• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.62 no.4
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• pp.377-402
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• 2010

This study examines the effects and process of housing poverty on children's physical health, internalizing problems and academic achievement using the first Korea Welfare Panel Study. The results show that sub-minimum standard housing condition and housing expenditures have increased the housing instability, non-study activities, while harming parent's health and decreasing non-housing expenditures. And this process negatively affects children's internalizing problems and academic achievement. The findings of this study have value for controlling the confounding factors as income poverty, neighborhood poverty and characters of household. This research is significant in that it develops the theoretical model of housing poverty and suggests the necessity of interventions to alleviate housing poverty.

• Korean Journal of Adult Nursing
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.283-293
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• 2015

Purpose: Depression is a common sign of suffering among the patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Frequent and severe neuropsychiatric symptoms lead to high levels of distress in patients and their caregivers, which results in the high levels of caregiver burden. The aim of this study was to determine the predictors of caregiver burden in caregivers of the patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods: The study included 183 consecutive PD patients and their caregivers. Patients were assessed using the Hoehn and Yahr scale, Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and Schwab and England Activities of Daily Living Scale. Caregivers' depressive symptoms were evaluated using the Caregiver Burden Inventor (CBI), BDI, and World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale. Results: All of the patients reported one or more neuropsychiatric symptoms. Patients' and caregivers' depressive symptoms, caregivers' age and education, time for caregiving, and quality of life were significantly associated with the increased caregiver burden. After controlling the level of education as a potential confounding variable, depression in both patients and caregivers, time for caregiving, and quality of life explained 45.6% of the variance in caregiver burden. Conclusion: Substantial attention needs to be given to the early identification of depression in PD patients and their caregivers to improve caregivers' quality of life and burden.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.5193-5198
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• 2013

The glycemic index (GI) and glycemic load (GL) have been considered risk factors for breast cancer, but association studies of breast cancer risk using simple GI and GL might be affected by confounding effects of the overall diet. A total of 357 cases and 357 age-matched controls were enrolled, and dietary intake was assessed using a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) with 103 food items. GI and GL dietary patterns were derived by reduced rank regression (RRR) method. The GI and GL pattern scores were positively associated with breast cancer risk among postmenopausal women [OR (95%CI): 3.31 (1.06-10.39), p for trend=0.031; 9.24 (2.93-29.14), p for trend<0.001, respectively], while the GI pattern showed no statistically significant effects on breast cancer risk, and the GL pattern was only marginally significant, among premenopausal women (p for trend=0.043). The GI and GL pattern scores were positively associated with the risk of breast cancer in subgroups defined by hormone receptor status in postmenopausal women. The GI and GL patterns based on all food items consumed were positively associated with breast cancer.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.104-109
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• 2012

Singapore, an island republic of over 5 million inhabitants, has 3.1 million workers. Most are employed in the service, finance and tourist/transport industry. Significant numbers work in manufacturing, construction and heavy industry. Following a series of construction and shipyard accidents with multiple deaths in 2004, the government announced its intention to reduce workplace fatalities from 4.9 to 2.5 per 100,000 by 2015. There was strong political will to achieve this target. The strategic approaches were to build workplace safety and health (WSH) capabilities; implement legislative changes with enforcement; promote benefits of WSH and recognize best practices, and enhance partnership with stakeholders. The anticipated outcomes were to reduce workplace fatality and injury rates; have WSH as an integral part of business; and establish a progressive and pervasive WSH culture. With these measures, the workplace fatality rate declined from 4.9/100,000 in 2004, to 2.2/100,000 in 2010. However, other confounding factors could also account for this decline, and have to be considered. The next target, announced by Singapore's Prime Minister in 2008, is to further reduce the workplace fatality rate to 1.8/100,000 by 2018, and to have "one of the best workplace safety records in the world".

• Journal of Ginseng Research
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.158-164
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• 2003

Recently, there are much concerns about ginseng as disease therapeutics. There are no epidemiologic study on relationship between ginseng intake and all cause mortality based from general population Cohort. This study sought to examine relationships between ginseng intake and all cause mortality from Kangwha Cohort data. From March 1985 through December 1999, 2696 males and 3595 females who were aged 55 or over as of 1985 were followed up. We calculate the mortality rate, standardized mortality ratio and risk ratios by ginseng intake. Cox proportional hazard model was used to adjust various confounding factors. Ginseng intake group had the lower all cause mortality(Risk ratio(RR)=0.88, 95%Confidence Interval(CI)=0.79-0.97) among males. Increasing ginseng intake, lower all cause mortality(Low ginseng intake: RR=0.88, 95%CI=0.79-0.98; high ginseng intake : RR=0.87, 95%CI=0.75-1.00) among males. There is no statistically significant difference between ginseng intake and mortality among females. The results of this study suggests that ginseng intake may prolong the human life among males.

• Journal of Korean Biological Nursing Science
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.74-81
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• 2013

Purpose: This study was conducted to explore the health effects of exposure to oil-contaminated water in G village near the area of Daecheon beach on which air force had test fired. Methods: Eighty residents consented and were divided into three groups; 33 residents(drinking well water and still living there), 23 residents(drinking well water but do not live there any more), and 24 residents(did not drink well water but live there now: control group). Data were collected from August to September, 2010 from the survey questionnaires, general health examination, specific functional test, and biological marker tests. Results: Current residents showed higher levels of body mass index, blood pressure, and fasting blood glucose that are related to adult diseases. 64 participants received specific test for cancer. Only one person had esophageal cancer. Perchloroethylene was not found in the Urine Samples. Current residents showed a higher level of 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine, an indicator of oxidative damage, and there was a statistically significant difference after correcting the confounding variables. Conclusion: We need education programs for managing the risk factors that are related to adult diseases in people who are now living in this village. We also need to expand further studies for investigating oxidative damage indicators.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.26 no.2 s.42
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• pp.210-221
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• 1993

In order to evaluate the confounding factors of neurobehavioral tests and the neurobehavioral effects in the workers exposed to organic solvents, NCTB was carried out on 100 workers. 46 workers had never been exposed to neurotoxic substances, and the others were being exposed to the solvents, mainly toluene. Simple reaction time, digit symbol, Santa Ana dexterity test and persuit aiming were different with age in non exposure group. Simple reaction time was carried out well in males, and digit symbol and persuit aiming were in females. There was no difference at educational level when the subject was educated over 12 years. Santa Ana dexterity and Benton visual test differed according to exposure level to toluene, however simple reaction time didn't. The acute neurotoxic effect was not excluded in this study. But, NCTB could be used to evaluate and prevent neurobehavioral changes in workers exposed to neurotoxic solvents in Korea.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.3182-3198
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• 2019

Vision-based Human Pose Estimation has been considered as one of challenging research subjects due to problems including confounding background clutter, diversity of human appearances and illumination changes in scenes. To tackle these problems, we propose to use a new multi-stage convolution machine for estimating human pose. To provide better heatmap prediction of body joints, the proposed machine repeatedly produces multiple predictions according to stages with receptive field large enough for learning the long-range spatial relationship. And stages are composed of various modules according to their strategic purposes. Pyramid stacking module and dilation module are used to handle problem of human pose at multiple scales. Their multi-scale information from different receptive fields are fused with concatenation, which can catch more contextual information from different features. And spatial and channel information of a given input are converted to gating factors by squeezing the feature maps to a single numeric value based on its importance in order to give each of the network channels different weights. Compared with other ConvNet-based architectures, we demonstrated that our proposed architecture achieved higher accuracy on experiments using standard benchmarks of LSP and MPII pose datasets.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.227-241
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• 2024

Safety and structural integrity of civil structures, like bridges and buildings, can be substantially enhanced by employing appropriate structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques for timely diagnosis of incipient damages. The information gathered from health monitoring of important infrastructure helps in making informed decisions on their maintenance. This ensures smooth, uninterrupted operation of the civil infrastructure and also cuts down the overall maintenance cost. With an early warning system, SHM can protect human life during major structural failures. A real-time online damage localization technique is proposed using only the vibration measurements in this paper. The concept of the 'Degree of Scatter' (DoS) of the vibration measurements is used to generate a spatial profile, and fractal dimension theory is used for damage detection and localization in the proposed two-phase algorithm. Further, it ensures robustness against environmental and operational variability (EoV). The proposed method works only with output-only responses and does not require correlated finite element models. Investigations are carried out to test the presented algorithm, using the synthetic data generated from a simply supported beam, a 25-storey shear building model, and also experimental data obtained from the lab-level experiments on a steel I-beam and a ten-storey framed structure. The investigations suggest that the proposed damage localization algorithm is capable of isolating the influence of the confounding factors associated with EoV while detecting and localizing damage even with noisy measurements.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.2897-2901
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• 2013

Gastric cancer is the second most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the world. Although certain dietary factors and lifestyles have been suggested to be associated with gastric carcinogenesis, there have been few investigations focusing on rural areas. A case-control study was therefore carried out to investigate the risk factors of gastric cardia cancer (GCC) in rural areas of Linzhou. A total of 470 newly diagnosed cases of GCC and 470 healthy controls were included. Face-to-face interviews were conducted, using a uniform questionnaire containing questions on demographics, per capita income, living habits, dietary habits and family history of tumors. The relationship between putative risk factors and GCC was assessed by odds ratios (OR) and their 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) derived from conditional logistic regression model by the COXREG command using SPSS 12.00. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate simultaneously the effects of multiple factors and other potential confounding factors. Multivariate logistic analysis showed that smoking (OR=1.939, 95%CI:1.097-3.426), alcohol drinking (OR=2.360, 95%CI: 1.292-4.311), hot food consumption (OR=2.034, 95%CI: 1.507-2.745), fast eating (OR=1.616, 95%CI: 1.171-2.230), mouldy food (OR=4.564, 95%CI: 2.682-7.767), leftover food (OR=1.881. 95%CI: 1.324-2.671), and family history of tumor (OR=2.831, 95%CI: 1.588-5.050) were risk factors for GCC. High per capita income (OR=0.709, 95%CI: 0.533-0.942), high education level (OR=0.354, 95%CI: 0.163-0.765), consumption of fresh fruits (OR=0.186, 95%CI: 0.111-0.311) and vegetables (OR=0.243, 95%CI: 0.142-0.415), and high BMI (OR=0.367, 95%CI: 0.242-0.557) were protective factors for GCC. Our data indicate that unhealthy lifestyle and dietary habits might be important contributors to GCC in this population.