integrated management of diverse individual health information that is generated and managed in heterogeneous Health Information System(HIS)s at hospitals or health centers. METHODS: We use XML and relational database together to represent the health information structurally and manage it flexibly. In order to show the effectiveness of our method, we developed a prototype of Intermediate System for integration and analysed the result. RESULTS: The Intermediate System for integration provides the schema of health information, represents the information in forms of XML strings by the subjects, and stores each XML string as one field of relational database. In each heterogeneous HIS, there is an adaptor that transforms the health information into XML according to the schema. The messages for transmission between each HIS and Intermediate System are represented in XML. CONCLUSION: The experimental study shows that using relational database and XML together provides a flexible, extensible and structured way of representing complex, dynamic, structurally-variant and large-scale information, on the premise that the database tables are partitioned or distributed according to the status of server.
Health Promotion

PURPOSE: The respiratory tract infections including pneumonia have been the major contributing factor for bronchial asthma, and are frequently involved in hospitalization due to asthma attack. We studied clinical characteristics of hospitalized cases due to asthma attack with and without pneumonic infiltrates. METHODS: Over 5 years between January 1993 and December 1997, 628 patients were hospitalized due to asthma attack. 315 of them had pneumonic infiltrates on chest X-ray (defined as pneumonia group) and 197 patients had no pneumonic infiltrates (uncomplicated group). The clinical characteristics of both groups were reviewed retrospectively. RESULTS: The age on admission and first attack in pneumonia group were significantly younger than those of uncomplicated group (P<0.05). The incidence of male was higher than that of female in both groups. The interval from attack to admission and duration of hospitalization were much longer in pneumonia group (P<0.05). The bronchial asthma attack was most frequently occurred between September and November. The atopy-perennial type was predominant in the both groups, and the incidence of non-atopy type was higher in the pneumonia group. The mild asthma attack was predominant in the pneumonia group and moderate one was predominant in the uncomplicated group. The incidence of fever and inflammatory reaction (peripheral blood WBC count, serum CRP level) were higher in the pneumonia group (P<0.05). There was no significant difference in the serum IgE level between two groups. CONCLUSION: Frequency and duration of hospitalization due to asthma attack might be lessened by prevention against respiratory tract infection.
Asthma* ; Female ; Fever ; Hospitalization ; Humans ; Immunoglobulin E ; Incidence ; Male ; Pneumonia ; Respiratory Tract Infections ; Retrospective Studies ; Thorax

Sodium hypochlorite is commonly used as a household bleaching agent (for example, the Clorox brand). Sodium hypochlorite poisoning with ingestion of a bleaching agent is often observed in clinical practice.Current Concepts: Ingestion (intentional or accidental) is the most common route of exposure to household bleaching agents. Accidental ingestion of household bleaching agents is rarely clinically important. However, ingestion of a large amount of a dilute formulation or a high-concentration preparation of bleaching agents can result in severe and rarely fatal corrosive injury. Therefore, prompt supportive care is essential because a specific antidote is currently unavailable. Severe poisoning requires hospital admission. Emergency endoscopy and thoracic and abdominal computed tomography are warranted to aid with diagnosis and management of hypochlorite-induced corrosive injury in patients with severe poisoning, who develop clinical features suggestive of corrosive injury.Discussion and Conclusion: Intentional poisoning, which accounts for most cases of household bleaching agent poisonings in Korea, is likely to cause severe corrosive injuries. Therefore, it is necessary to gain deeper and accurate understanding of the clinical aspects and treatment of poisoning by household bleaching agents.

In anesthesia for Caesarean section, some induction agents have been used. Thiopental so- dium is regarded as the standard induction agent. Propofol and ketamine have properties which suggest that it might be useful alternstives to thiopental. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the maternal and neonatal effect of propofol and ketamine used as induction agent for general anesthesia for elective Caeearean section. Sixty mothers undergoing elective Caesarean section under general anesthesia were allocated randomly to receive thiopental 4 mg/kg or ketamine 1 mg/kg or propofol 2 mg/ kg for induction of anesthesia. The results were as follows; 1) There were significant increase in systolic pressure, diastolic pressure and heart rate at postintubation within three groups(p<0.05). But there were no significant differences in cardiovascular responses between three groups during the induction. 2) The Apgar scores and blood gas analyses of neonates did not differ between three groups significsntly and the results were within normal range in all groups. As a result, propofol and ketamine are acceptable alternatives to thiopental for the induction of general anesthesia in Caesarean section. But in view of maternal cardiovascular changes and fetal well being, propofol and ketamine offer no significant advantage over thiopental.
Anesthesia ; Anesthesia, General ; Blood Gas Analysis ; Blood Pressure ; Cesarean Section* ; Female ; Fetal Blood* ; Heart Rate ; Humans ; Infant, Newborn* ; Ketamine ; Mothers ; Pregnancy ; Propofol ; Reference Values ; Thiopental ; Umbilical Cord*

BACKGROUND/AIMS: The prevalence and clinical characteristics of entecavir (ETV) resistance is not well known. The aim of this study was to determine the frequency of genotypic resistance in nonresponders and virologic breakthrough (VBT) patients. METHODS: The medical records of 76 chronic hepatitis B patients treated for a least 6 months from October 2006 to October 2008 were reviewed retrospectively. We divided patients into two groups: nucleoside analogue (NA)-naive patients (n=38) and LAM experienced patients (n=38). NA-naive and LAM experienced patients received ETV at 0.5 and 1.0 mg/day, respectively. The virologic response and VBT were investigated in both groups. We used the multiplex restriction fragment mass polymorphism (RFMP) method to test genotypic resistance at the rtI169, rtT184, rtS202, rtM204, and rtM250 sites. RESULTS: Age, gender, serum ALT, and HBV DNA level before treatment did not differ between the groups. Neither VBT nor nonresponse was observed in the NA-naive group, whereas VBT and nonresponse were observed in three patients each in the lamivudine (LAM)-experienced group; all six patients had YMDD mutation at study enrollment, all three patients with VBT had genotypic resistance to ETV, but the three nonresponse patients did not have genotypic resistance to ETV. CONCLUSIONS: We suspect that VBT is mostly associated with genotypic resistance to ETV. However, nonresponse might be associated with the continuance or reselection of the YMDD mutant in LAM-experienced patients.
Adult ; Antiviral Agents/*therapeutic use ; Drug Resistance, Viral/genetics ; Female ; Genotype ; Guanine/*analogs & derivatives/therapeutic use ; Hepatitis B/genetics ; Hepatitis B, Chronic/*drug therapy/virology ; Humans ; Lamivudine/therapeutic use ; Male ; Middle Aged ; Mutation ; Polymorphism, Restriction Fragment Length ; RNA-Directed DNA Polymerase/genetics ; Retrospective Studies

Mining interesting patterns from DNA sequences is one of the most challenging tasks in bioinformatics and computational biology. Maximal contiguous frequent patterns are preferable for expressing the function and structure of DNA sequences and hence can capture the common data characteristics among related sequences. Biologists are interested in finding frequent orderly arrangements of motifs that are responsible for similar expression of a group of genes. In order to reduce mining time and complexity, however, most existing sequence mining algorithms either focus on finding short DNA sequences or require explicit specification of sequence lengths in advance. The challenge is to find longer sequences without specifying sequence lengths in advance. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to mining maximal contiguous frequent patterns from large DNA sequence datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed approach is memory-efficient and mines maximal contiguous frequent patterns within a reasonable time.
Base Sequence ; Computational Biology ; Databases, Nucleic Acid ; DNA ; Mining