PURPOSE: This study aims to explore development of a student-centered mentoring program and assess satisfaction about the course in order to improve system of the course on the basis of our implementation experience. METHODS: The course was designed for 58 third-year medical students in 2012. A student council acted as the core management team. We evaluate assessment about the course with a 50-item questionnaire administered on a 5-point Likert scale using SPSS version 20.0, and a short-answer form asked students, faculty, and lecturers for their opinions on the course. RESULTS: Students felt that 'Attitude on health care policies (28.6%)' was the most useful lecture. The 'Meeting with a patient' session was useful for developing students' abilities to empathize and communicate with other people (81.1%). The 50.9% of students were very satisfied with the course, as well as with the form of the course (49.2%). CONCLUSION: A bold action that medical educators can take is to get students involved from the outset of the curriculum development. Allowing students to become actively involved in developing the program is an effective means of hearing them and providing a more meaningful learning experience.
Curriculum ; Delivery of Health Care ; Hearing ; Humans ; Learning ; Mentors ; Students, Medical ; Surveys and Questionnaires

PURPOSE: The purposes of this study were to identify factors affecting depression in college students and the correlation of depression with self-esteem and academic stress, and to identify differences among student self-esteem, academic stress, and general characteristics and the relationship of these variables to depression. METHODS: The study was done in April 2011 with 852 students in health-related majors (medicine, nursing science, and dental hygiene) of a medical college in Korea. A self-rating survey containing 10 items from the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, 20 items from the Self-rating Depression Scale, and 22 items on academic stress was used. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-tests, one-way ANOVA, and logistic regression. RESULTS: Medical students' scores for self-esteem were significantly higher than dental hygiene students, but for academic stress scores, the result was the opposite. Logistic regression showed that self-esteem, academic stress, academic major and satisfaction with it (positive affect), and home income level (negative affect) significantly affected the level of depression. CONCLUSION: Designing and implementing realistic programs tailored to students' academic majors to enhance their self-esteem and provide practical knowledge in dealing with academic stress will help these students obtain a healthier school life emotionally as well as academically.
Delivery of Health Care ; Depression ; Humans ; Korea ; Logistic Models ; Oral Hygiene

PURPOSE: Recently, concern of the college students' mental health has increased due to their continuous psychologic problems such as suicidal attempt. This study aimed to examine the correlation among depression, stress, self-esteem, and coping strategies of the medical students and also according to the academic year. METHODS: The subject was 384 medical students of K medical school in Korea. Self-rating depression scale, stress scale, self-esteem scale was used for the survey, and academic stress and coping strategies of the students were asked. Frequency analysis, one-way ANOVA, t-test, correlation analysis was carried out. RESULTS: Third year students were under most stress (F=5.67, p=0.000) and had the most students who were moderately (22.9%) and mildly depressed (6.3%). Stress form academic studies and grade was also the highest in third year students. For English fluency, freshmen students scored the top. Academic career stress and school culture stress were higher for year 3, 4, 5, 6 than year 1, 2 students. Differences of the coping strategies by academic year was significant in emotional display. Students who showed high level of depression and stress, also students with low self-esteem used emotional display as their major coping strategy. CONCLUSION: Depending on their academic year medical students' level of depression and stress was different, and they did not use a variety of coping strategies. Therefore, a program which can give a diverse access to variety of coping strategies to relieve students' stress should be developed taking their characteristics of academic year into consideration.
Depression ; Humans ; Korea ; Mental Health ; Schools, Medical ; Students, Medical

BACKGROUND: Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) requires prompt and appropriate treatment. Since methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a frequent pathogen in VAP, rapid identification of it, is pivotal. Our aim was to evaluate the utility of quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) as a useful method for etiologic diagnoses of MRSA pneumonia. METHODS: We performed qPCR for mecA, S. aureus-specific femA-SA, and S. epidermidis-specific femA-SE genes from bronchoalveolar lavage or bronchial washing samples obtained from clinically-suspected VAP. Molecular identification of MRSA was based on the presence of the mecA and femA-SA gene, with the absence of the femA-SE gene. To compensate for the experimental and clinical conditions, we spiked an internal control in the course of DNA extraction. We estimated number of colony-forming units per mL (CFU/mL) of MRSA samples through a standard curve of a serially-diluted reference MRSA strain. We compared the threshold cycle (Ct) value with the microbiologic results of MRSA. RESULTS: We obtained the mecA gene standard curve, which showed the detection limit of the mecA gene to be 100 fg, which corresponds to a copy number of 30. We chose cut-off Ct values of 27.94 (equivalent to 1x10(4) CFU/mL) and 21.78 (equivalent to 1x10(5) CFU/mL). The sensitivity and specificity of our assay were 88.9% and 88.9% respectively, when compared with quantitative cultures. CONCLUSION: Our results were valuable for diagnosing and identifying pathogens involved in VAP. We believe our modified qPCR is an appropriate tool for the rapid diagnosis of clinical pathogens regarding patients in the intensive care unit.
Adenosine ; Bronchoalveolar Lavage ; Coat Protein Complex I ; DNA ; Humans ; Critical Care ; Intensive Care Units ; Limit of Detection ; Methicillin Resistance ; Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus ; Pneumonia ; Pneumonia, Ventilator-Associated ; Polymerase Chain Reaction ; Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction ; Sprains and Strains ; Stem Cells

Hippo/YAP signaling is implicated in tumorigenesis and progression of various cancers. By inhibiting a plethora signaling cascades, resveratrol has strong anti-tumorigenic and anti-metastatic activity. In the present study, we demonstrate that resveratrol decreases the expression of YAP target genes. In addition, our data showed that resveratrol attenuates breast cancer cell invasion through the activation of Lats1 and consequent inactivation of YAP. Strikingly, we also demonstrate that resveratrol inactivates RhoA, leading to the activation of Lats1 and induction of YAP phosphorylation. Further, resveratrol in combination with other agents that inactivate RhoA or YAP showed more marked suppression of breast cancer cell invasion compared with single treatment. Collectively, these findings indicate the beneficial effects of resveratrol on breast cancer patients by suppressing the RhoA/Lats1/YAP signaling axis and subsequently inhibiting breast cancer cell invasion.
Breast Neoplasms* ; Breast* ; Carcinogenesis ; Humans ; Phosphorylation

Background: Liver fibrosis is an early stage of liver cirrhosis. As a reversible lesion before cirrhosis, liver failure, and liver cancer, it has been a target for drug discovery. Many antifibrotic candidates have shown promising results in experimental animal models; however, due to adverse clinical reactions, most antifibrotic agents are still preclinical. Therefore, rodent models have been used to examine the histopathological differences between the control and treatment groups to evaluate the efficacy of anti-fibrotic agents in non-clinical research. In addition, with improvements in digital image analysis incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), a few researchers have developed an automated quantification of fibrosis. However, the performance of multiple deep learning algorithms for the optimal quantification of hepatic fibrosis has not been evaluated. Here, we investigated three different localization algorithms, mask R-CNN, DeepLabV3+, and SSD, to detect hepatic fibrosis. Results: 5750 images with 7503 annotations were trained using the three algorithms, and the model performance was evaluated in large-scale images and compared to the training images. The results showed that the precision values were comparable among the algorithms. However, there was a gap in the recall, leading to a difference in model accuracy. The mask R-CNN outperformed the recall value (0.93) and showed the closest prediction results to the annotation for detecting hepatic fibrosis among the algorithms. DeepLabV3+ also showed good performance; however, it had limitations in the misprediction of hepatic fibrosis as inflammatory cells and connective tissue. The trained SSD showed the lowest performance and was limited in predicting hepatic fibrosis compared to the other algorithms because of its low recall value (0.75). Conclusions We suggest it would be a more useful tool to apply segmentation algorithms in implementing AI algorithms to predict hepatic fibrosis in non-clinical studies.