Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common form of chronic liver disease. The prevalence of NAFLD is growing gradually worldwide with increases in obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and an unbalanced diet. NAFLD ranges from simple steatosis without inflammation to steatohepatitis that can progress to cirrhosis. There is no single effective treatment that has widespread effects in NAFLD. The cornerstone of treatment is lifestyle modification, including weight reduction, diet, and physical activity. An approximately 7-10% weight reduction via diet or physical activity can improve the liver histopathology. Risk factors for NAFLD include a high-calorie diet, high-lipid diet, high-carbohydrate diet, saturated fatty acids, trans fatty acids, cholesterol, high fructose intake, and low-choline diet. Factors that protect against NAFLD include a low-calorie diet, low-carbohydrate diet, low-lipid diet, monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA), polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), dietary fiber, coffee, green tea, and light alcohol consumption. Physical activity also helps to manage NAFLD with or without weight reduction. Recent reports found that resistance training is as effective as aerobic training. Lifestyle modification has very low compliance. To maintain a treatment program, a multidisciplinary team approach is required that includes physicians, dietitians, physical trainers, and psychologists.
Alcohol Drinking ; Caloric Restriction ; Cholesterol ; Coffee ; Compliance ; Diet ; Dietary Fiber ; Fatty Acids ; Fatty Acids, Monounsaturated ; Fatty Acids, Unsaturated ; Fatty Liver* ; Fibrosis ; Fructose ; Inflammation ; Life Style* ; Liver ; Liver Diseases ; Motor Activity ; Nutritionists ; Obesity ; Prevalence ; Psychology ; Resistance Training ; Risk Factors ; Sedentary Lifestyle ; Tea ; Trans Fatty Acids ; Weight Loss

No abstract available.
Abdomen/ultrasonography ; Adult ; Contrast Media ; Fatty Liver/*diagnosis ; Humans ; Liver/*ultrasonography ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging ; Male ; Tomography, X-Ray Computed

Female ; Humans ; Lip ; Male ; Maxilla ; Nose ; Orthognathic Surgery ; Osteotomy

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:In order to analyze and understand the oculomotor system completely, it is essential to measure horizontal, vertical, and torsional eye movements. We developed a new system of 3-dimensional videooculography that can accurately estimate the pupil center and measure torsional eye movement in real time while minimizing the errors caused by upper eyelid droop, eyelashes, corneal reflection, and eye blinking. MATERIALS AND METHOD:For accurate estimation of the center and diameter of the pupil, the edges of the pupil were searched by using a sector-form window and circle fitting was performed using the least square regression. Torsional eye movement was measured using polar cross-correlation technique with modification to lessen the errors produced by the change in pupil size. Calibrations were performed and to verify the proposed system, the linearity between the measured and actual eye movements was measured. Also, the results of the proposed system were compared with those of another commercialized system. RESULTS: The linearity between the measured and actual eye movements showed errors of less than 1%. The spatial resolutions of the system for horizontal, vertical, and torsional eye movements were 0.3, 0.4, and 0.2, respectively whereas the temporal resolution was 30 frames/sec. In comparison to the commercialized system, our system showed less artifact by eye blinking when measuring vertical eye movement. CONCLUSION:We proposed an algorithm and a system for measuring horizontal, vertical, and torsional eye movements which minimized the influence of partial eyelid closure, eyelashes, corneal reflections, and change in pupil size.
Artifacts ; Blinking ; Calibration ; Eye Movements* ; Eyelashes ; Eyelids ; Pupil

DNA barcoding has been widely used in species identification and biodiversity research. A short fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) sequence serves as a DNA bio-barcode. We collected DNA barcodes, based on COI sequences from 156 species (529 sequences) of fish, insects, and shellfish. We present results on phylogenetic relationships to assess biodiversity the in the Korean peninsula. Average GC% contents of the 68 fish species (46.9%), the 59 shellfish species (38.0%), and the 29 insect species (33.2%) are reported. Using the Kimura 2 parameter in all possible pairwise comparisons, the average interspecific distances were compared with the average intraspecific distances in fish (3.22 vs. 0.41), insects (2.06 vs. 0.25), and shellfish (3.58 vs. 0.14). Our results confirm that distance-based DNA barcoding provides sufficient information to identify and delineate fish, insect, and shellfish species by means of all possible pairwise comparisons. These results also confirm that the development of an effective molecular barcode identification system is possible. All DNA barcode sequences collected from our study will be useful for the interpretation of species-level identification and community-level patterns in fish, insects, and shellfish in Korea, although at the species level, the rate of correct identification in a diversified environment might be low.
Biodiversity ; DNA ; DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic ; DNA, Mitochondrial ; Electron Transport Complex IV ; Insects ; Korea ; Shellfish

PURPOSE: A number of clinical decision tools for osteoporosis risk assessment have been developed to select postmenopausal women for the measurement of bone mineral density. We developed and validated machine learning models with the aim of more accurately identifying the risk of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women compared to the ability of conventional clinical decision tools. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We collected medical records from Korean postmenopausal women based on the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. The training data set was used to construct models based on popular machine learning algorithms such as support vector machines (SVM), random forests, artificial neural networks (ANN), and logistic regression (LR) based on simple surveys. The machine learning models were compared to four conventional clinical decision tools: osteoporosis self-assessment tool (OST), osteoporosis risk assessment instrument (ORAI), simple calculated osteoporosis risk estimation (SCORE), and osteoporosis index of risk (OSIRIS). RESULTS: SVM had significantly better area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic than ANN, LR, OST, ORAI, SCORE, and OSIRIS for the training set. SVM predicted osteoporosis risk with an AUC of 0.827, accuracy of 76.7%, sensitivity of 77.8%, and specificity of 76.0% at total hip, femoral neck, or lumbar spine for the testing set. The significant factors selected by SVM were age, height, weight, body mass index, duration of menopause, duration of breast feeding, estrogen therapy, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, osteoarthritis, and diabetes mellitus. CONCLUSION: Considering various predictors associated with low bone density, the machine learning methods may be effective tools for identifying postmenopausal women at high risk for osteoporosis.
Aged ; *Artificial Intelligence ; Bone Density/*physiology ; Female ; Humans ; Middle Aged ; Osteoporosis, Postmenopausal

BACKGROUND: To ensure the safety of plasma derivatives, some countries have been screening for the human parvovirus B19 (B19V) antigen or DNA in blood donors. We investigated the prevalence of B19V DNA and anti-B19V antibodies in Korean plasmapheresis donors to evaluate the necessity of B19V DNA screening test. METHODS: Plasma samples were collected between March and July 2008 from 10,032 plasmapheresis donors. The B19V DNA test was performed using the LightCycler 2.0 (Roche, Germany) with quantification kits. Anti-B19V IgM and IgG were tested in 928 randomly selected samples from the 10,032 donors using recomWell Parvovirus B19 ELISA IgM, IgG assay (Mikrogen, Germany). RecomLine Parvovirus B19 LIA IgG, IgM assay (Mikrogen, Germany) was used to analyze the epitopes of antibodies in donors showing positive results for B19V DNA and anti-B19V antibodies. DNA sequencing was performed to identify the genotypes. RESULTS: The prevalence of B19V DNA was 0.1% (10/10,032). Virus titers in B19V DNA positive donors were less than 10(5) IU/mL (range: 2.7x10(1)-3.2x10(4) IU/mL) except for 1 donor (1.33x10(8) IU/mL). All the isolated B19V DNAs from 6 donors were identified as genotype I. Nine out of 10 B19V DNA positive donors also possessed anti-B19V IgG only or IgG and IgM. The prevalence of anti-B19V IgG was 60.1% (558/928). CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of B19V DNA in Korean blood donors was not high and most donors also possessed neutralizing anti-B19V antibodies. Thus, the implementation of a B19V screening test for Korean blood donors does not appear to be imperative.
Adolescent ; Adult ; Aged ; Antibodies, Viral/blood ; *Blood Donors ; DNA, Viral/*blood ; Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay/methods ; Female ; Follow-Up Studies ; Genotype ; Humans ; Immunoglobulin G/blood ; Immunoglobulin M/blood ; Male ; Middle Aged ; Parvoviridae Infections/epidemiology ; Parvovirus B19, Human/genetics/immunology/*isolation & purification ; *Plasmapheresis ; Polymerase Chain Reaction/methods ; Prevalence ; Republic of Korea/epidemiology ; Retrospective Studies

BACKGROUND: The safety of plasma derivatives has been reinforced since 1980s by variable pathogen inactivation or elimination techniques. Nucleic acid amplification test (NAT) for the source plasma has also been implemented worldwide. Recently nanofiltration has been used in some country for ensuring safety of plasma derivatives to eliminate non-enveloped viruses such as parvovirus B19 (B19V) and hepatitis A virus (HAV). We evaluated the efficacy of nanofiltration for the elimination of B19V and HAV. METHODS: To verify the efficacy of nanofiltration, we adopted a 20 nm Viresolve NFP (Millipore, USA) in the scaling down (1:1,370) model of the antithrombin III production. As virus stock solutions, we used B19V reactive plasma and porcine parvovirus (PPV) and HAV obtained from cell culture. And 50% tissue culture infectious dose was consumed as infectious dose. The methods used to evaluate the virus-elimination efficacy were reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction for B19V and the cytopathic effect calculation after filtration for PPV and HAV. RESULTS: B19V was not detected by RT-PCR in the filtered antithrombin III solutions with initial viral load of 6.42x10(5) IU/mL and 1.42x10(5) IU/mL before filtration. The virus-elimination efficacy of nanofiltration for PPV and HAV were > or =10(3.32) and > or =10(3.31), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Nanofiltration would be an effective method for the elimination of B19V and HAV. It may be used as a substitute for NAT screening of these viruses in source plasma to ensure safety of plasma derivatives in Korea.
Antithrombin III/isolation & purification ; DNA, Viral/analysis ; Filtration/*methods ; Hepatitis A virus/genetics/*isolation & purification ; Humans ; Nanotechnology/*methods ; Parvovirus B19, Human/genetics/*isolation & purification ; RNA, Viral/analysis ; Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction

Neurocutaneous melanosis (NCM) is a rare congenital disease that is characterized by the presence of large or multiple congenital melanocytic nevi and melanotic lesions of the central nervous system. We report here on the CT and MR imaging findings of an unusual case of NCM that was associated with intraventricular dermoid and Dandy-Walker malformation.
Tomography, X-Ray Computed ; Neurocutaneous Syndromes/*epidemiology/radiography ; Melanosis/*epidemiology/radiography ; Male ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging ; Humans ; Dermoid Cyst/*epidemiology/radiography ; Dandy-Walker Syndrome/*epidemiology ; Comorbidity ; Cerebral Ventricle Neoplasms/*epidemiology/radiography ; Arachnoid Cysts/epidemiology/pathology ; Adult

OBJECTIVE: To assess the pre-pregnancy and pregnancy factors influencing pregnancy outcome in renal transplanted women Materials and METHODS: This retrospective study included all pregnancies in renal transplanted women in Asan Medical Center between June 1996 and February 1998. We collected data from the medical records of allograft recipients. Pre-pregnant status and pregnancy outcome were described. RESULTS: Seventeen pregnancies in 13 allograft recipients resulted in 7 term deliveries, 4 preterm births, 2 spontaneous abortions, and 4 therapeutic abortions. All but one patient received immunosuppressive therapy with cyclosporin A, azathioprine, and prednisolone during pregnancy. The mean interval from the time of transplantation to conception was 28.8+/-14.3 months(range 6-60 months). In live birth group, the mean gestational age at delivery was 37.7+/-1.2 weeks and the mean birth weight of their offspring was 2.85+/-0.37 kilogram. Apgar scores at 5 minutes were 8 or more in all of them. The obstetric complications were distributed as follows: pregnancy induced hypertension in 6 cases(55%), pregnancy aggravated hypertension in 2 cases(18%), fetal growth restriction in 1 case(9%), prematurity in 4 cases(36%). Cesarean sections were done in 4 cases(36%) because of previous Cesarean section(3 cases) and uncontrolled hypertension(1 case). Neonatal complication, transient tachypnea of the newborn, was found in one case. Graft rejection after transplantation occurred in 4 cases: 3 cases in preterm births and 1 case in therapeutic abortions. Maternal renal functions were normal during pregnancy and postpartum period whose pre-pregnant renal functions had been normal. No patient experienced any rejection episode or graft loss during pregnancy. CONCLUSION: Successful pregnancy can be expected in women with a renal transplant, although there was high incidence of pregnancy-related complications, especially hypertensive disorders. Pregnancy can be encouraged to these allograft recipients if they have good renal function.
Abortion, Spontaneous ; Abortion, Therapeutic ; Allografts* ; Azathioprine ; Birth Weight ; Cesarean Section ; Chungcheongnam-do ; Cyclosporine ; Female ; Fertilization ; Fetal Development ; Gestational Age ; Graft Rejection ; Humans ; Hypertension ; Hypertension, Pregnancy-Induced ; Incidence ; Kidney Transplantation ; Live Birth ; Medical Records ; Postpartum Period ; Prednisolone ; Pregnancy ; Pregnancy Outcome* ; Pregnancy* ; Premature Birth ; Retrospective Studies ; Transient Tachypnea of the Newborn ; Transplants