• Title/Summary/Keyword: real scale

Search Result 2,311, Processing Time 0.036 seconds

A Laboratory-Scale Study of the Applicability of a Halophilic Sediment Bioelectrochemical System for in situ Reclamation of Water and Sediment in Brackish Aquaculture Ponds: Effects of Operational Conditions on Performance

  • Pham, Hai The;Vu, Phuong Ha;Nguyen, Thuy Thu Thi;Bui, Ha Viet Thi;Tran, Huyen Thanh Thi;Tran, Hanh My;Nguyen, Huy Quang;Kim, Byung Hong
    • Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
    • /
    • v.29 no.10
    • /
    • pp.1607-1623
    • /
    • 2019
  • Sediment bioelectrochemical systems (SBESs) can be integrated into brackish aquaculture ponds for in-situ bioremediation of the pond water and sediment. Such an in-situ system offers advantages including reduced treatment cost, reusability and simple handling. In order to realize such an application potential of the SBES, in this laboratory-scale study we investigated the effect of several controllable and uncontrollable operational factors on the in-situ bioremediation performance of a tank model of a brackish aquaculture pond, into which a SBES was integrated, in comparison with a natural degradation control model. The performance was evaluated in terms of electricity generation by the SBES, Chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal and nitrogen removal of both the tank water and the tank sediment. Real-life conditions of the operational parameters were also experimented to understand the most close-to-practice responses of the system to their changes. Predictable effects of controllable parameters including external resistance and electrode spacing, similar to those reported previously for the BESs, were shown by the results but exceptions were observed. Accordingly, while increasing the electrode spacing reduced the current densities but generally improved COD and nitrogen removal, increasing the external resistance could result in decreased COD removal but also increased nitrogen removal and decreased current densities. However, maximum electricity generation and COD removal efficiency difference of the SBES (versus the control) could be reached with an external resistance of $100{\Omega}$, not with the lowest one of $10{\Omega}$. The effects of uncontrollable parameters such as ambient temperature, salinity and pH of the pond (tank) water were rather unpredictable. Temperatures higher than $35^{\circ}C$ seemed to have more accelaration effect on natural degradation than on bioelectrochemical processes. Changing salinity seriously changed the electricity generation but did not clearly affect the bioremediation performance of the SBES, although at 2.5% salinity the SBES displayed a significantly more efficient removal of nitrogen in the water, compared to the control. Variation of pH to practically extreme levels (5.5 and 8.8) led to increased electricity generations but poorer performances of the SBES (vs. the control) in removing COD and nitrogen. Altogether, the results suggest some distinct responses of the SBES under brackish conditions and imply that COD removal and nitrogen removal in the system are not completely linked to bioelectrochemical processes but electrochemically enriched bacteria can still perform non-bioelectrochemical COD and nitrogen removals more efficiently than natural ones. The results confirm the application potential of the SBES in brackish aquaculture bioremediation and help propose efficient practices to warrant the success of such application in real-life scenarios.

Twitter Issue Tracking System by Topic Modeling Techniques (토픽 모델링을 이용한 트위터 이슈 트래킹 시스템)

  • Bae, Jung-Hwan;Han, Nam-Gi;Song, Min
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.20 no.2
    • /
    • pp.109-122
    • /
    • 2014
  • People are nowadays creating a tremendous amount of data on Social Network Service (SNS). In particular, the incorporation of SNS into mobile devices has resulted in massive amounts of data generation, thereby greatly influencing society. This is an unmatched phenomenon in history, and now we live in the Age of Big Data. SNS Data is defined as a condition of Big Data where the amount of data (volume), data input and output speeds (velocity), and the variety of data types (variety) are satisfied. If someone intends to discover the trend of an issue in SNS Big Data, this information can be used as a new important source for the creation of new values because this information covers the whole of society. In this study, a Twitter Issue Tracking System (TITS) is designed and established to meet the needs of analyzing SNS Big Data. TITS extracts issues from Twitter texts and visualizes them on the web. The proposed system provides the following four functions: (1) Provide the topic keyword set that corresponds to daily ranking; (2) Visualize the daily time series graph of a topic for the duration of a month; (3) Provide the importance of a topic through a treemap based on the score system and frequency; (4) Visualize the daily time-series graph of keywords by searching the keyword; The present study analyzes the Big Data generated by SNS in real time. SNS Big Data analysis requires various natural language processing techniques, including the removal of stop words, and noun extraction for processing various unrefined forms of unstructured data. In addition, such analysis requires the latest big data technology to process rapidly a large amount of real-time data, such as the Hadoop distributed system or NoSQL, which is an alternative to relational database. We built TITS based on Hadoop to optimize the processing of big data because Hadoop is designed to scale up from single node computing to thousands of machines. Furthermore, we use MongoDB, which is classified as a NoSQL database. In addition, MongoDB is an open source platform, document-oriented database that provides high performance, high availability, and automatic scaling. Unlike existing relational database, there are no schema or tables with MongoDB, and its most important goal is that of data accessibility and data processing performance. In the Age of Big Data, the visualization of Big Data is more attractive to the Big Data community because it helps analysts to examine such data easily and clearly. Therefore, TITS uses the d3.js library as a visualization tool. This library is designed for the purpose of creating Data Driven Documents that bind document object model (DOM) and any data; the interaction between data is easy and useful for managing real-time data stream with smooth animation. In addition, TITS uses a bootstrap made of pre-configured plug-in style sheets and JavaScript libraries to build a web system. The TITS Graphical User Interface (GUI) is designed using these libraries, and it is capable of detecting issues on Twitter in an easy and intuitive manner. The proposed work demonstrates the superiority of our issue detection techniques by matching detected issues with corresponding online news articles. The contributions of the present study are threefold. First, we suggest an alternative approach to real-time big data analysis, which has become an extremely important issue. Second, we apply a topic modeling technique that is used in various research areas, including Library and Information Science (LIS). Based on this, we can confirm the utility of storytelling and time series analysis. Third, we develop a web-based system, and make the system available for the real-time discovery of topics. The present study conducted experiments with nearly 150 million tweets in Korea during March 2013.

Cloud-cell Tracking Analysis using Satellite Image of Extreme Heavy Snowfall in the Yeongdong Region (영동지역의 극한 대설에 대한 위성관측으로부터 구름 추적)

  • Cho, Young-Jun;Kwon, Tae-Yong
    • Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
    • /
    • v.30 no.1
    • /
    • pp.83-107
    • /
    • 2014
  • This study presents spatial characteristics of cloud using satellite image in the extreme heavy snowfall of the Yeongdong region. 3 extreme heavy snowfall events in the Yeongdong region during the recent 12 years (2001 ~ 2012) are selected for which the fresh snow cover exceed 50 cm/day. Spatial characteristics (minimum brightness temperature; Tmin, cloud size, center of cloud-cell) of cloud are analyzed by tracking main cloud-cell related with these events. These characteristics are compared with radar precipitation in the Yeongdong region to investigate relationship between cloud and precipitation. The results are summarized as follows, selected extreme heavy snowfall events are associated with the isolated, well-developed, and small-scale convective cloud which is developing over the Yeongdong region or moving from over East Korea Bay to the Yeongdong region. During the period of main precipitation, cloud-cell Tmin is low ($-40{\sim}-50^{\circ}C$) and cloud area is small (17,000 ~ 40,000 $km^2$). Precipitation area (${\geq}$ 0.5 mm/hr) from radar also shows small and isolated shape (4,000 ~ 8,000 $km^2$). The locations of the cloud and precipitation are similar, but in there centers are located closely to the coast of the Yeongdong region. In all events the extreme heavy snowfall occur in the period a developed cloud-cell was moving into the coastal waters of the Yeongdong. However, it was found that developing stage of cloud and precipitation are not well matched each other in one of 3 events. Water vapor image shows that cloud-cell is developed on the northern edge of the dry(dark) region. Therefore, at the result analyzed from cloud and precipitation, selected extreme heavy snowfall events are associated with small-scale secondary cyclone or vortex, not explosive polar low. Detection and tracking small-scale cloud-cell in the real-time forecasting of the Yeongdong extreme heavy snowfall is important.

Keyword Network Analysis for Technology Forecasting (기술예측을 위한 특허 키워드 네트워크 분석)

  • Choi, Jin-Ho;Kim, Hee-Su;Im, Nam-Gyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.17 no.4
    • /
    • pp.227-240
    • /
    • 2011
  • New concepts and ideas often result from extensive recombination of existing concepts or ideas. Both researchers and developers build on existing concepts and ideas in published papers or registered patents to develop new theories and technologies that in turn serve as a basis for further development. As the importance of patent increases, so does that of patent analysis. Patent analysis is largely divided into network-based and keyword-based analyses. The former lacks its ability to analyze information technology in details while the letter is unable to identify the relationship between such technologies. In order to overcome the limitations of network-based and keyword-based analyses, this study, which blends those two methods, suggests the keyword network based analysis methodology. In this study, we collected significant technology information in each patent that is related to Light Emitting Diode (LED) through text mining, built a keyword network, and then executed a community network analysis on the collected data. The results of analysis are as the following. First, the patent keyword network indicated very low density and exceptionally high clustering coefficient. Technically, density is obtained by dividing the number of ties in a network by the number of all possible ties. The value ranges between 0 and 1, with higher values indicating denser networks and lower values indicating sparser networks. In real-world networks, the density varies depending on the size of a network; increasing the size of a network generally leads to a decrease in the density. The clustering coefficient is a network-level measure that illustrates the tendency of nodes to cluster in densely interconnected modules. This measure is to show the small-world property in which a network can be highly clustered even though it has a small average distance between nodes in spite of the large number of nodes. Therefore, high density in patent keyword network means that nodes in the patent keyword network are connected sporadically, and high clustering coefficient shows that nodes in the network are closely connected one another. Second, the cumulative degree distribution of the patent keyword network, as any other knowledge network like citation network or collaboration network, followed a clear power-law distribution. A well-known mechanism of this pattern is the preferential attachment mechanism, whereby a node with more links is likely to attain further new links in the evolution of the corresponding network. Unlike general normal distributions, the power-law distribution does not have a representative scale. This means that one cannot pick a representative or an average because there is always a considerable probability of finding much larger values. Networks with power-law distributions are therefore often referred to as scale-free networks. The presence of heavy-tailed scale-free distribution represents the fundamental signature of an emergent collective behavior of the actors who contribute to forming the network. In our context, the more frequently a patent keyword is used, the more often it is selected by researchers and is associated with other keywords or concepts to constitute and convey new patents or technologies. The evidence of power-law distribution implies that the preferential attachment mechanism suggests the origin of heavy-tailed distributions in a wide range of growing patent keyword network. Third, we found that among keywords that flew into a particular field, the vast majority of keywords with new links join existing keywords in the associated community in forming the concept of a new patent. This finding resulted in the same outcomes for both the short-term period (4-year) and long-term period (10-year) analyses. Furthermore, using the keyword combination information that was derived from the methodology suggested by our study enables one to forecast which concepts combine to form a new patent dimension and refer to those concepts when developing a new patent.

A Comparative Analysis of the Level of Occupational Health : Before and After the Subsidiary Program on Health Care Management of Small Scale Industries (영세사업장 보건관리 지원사업 실시 전후의 산업보건수준 비교 분석)

  • Jung, Hye Sun
    • Korean Journal of Occupational Health Nursing
    • /
    • v.4
    • /
    • pp.58-83
    • /
    • 1995
  • The small scale industries which have less than 30 employees occupy 86.5% of total number of industries in Korea. And though they have higher accident rate and lower environmental condition than big industries, it has been not mandatory to appointing health care manager at factory. So, from 1993, government subsidizes to the health care management of small industries. The purpose of this study is to identify the real feature of health care status in small industries, and to evaluate the level of health care management, before and after the subsidiary program. 65 small plating industries which have been managed by the same health care management support institution in 1993 were selected for study. Of the 65 industries, 3 which have not taken both environmental evaluation and health screening in 1994, and 9 which have closed were excluded from study sample. And the remaining 53 were analyzed by using the results of environmental evaluation and health screening, reported to the Ministry of Labor, before and after the subsidiary program, the analysis was done by the comparison of the two year paired data of the same industry. Over-permissible-limit rate, health screening implementation rate, above grade C rate were calculated and compared. The status of health care management ; 1. Of the sample industries, 96.9% provide protective equipment and 80.0% set up ventilating system. Protective gloves (89.2%) and protective clothing (80.0%) are widely provided, but ear plugs (4.6%) are rarely provided. 21.5% of the protective equipment are well put on, and 40.4% of the ventilating systems function well. 2. In 1993, 35 industries, 53.8% of the sample, checked working environment twice. Over-permissible-limit rates of heavy metal (12.2%), suspended particle (11.1%), noise (5.5%) were high. To put on protective equipment and to set up local ventilating system were pointed out by the examiners. 3. General health screening was done at 63.1% of the sample industries and 35.3% of total workers were examined. Specific health screening was done at 93.8% of the sample industries and 75.4% of workers were examined. 15.5% of workers was provided to be above grade C and to have digestive system disease (43.3%), circulatory disease (18.9%), and hematopoietic disease (14.2%), etc. 4. In 1993, the subsidiary program of health care management was provided in forms of health education, health counseling, and rounding check of working field. And 61.5%, 83.0%, 55.4% of sample industries respectively received it. The average visit per industry was 1.8. Comparisons of the level of occupational health before and after the subsidiary program ; 1. Over-permissible-limit rates of hazardous factors of 1993 and that of 1994 were compared. The rates of suspended particle, noise, organic solvent of 1994 (37.5%, 13.4%, 24.2% respectively) were higher than that of 1993 (25.0%, 6.0%, 6.3% respectively). In the case of acid, there was no difference between the rate of 1993 and that of 1994. Only the rate of heavy metal decreased from 12.9% in 1993 to 3.0% in 1994. 2. General health screening was done at 38.7% of the sample industries in 1993 and at 44.6% in 1994. But the implementation rate of specific health screening decreased from 72.4% in 1993 to 64.6% in 1994. 3. The implementation rate of specific health screening was analyzed by some health factors. The rate of suspended particle increased from 61.8% in 1993 to 91.2% in 1994. But the rates of the others-noise, organic solvent, heavy metal, specific chemical substances-decreased. 4. Above grade C rate in health screening increased from 27.8% in 1993 to 35.5% in 1994. But that of endocrine disorders and pulmonary disease decreased.

  • PDF

A Study on Improvement of the police disaster crisis management system (경찰의 재난위기관리 개선에 관한 연구)

  • Chun, Yongtae;Kim, Moonkwi
    • Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
    • /
    • v.11 no.4
    • /
    • pp.556-569
    • /
    • 2015
  • With about 75% of the population of Korea criticizing the government's disaster policy and a failure to respond to large-scale emergency like the Sewol ferry sinking means that there is a deep distrust in the government. In order to prevent dreadful disasters such as the Sewol ferry sinking, it is important to secure a prime time with respect to disaster safety. Improving crisis management skills and managerial role of police officers who are in close proximity to the people is necessary for the success of disaster management. With disaster management as one of the most essential missions of the police, as a part of a national crisis management, a step by step strengthening of the disaster safety management system of the police is necessary, as below. First, at the prevention phase, law enforcement officers were not injected into for profit large-scale assemblies or events, but in the future the involvement, injection should be based on the level of potential risk, rather than profitability. In the past and now, the priortiy was the priority was on traffic flow, traffic communication, however, the paradigm of traffic policy should be changed to a safety-centered policy. To prevent large-scale accidents, police investigators should root out improper routines and illegal construction subcontracting. The police (intelligence) should strengthen efforts to collect intelligence under the subject of "safety". Second, with respect to the preparatory phase, on a survey of police officers, the result showed that 72% of police officers responded that safety management was not related to the job descriptions of the police. This, along with other results, shows that the awareness of disaster safety must be adopted by, or rather changed in the police urgently. The training in disaster safety education should be strengthened. A network of experts (private, administrative, and police) in safety management should be established to take advantage of private resources with regard to crisis situtions. Third, with respect to the response phase, for rapid first responses to occur, a unified communication network should be established, and a real-time video information network should be adopted by the police and installed in the police situation room. Fourth, during the recovery phase, recovery teams should be injected, added and operated to minimize secondary damage.

A Comparative Study about Industrial Structure Feature between TL Carriers and LTL Carriers (구역화물운송업과 노선화물운송업의 산업구조 특성 비교)

  • 민승기
    • Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
    • /
    • v.19 no.1
    • /
    • pp.101-114
    • /
    • 2001
  • Transportation enterprises should maintain constant and qualitative operation. Thus, in short period, transportation enterprises don't change supply in accordance with demand. In the result, transportation enterprises don't reduce operation in spite of management deficit at will. In freight transportation type, less-than-truckload(LTL) has more relation with above transportation feature than truckload(TL) does. Because freight transportation supply of TL is more flexible than that of LTL in correspondence of freight transportation demand. Relating to above mention, it appears that shortage of road and freight terminal of LTL is larger than that of TL. Especially in road and freight terminal comparison, shortage of freight terminal is larger than that of road. Shortage of road is the largest in 1990, and improved after-ward. But shortage of freight terminal is serious lately. So freight terminal needs more expansion than road, and shows better investment condition than road. Freight terminal expansion brings road expansion in LTL, on the contrary, freight terminal expansion substitutes freight terminal for road in TL. In transportation revenue, freight terminal's contribution to LTL is larger than that to TL. However, when we adjust quasi-fixed factor - road and freight terminal - to optimal level in the long run, in TL, diseconomies of scale becomes large, but in LTL, economies of scale becomes large. Consequently, it is necessary for TL to make counterplans to activate management of small size enterprises and owner drivers. And LTL should make use of economies of scale by solving the problem, such as nonprofit route, excess of rental freight handling of office, insufficiency of freight terminal, shortage of driver, and unpreparedness of freight insurance.

  • PDF

Estimation of Reliability of Real-time Control Parameters for Animal Wastewater Treatment Process and Establishment of an Index for Supplemental Carbon Source Addition (가축분뇨처리공정의 자동제어 인자 신뢰성 평가 및 적정 외부탄소원 공급량 지표 확립)

  • Pak, JaeIn;Ra, Jae In-
    • Journal of Animal Science and Technology
    • /
    • v.50 no.4
    • /
    • pp.561-572
    • /
    • 2008
  • Responses of real-time control parameters, such as ORP, DO and pH, to the conditions of biological animal wastewater treatment process were examined to evaluate the stability of real-time control using each parameter. Also an optimum index for supplemental carbon source addition based on NOx-N level was determined under a consideration of denitrification rate by endogenous respiration of microorganism and residual organic matter in liquor. Experiment was performed with lab-scale sequencing batch reactor(SBR) and working volume of the process was 45L. The distinctive nitrogen break point(NBP) on ORP-and DO-time profiles, which mean the termination of nitrification, started disappearing with the maintenance of low NH4-N loading rate. Also the NBP on ORP-and DO-time profiles was no longer observed when high NOx-N was loaded into the reactor, and the sensitivity of ORP became dull with the increase of NOx-N level. However, the distinctive NBP was constantly occurred on pH(mV)-time profile, maintaining unique profile patterns. This stable occurrence of NBP on pH(mV)-time profile was lasted even at very high NOx-N:NH4-N ratio(over 80:1) in reactor, and the specific point could be easily detected by tracking moving slope change(MSC) of the curve. Revelation of NBP on pH(mV)-time profile and recognition of the realtime control point using MSC were stable at a condition of over 300mg/L NOx-N level in reactor. The occurrence of distinctive NBP was persistent on pH(mV)-time profile even at a level of 10,000mg/L STOC(soluble total organic carbon) and the recognition of NBP was feasible by tracing MSC, but that point on ORP and DO-time profiles began to disappear with the increase of STOC level in reactor. The denitrfication rate by endogenous respiration and residual organic matter was about 0.4mg/L.hr., and it was found that 0.83 would be accepted as an index for supplemental carbon source addition when 0.1 of safety factor was applied.

Product Recommender Systems using Multi-Model Ensemble Techniques (다중모형조합기법을 이용한 상품추천시스템)

  • Lee, Yeonjeong;Kim, Kyoung-Jae
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.19 no.2
    • /
    • pp.39-54
    • /
    • 2013
  • Recent explosive increase of electronic commerce provides many advantageous purchase opportunities to customers. In this situation, customers who do not have enough knowledge about their purchases, may accept product recommendations. Product recommender systems automatically reflect user's preference and provide recommendation list to the users. Thus, product recommender system in online shopping store has been known as one of the most popular tools for one-to-one marketing. However, recommender systems which do not properly reflect user's preference cause user's disappointment and waste of time. In this study, we propose a novel recommender system which uses data mining and multi-model ensemble techniques to enhance the recommendation performance through reflecting the precise user's preference. The research data is collected from the real-world online shopping store, which deals products from famous art galleries and museums in Korea. The data initially contain 5759 transaction data, but finally remain 3167 transaction data after deletion of null data. In this study, we transform the categorical variables into dummy variables and exclude outlier data. The proposed model consists of two steps. The first step predicts customers who have high likelihood to purchase products in the online shopping store. In this step, we first use logistic regression, decision trees, and artificial neural networks to predict customers who have high likelihood to purchase products in each product group. We perform above data mining techniques using SAS E-Miner software. In this study, we partition datasets into two sets as modeling and validation sets for the logistic regression and decision trees. We also partition datasets into three sets as training, test, and validation sets for the artificial neural network model. The validation dataset is equal for the all experiments. Then we composite the results of each predictor using the multi-model ensemble techniques such as bagging and bumping. Bagging is the abbreviation of "Bootstrap Aggregation" and it composite outputs from several machine learning techniques for raising the performance and stability of prediction or classification. This technique is special form of the averaging method. Bumping is the abbreviation of "Bootstrap Umbrella of Model Parameter," and it only considers the model which has the lowest error value. The results show that bumping outperforms bagging and the other predictors except for "Poster" product group. For the "Poster" product group, artificial neural network model performs better than the other models. In the second step, we use the market basket analysis to extract association rules for co-purchased products. We can extract thirty one association rules according to values of Lift, Support, and Confidence measure. We set the minimum transaction frequency to support associations as 5%, maximum number of items in an association as 4, and minimum confidence for rule generation as 10%. This study also excludes the extracted association rules below 1 of lift value. We finally get fifteen association rules by excluding duplicate rules. Among the fifteen association rules, eleven rules contain association between products in "Office Supplies" product group, one rules include the association between "Office Supplies" and "Fashion" product groups, and other three rules contain association between "Office Supplies" and "Home Decoration" product groups. Finally, the proposed product recommender systems provides list of recommendations to the proper customers. We test the usability of the proposed system by using prototype and real-world transaction and profile data. For this end, we construct the prototype system by using the ASP, Java Script and Microsoft Access. In addition, we survey about user satisfaction for the recommended product list from the proposed system and the randomly selected product lists. The participants for the survey are 173 persons who use MSN Messenger, Daum Caf$\acute{e}$, and P2P services. We evaluate the user satisfaction using five-scale Likert measure. This study also performs "Paired Sample T-test" for the results of the survey. The results show that the proposed model outperforms the random selection model with 1% statistical significance level. It means that the users satisfied the recommended product list significantly. The results also show that the proposed system may be useful in real-world online shopping store.

Review of Sexual Dysfunction in Male Schizophrenics (남자 정신분열병 환자에서 성기능장애에 대한 검토)

  • Choi, Yeong Tae;Cheon, Jin Sook;Oh, Byoung Hoon
    • Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
    • /
    • v.7 no.1
    • /
    • pp.85-98
    • /
    • 2000
  • Objective : There are four possible explanations for the sexual dysfunction of schizophrenics. The first is the possibility of a real structural aspect. The second possibility is that sexual function changes secondary to the illness. The third possibility is that there are medical and sociocultural barriers to sexual expression for chronic schizophrenics. The fourth possibility is that sexual dysfunction due to antipsychotic medication. However, we didn't know the precise cause of sexual dysfunction in schizophrenics. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the mechanism of illness itself and antipsychotics on sexual dysfunction in male schizophrenics. Methods : The serum prolactin(PRL), testosterone(TST), and the plasma serotonin(5-HT) concentrations were measured by radioimmunoassay and high performance liquid chromatography method for 100 healthy male schizophrenics according to the DSM-IV. Concomitantly, the severity of psychotic symptoms using Clinical Global Impression(CGI), Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale(BPRS), Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale(PANSS), and the severity of side effects for antipsychotics using Extrapyramidal Side Effects Scale(EPSE), Anticholinergic Side Effects Scale(ACSE), the cognitive function using PANSS-Cognitive Function(PANSS-CF), Mini Mental State Exam-Korean(MMSE-K), and the sexual dysfunction using Sexual Functioning Questionnaire(SFQ), Questionnaire for Sexual Dysfunction in Men were assessed. The PRL, TST, and 5-HT levels of 50 healthy male controls who had no medical, neurological, and psychiatric illnesses were evaluated. The sexual function using SFQ(items FGa, FNa) were also assessed. Furthermore, the correlation with age, education, religion, economic status, age at onset, duration of illnesses, duration of admission, levels of PRL, TST, 5-HT, antipsychotic dosages, potency, benztropine, total duration of medication, EPSE, ACSE, CGI, BPRS, PANSS, PANSS-CF, MMSE-K and sexual dysfunctions were identified in male schizophrenics. Results : 1) The frequencies of sexual dysfunctions for schizophrenics(80%) were significantly(p<0.001) higher than those for controls(42%). The sexual dysfunctions according to sexual response cycle were 'low sexual desire' 76%, 'impairment of achieving erection' 75%, 'impairment of maintaining erection' 75%, 'impairment of obtaining orgasm' 32%, 'impairment in the quality of orgasm' 61%, 'impairment in quantity of ejaculate' 44%, 'premature ejaculation' 15%, and 'delayed ejaculation' 50%. 2) The PRL, 5-HT levels of schizophrenics($28.5{\pm}20.6ng/ml$, $298.5{\pm}89.1ng/ml$) were significantly(p<0.001) higher than those of controls($10{\pm}5.6ng/ml$, $169.2{\pm}37.8ng/ml$), while the TST levels of schizophrenics($4.3{\pm}1.5ng/ml$) and controls($4.5{\pm}1.2ng/ml$) were not significantly different. The sexual dysfunctions of schizophrenics who had abnormal 5-HT levels($4.7{\pm}1.3$ scores) were significantly(p<0.05) higher than those of who had normal 5-HT levels($3.8{\pm}1.6$ scores) on item D7. 3) The sexual dysfunctions of unmarried schizophrenics were significantly(p<0.01 : p<0.05) higher than those of married schizophrenics($6.1{\pm}2.8$ scores, $4.7{\pm}1.3$ scores on item FGa : ${\beta}$=-0.211 on item FNa). The sexual dysfunctions were positively correlated with the rise of 5-HT levels(r=0.209, p<0.05 on item D4 and r=0.241, p<0.05 on item D7), the higher age at onset(r=0.275, p<0.01 on item FNa : r=-0.202, p<0.05 on item FDa), the longer duration of illnesses(r=0.237, p<0.05 on item D6), the longer duration of admission(r=0.234, p<0.05 on item D4 : r=0.328, p<0.05 on item D6), the longer total duration of medication(r=0.237, p<0.05 on item D6). However, age, education, religion, economic status, PRL, TST levels, antipsychotics dosage, potency, benztropine, ACSE, CGI, BPRS, PANSS, PANSS-CF, MMSE-K scores were not correlated with increased sexual dysfunctions. Conclusions : Male schizophrenics have significantly more sexual dysfunction to compare with controls. The higher frequencies of sexual dysfunctions were low sexual desire and erectile disorder. The unmarried, higher age at onset, and longer duration of diseases were positively correlated with increased sexual dysfunctions. Also high 5-HT levels were positively correlated with increased sexual dysfunctions. This means that studies of plasma 5-HT levels, albeit questionable indicators of central 5-HT function, offer some additional support for the association of sexual dysfunction with excess 5-HT activity as primary pathology of schizophrenia. Our findings suggest that excess 5-HT activity seems to affect the patient's sexual function.

  • PDF