PURPOSE: This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of foot reflexologic massage on blood pressure and sleep of elderly with essential hypertension. METHOD: This study was employed non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design. The subjects were divided into two groups: 20 elders for experimental group and 18 elders for control group. For experimental group, foot reflexologic massage was done three times at three-day intervals. The data analyzed by SPSS version 10.0 program. RESULT: The systolic and diastolic blood pressure after foot reflexologic massage did not show a significant difference between the two groups. In experimental group, there was a significant difference in the systolic(t=3.559, p=.001) and the diastolic blood pressure(t= 3.048, p=.004) that measured after foot reflexologic massage. There was a significant difference(t=2.665, p=.011) in sleep between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that foot reflexologic massage was partially effective to reduce the degree of blood pressure and improve sleep of the elderly with essential hypertension. A follow up research is needed to compare and confirm its long-term effects.
Aged* ; Blood Pressure* ; Foot* ; Humans ; Hypertension* ; Massage*

Clinical professionals gain new information to assist in patient care when they read the medical literature. Similarly, in clinical preventive medicine, medical science documents that have previously published can be searched and evaluated in order to confirm the scientific support for the clinical preventive medical service offered in order to prevent chronic disease. This paper introduces the medical informatics techniques for knowledge extraction that can become the basis for clinical practice. Particularly, it discusses the clinical document retrieval and knowledge discovery tools that can search for extracting the knowledge which the medical expert desires with data mining techniques. For example, Clinical medical personnel and medical researchers can locate the information from the latest literature rapidly or find and evaluate the scientific basis for the treatment and prevention of infection. This study can be used when they analyze the correlation between accumulated and different type of data and contributes to the detection of new knowledge. Recently, the concern about the visualization of massive data and information is high as the importance of big data has received greater attention. Contributions to this technique and decision support tools will increase gradually due to the way support for decision-making through scientific evidence for the pattern changing disease is evaluated or as one of the clinical practice guidelines is accepted.
Artificial Intelligence ; Chronic Disease ; Data Mining ; Decision Support Techniques ; Evidence-Based Medicine ; Information Storage and Retrieval ; Medical Informatics ; Medical Informatics Computing ; Patient Care ; Preventive Medicine

Sex determination is considered the first and most important process in the identification of unknown skeletal remains. The skull is one of bones with high accuracy to discriminate sexes, but there is no dimorphic studies of Korean skull by discriminant function analysis. The aim of this study was to build and provide an easy and accurate discriminant equation to sex determination by using three-dimensional skull images of Korean. Computed tomography images from 102 cadavers were reconstructed three-dimensional images by computer program. We measured 44 variables using the template in computer program and variables were sorted out items with high accuracy and reliability by intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), Cohen's d value, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The equation with the highest accuracy had 82.7% in males, 82.2% in females, it was constituted bizygomatic diameter, cranial base length, biauricular breadth, upper facial breadth, frontal chord, foramen magnum breadth, and right mastoid length. The cross-validated accuracy had 76.5%~86.7% using 3D skull images in Koreans. The value of variables that matches the other population group study, most of variables had a statistically significant difference among population groups. Male skulls in Koreans were smaller than those in European and female skulls were bigger than in Asian. This result should be helpful to determine sex in Koreans.
Asian Continental Ancestry Group ; Cadaver ; Female ; Foramen Magnum ; Humans ; Imaging, Three-Dimensional* ; Male ; Mastoid ; Population Groups ; ROC Curve ; Skull Base ; Skull*

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of psychosocial distress, intention to quit and nursing performance. METHODS: The data were collected through structured questionnaires from 210 registered nurses in a general hospital. They were analyzed by descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, scheffe test, Pearson's correlation coefficient and multiple regression with the SPSS WIN program. RESULTS: The results of the analysis showed that the mean of the psychosocial distress was 25.38+/-7.26, intention to quit was 3.51+/-0.78, and nursing performance was 3.67+/-0.46. In the correlation analysis, the nursing performance had negative correlation with psychosocial distress(r=-.371, p=.000) and intention to quit(r=-.211, p=.002). There were statistically significant differences in nursing performance depending on age, marital status, position and work experience. The psychosocial distress and age explained 15.1% of nursing performance. CONCLUSION: This study showed psychosocial distress and intention to quit affects the nursing performance. Therefore, nursing executives and unit managers need to concern on the significance of the stress management programs so that these can be organizational support.
Hospitals, General ; Intention ; Marital Status ; Patients' Rooms ; Questionnaires

Dental development is valuable for age estimation of children because of its low variability and less affection by endocrine and nutritional status. Demirjian reported a new system of dental age assessment in 1973 and this method has been used in many countries. The accuracy of Demirjian's method in dental age estimation may be affected by ethnic difference. For Korean population, the population study of Demirjian technique has not accomplished yet, therefore, we investigate and analyze the validity of Demirjian's method in Korean population. The 155 orthopantomographys which consisted of 87 boys and 68 girls were randomly selected and the age range was 5 to 16 years. The age of radiography was estimated according to criteria presented by Demirjian. Statistical analysis was preformed between real age and estimated age. In boys, there was no significant difference observed (p=0.171) between the real age and estimated age, however in girls, significant difference was shown (p=0.022) in 95% confidence interval. In both groups, there was clear overestimation tendency below 8.0 year, but over 8.0 year the difference pattern is atypical. The Pearson correlation coefficients between real age and estimated age were 0.970, 0.964 in boys, girls, respectively and showed positive relationship. The standards of dental maturation reported by Demirjian may not be applicable in Korean children especially in girls. Establishment of new maturation scores and percentiles curves for Korean population with many samples is required for more accurate age estimation.
Child ; Humans ; Nutritional Status ; Radiography, Panoramic

Recently therapeutic efficacy of stomach cancer was greatly improved due to early diagnosis and irnproved diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. Especially in early gastric cancer, 5 year survival rate is near 100%. Recarrence of early gastric cancer after curative surgery is rarely reported. Recently authors experienced one case of recurrent stomach cancer arising from remmnant stomach 14 years after gastrectomy of EGC type I(m), so we reports it here with review of literatures.
Early Diagnosis ; Gastrectomy* ; Stomach Neoplasms* ; Stomach* ; Survival Rate

BACKGROUND: Macrophage migration inhibitory factor(MIF) was discovered in 1960s as a T-cell cytokine which inhibited random migration of macrophages. MIF is a multifunctional protein acting as cytokine, hormone, or enzyme. It plays a pivotal role in innate and adaptive immune responses and early phase of inflammatory response, as well as cell proliferation, differentiation, and tumor progression. Many inflammatory diseases and cancers show increased activity and serum concentration. The purpose of this study was to measure the normal serum MIF concentration of Korean people to be utilized as base data for future MIF research. METHODS: Sera of 20 healthy adults from each groups of 20's to 60's(total 100 persons) who visited the Health Promotion center of Inha university Hospital were collected. The MIF concentration in each serum was measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay(ELISA). RESULTS: The average serum MIF concentration was 1.49 ng/ml(ranging from 0 to 3.33), and there was no significant difference between age groups. CONCLUSION: The normal serum MIF concentration of Korean people is 1.49 ng/ml, and seems to be unchanged with aging.
Adult ; Aging ; Cell Proliferation ; Health Promotion ; Humans ; Macrophages* ; T-Lymphocytes

OBJECTIVES: A healthcare decision-making support model and rule management system is proposed based on a personalized rule-based intelligent concept, to effectively manage chronic diseases. METHODS: A Web service was built using a standard message transfer protocol for interoperability of personal health records among healthcare institutions. An intelligent decision service is provided that analyzes data using a service-oriented healthcare rule inference function and machine-learning platform; the rules are extensively compiled by physicians through a developmental user interface that enables knowledge base construction, modification, and integration. Further, screening results are visualized for the self-intuitive understanding of personal health status by patients. RESULTS: A recommendation message is output through the Web service by receiving patient information from the hospital information recording system and object attribute values as input factors. The proposed system can verify patient behavior by acting as an intellectualized backbone of chronic diseases management; further, it supports self-management and scheduling of screening. CONCLUSIONS: Chronic patients can continuously receive active recommendations related to their healthcare through the rule management system, and they can model the system by acting as decision makers in diseases management; secondary diseases can be prevented and health management can be performed by reference to patient-specific lifestyle guidelines.
Chronic Disease* ; Decision Support Systems, Clinical ; Delivery of Health Care* ; Expert Systems ; Health Records, Personal ; Humans ; Knowledge Bases ; Life Style ; Mass Screening ; Self Care

OBJECTIVE: This study proposes an automated diagnostic method to classify patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) of degenerative etiology using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) markers. METHODS: Twenty-seven patients with subjective memory impairment (SMI), 18 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 27 patients with AD participated. MRI protocols included three dimensional brain structural imaging and diffusion tensor imaging to assess the cortical thickness, subcortical volume and white matter integrity. Recursive feature elimination based on support vector machine (SVM) was conducted to determine the most relevant features for classifying abnormal regions and imaging parameters, and then a factor analysis for the top-ranked factors was performed. Subjects were classified using nonlinear SVM. RESULTS: Medial temporal regions in AD patients were dominantly detected with cortical thinning and volume atrophy compared with SMI and MCI patients. Damage to white matter integrity was also accredited with decreased fractional anisotropy and increased mean diffusivity (MD) across the three groups. The microscopic damage in the subcortical gray matter was reflected in increased MD. Classification accuracy between pairs of groups (SMI vs. MCI, MCI vs. AD, SMI vs. AD) and among all three groups were 84.4% (+/-13.8), 86.9% (+/-10.5), 96.3% (+/-4.6), and 70.5% (+/-11.5), respectively. CONCLUSION: This proposed method may be a potential tool to diagnose AD pathology with the current clinical criteria.
Alzheimer Disease* ; Anisotropy ; Atrophy ; Brain ; Classification* ; Diagnosis ; Diffusion Tensor Imaging ; Humans ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging ; Memory ; Mild Cognitive Impairment ; Pathology ; Support Vector Machine

On November 14, 2001, well -preserved male child corpse was excavated at Heapyeong Yoon's family mountain, Gyeonggi -do, in Korea. For one year after the excavation, the researches about this mummified male were made with various aspects including physical anthropology, forensic medicine, histology, radiology, and archaeology. After the researches, the mummy was presumed to be born at A.D. 1680, the middle of Joseon dynasty period and to die at about 5.5 years old by small pox or complications of same disease. This study is for physical anthropological measurement for this mummy and comparison to anthropometric data of mordern Korean 5 years old male child. The ratio of iliocristal height, iliospinal height and total arm length to standing height of the mummy is smaller than the same age group of mordern Korean. In cephalic index, the head of the mummy is hyperbrachycephalic, acrocephalic and hypsicephalic. There is no difference of cephalic index between the mummy and the same age group of mordern Korean. The mummy was taken the whole body computed tomography with 1mm slice distance. After automatic segmentation process of the skull, the model of the skull was reconstructed.
Anthropology, Physical ; Anthropometry* ; Archaeology ; Arm ; Cadaver ; Child* ; Child, Preschool ; Forensic Medicine ; Gyeonggi-do ; Head ; Humans ; Korea* ; Male* ; Mummies* ; Skull