Intakes of Dairy Products and Calcium and Obesity in Korean Adults: Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (KNHANES) 2007-2009

Background: The possible effects of dairy product intake against obesity have been suggested in animal studies; however, the association is still not well established in epidemiological studies. Few studies in Asian countries with relatively low intake of dairy products exist. Objective: We investigated the association between dairy products and calcium intake and obesity in Korean population with relatively low intake of dairy products. Subjects and Methods Our study population consisted of adults (n = 7173) aged 19–64 among participants of the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey who had not made any attempt of intentional weight loss. Dietary intake data from food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and 24-hour recall were used. Dairy products included milk and yogurt in the FFQ. Obesity was defined as BMI≥25 kg/m2. Results: Higher frequency of dairy product intake was associated with a reduced prevalence of obesity (OR = 0.63; 95% CI = 0.45–0.89 for ≥2 times/day vs. ≤1 time/month; p for trend = 0.003) using the intake data from FFQ. Similarly, high frequency of milk or yogurt intake had an inverse association with obesity. The association between milk and yogurt intake and obesity was similar when the intake from 24-hour recall was examined. Higher calcium intake from dairy products as well as total dietary calcium intake was associated with a decreased prevalence of obesity (OR = 0.83; 95% CI = 0.71–0.98 for highest vs. lowest quintile of dairy calcium intake; p for trend = 0.02, OR = 0.78; 95% CI = 0.64–0.94 for highest vs. lowest quintile of total calcium intake; p for trend = 0.04). The associations appeared to be stronger in women than in men. Conclusion: These results suggest that high consumption of dairy products is associated with a lower prevalence of obesity and that calcium in dairy products may be one of the components contributing to the association. Further longitudinal studies are warranted to replicate our findings

Developmental trajectories of tobacco use and risk factors from adolescence to emerging young adulthood: a population-based panel study

Abstract Background Adolescence to young adulthood is a critical developmental period that determines lifelong patterns of tobacco use. We examined the longitudinal trajectories of tobacco use, and risk factors for its use, and explored the association between the trajectories of mobile phone dependency and smoking throughout the life-course among adolescents and young adults. Methods Data of 1,723 subjects (853 boys and 870 girls) were obtained from six waves of the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (mean age = 13.9–19.9years). To identify trajectories of smoking and mobile phone dependency, group-based trajectory modelling (GBTM) was conducted. A multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed to identify the characteristics of the trajectory groups. Results GBTM identified four distinct smoking trajectories: never smokers (69.1%), persistent light smokers (8.7%), early established smokers (12.0%), and late escalators (10.3%). Successful school adjustment decreased the risk of being an early established smoker (odds ratio [OR] 0.46, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.27–0.78). The number of days not supervised by a guardian after school was positively associated with the risk of being an early established smoker (OR 1.96, 95% CI 1.23–3.13). Dependency on mobile phones throughout the life-course was positively associated with the risk of being a persistent light smoker (OR 4.04, 95% CI 1.32–12.34) or early established smoker (OR 8.18, 95% CI 4.04–16.56). Conclusions Based on the group-based modeling approach, we identified four distinctive smoking trajectories and highlight the long-term effects of mobile phone dependency, from early adolescence to young adulthood, on smoking patterns

Effect of Different Seeding Rate on Seed Production of the Rye Variety “Gogu” in Korea

The rye (Secale cereale L.) has been used as an excellent green manure crop and good forage crop in Korea. The rye is usually recommended as a winter crop for forage and green manure after either maize or rice in Korea (Heo et al., 2009). But most of its seeds are being imported from foreign countries because the seed productions have difficulty with latematuring and the heavy raining season in the ripening stage in Korea. Therefore, a new rye variety “Gogu” with an earlymaturing and high performance was bred by National Institute of Crop Science (NICS), Suwon, Korea in 2004. This study was carried out to determine the effect of seeding rate on the seed yield and agronomic characteristics of the rye variety “Gogu” in the north eastern area, Youngwol, Korea

Self-supervised Image Denoising with Downsampled Invariance Loss and Conditional Blind-Spot Network

There have been many image denoisers using deep neural networks, which outperform conventional model-based methods by large margins. Recently, self-supervised methods have attracted attention because constructing a large real noise dataset for supervised training is an enormous burden. The most representative self-supervised denoisers are based on blind-spot networks, which exclude the receptive field's center pixel. However, excluding any input pixel is abandoning some information, especially when the input pixel at the corresponding output position is excluded. In addition, a standard blind-spot network fails to reduce real camera noise due to the pixel-wise correlation of noise, though it successfully removes independently distributed synthetic noise. Hence, to realize a more practical denoiser, we propose a novel self-supervised training framework that can remove real noise. For this, we derive the theoretic upper bound of a supervised loss where the network is guided by the downsampled blinded output. Also, we design a conditional blind-spot network (C-BSN), which selectively controls the blindness of the network to use the center pixel information. Furthermore, we exploit a random subsampler to decorrelate noise spatially, making the C-BSN free of visual artifacts that were often seen in downsample-based methods. Extensive experiments show that the proposed C-BSN achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets as a self-supervised denoiser and shows qualitatively pleasing results without any post-processing or refinement

A genome-wide Asian genetic map and ethnic comparison: The GENDISCAN study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genetic maps provide specific positions of genetic markers, which are required for performing genetic studies. Linkage analyses of Asian families have been performed with Caucasian genetic maps, since appropriate genetic maps of Asians were not available. Different ethnic groups may have different recombination rates as a result of genomic variations, which would generate misspecification of the genetic map and reduce the power of linkage analyses.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We constructed the genetic map of a Mongolian population in Asia with CRIMAP software. This new map, called the GENDISCAN map, is based on genotype data collected from 1026 individuals of 73 large Mongolian families, and includes 1790 total and 1500 observable meioses. The GENDISCAN map provides sex-averaged and sex-specific genetic positions of 1039 microsatellite markers in Kosambi centimorgans (cM) with physical positions. We also determined 95% confidence intervals of genetic distances of the adjacent marker intervals.</p> <p>Genetic lengths of the whole genome, chromosomes and adjacent marker intervals are compared with those of Rutgers Map v.2, which was constructed based on Caucasian populations (Centre d'Etudes du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH) and Icelandic families) by mapping methods identical to those of the GENDISCAN map, CRIMAP software and the Kosambi map function. Mongolians showed approximately 1.9 fewer recombinations per meiosis than Caucasians. As a result, genetic lengths of the whole genome and chromosomes of the GENDISCAN map are shorter than those of Rutgers Map v.2. Thirty-eight marker intervals differed significantly between the Mongolian and Caucasian genetic maps.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The new GENDISCAN map is applicable to the genetic study of Asian populations. Differences in the genetic distances between the GENDISCAN and Caucasian maps could facilitate elucidation of genomic variations between different ethnic groups.</p