BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to examine whether formal and informal social activities are associated with a lower risk of depression. Besides, we investigated which type of social activities may protect against late-life depression by gender using data from a population-based study of older Korean adults. METHODS Data for analysis were drawn from the 2010 Korean Longitudinal Study of ...

BACKGROUND Septic arthritis of the knee has been reported recently in adult patients who were administered hyaluronate. We evaluated the incidence of septic knees and the utilization of hyaluronate in the Korean adult population using nationwide data from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA). METHODS All new admissions to the clinics or hospitals for septic knees were rec...

To produce ginsenoside-Rg3 enriched yeast from ginseng-steaming effluent (GSE), Lipomyces starkeyi, which tends to grow well in GSE, was cultured in sterilized GSE and its growth and production of ginsenoside-Rg3 were determined. Growth of L. starkeyi was 86.1 mg per g GSE and its ginsenoside-Rg3 contents was 0.013 mg per g GSE.

BACKGROUND Satisfaction with medical doctor (MD) has been studied as a possible motivation for trying complementary medicine. This study aimed to explore the relationship between Korean outpatients' satisfaction with their MDs and their use of traditional Korean medicine (KM). METHODS Data were drawn from the 2011 annual Korea Health Panel, a national representative sample. We analyzed the re...

BACKGROUND We aimed to assess the performance of the five creatinine-based equations commonly used for estimates of the glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), namely, the creatinine-based Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPIcr), Asian CKD-EPI, revised Lund-Malmö (revised LM), full age spectrum (FAS), and Korean FAS equations, in the Korean population. METHODS A total of 1,31...

Childhood exposure to heritage language has been found to be beneficial when relearning the language as an adult. However, it is not known whether the exposure to heritage language affects the dominant language of the heritage speaker. This study investigates if there is any influence of heritage language (i.e., Korean) on the dominant language (i.e., English) of second-generation Korean-Americ...

As the first step to discover protein disease biomarkers from saliva, global analyses of the saliva proteome have been carried out since the early 2000s, and more than 3,000 proteins have been identified in human saliva. Recently, ethnic differences in the human plasma proteome have been reported, but such corresponding studies on human saliva in this aspect have not been previously reported. T...

The aim of this study was to examine the perspectives on the options for the integration of western and traditional Korean medical services among three types of medical doctors with different disciplines in Korea. We surveyed and analyzed responses from 167 conventional Western medicine (WM), 135 traditional Korean medicine (KM), and 103 dual-licensed (DL) doctors who can practice both. All thr...