The purpose of this study was to survey opinions and to gather data of private psychiatric practitioners in Korea about their quality of life, business environment, and government policy of interest. The questionnaire was composed of 14 categories and 53 questions were administered to approximately 150 private psychiatric practitioners by E-mail and post mail concerning the present state, critique and prediction about their practice, business, and government policy. A total of 47 practitioners responded and we could gather meaningful data. Their responses regarding quality of life and satisfaction as a specialist were "a little" and they had many complaints of lack of income, stress of practice, anxieties of government control, and too much work. They had various adaptation skills to these "bad" situations and asked active plan to Korean Psychiatric Practitioners Association and government for present and future development of practice environment. These results provide meaningful data for understanding private psychiatric practitioners' opinions and behavioral patterns to adapt to their business area, and also suggest present and future direction for development of a medium and long-term plan against government policy and market change. This study will provide the basis for further investigation and projects in the near future.
Anxiety ; Commerce ; Electronic Mail ; Evaluation Studies as Topic ; Korea ; Postal Service ; Quality of Life ; Surveys and Questionnaires ; Specialization

BACKGROUND: We examined global gene expression profiles of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in patients with ulcerative colitis (UC), and tested whether the identified genes with the altered expression might be associated with susceptibility to UC. METHODS: PBMCs from 8 UC and 8 normal healthy (NH) volunteers were collected, and total RNAs were subjected to the human 8.0K cDNA chip for the microarray analysis. Real time-PCR (RT-PCR) was performed to verify the results of microarray. One hundred forty UC patients and 300 NH controls were recruited for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis. RESULTS: Twenty-five immune function-related genes with over 2-fold expression were identified. Of these genes, two chemokines, namely, CXCL1 and CCL20, were selected because of their potential importance in the evocation of host innate and adaptive immunity. Four SNPs were identified in the promoter and coding regions of CXCL1, while there was no significant difference between all patients with UC and controls in their polymorphisms, except minor association at g.57A< G (rs2071425, p=0.02). On the other hand, among three novel and one known SNPs identified in the promoter region of CCL20, g.-1,706 G< A (p=0.000000055), g.-1,458 G< A (p=0.0048), and g.-962C< A (p=0.0006) were found to be significantly associated with the susceptibility of UC. CONCLUSION: Altered gene expression in mononuclear cells may contribute to IBD pathogenesis. Although the findings need to be confirmed in other populations with larger numbers of patients, the current results demonstrated that polymorphisms in the promoter region of CCL20 are positively associated with the development of UC.
Adaptive Immunity ; Chemokines ; Clinical Coding ; Colitis, Ulcerative* ; Crohn Disease ; DNA, Complementary ; Gene Expression ; Hand ; Humans ; Inflammatory Bowel Diseases ; Microarray Analysis ; Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide ; Promoter Regions, Genetic* ; RNA ; Transcriptome ; Ulcer* ; Volunteers