The nutritional transition and diet-related chronic diseases in Asia

The nutritional transition currently occurring in Asia is one facet of a more general demographic/nutritional/epidemiological transition that accompanies development and urbanization, marked by a shift away from relatively monotonous diets of varying nutritional quality toward an industrialized diet that is usually more varied, includes more preprocessed food, more food of animal origin, more added sugar and fat, and often more alcohol. This is accompanied by shift in the structure of occupations and leisure toward reduced physical activity, and leads to a rapid increase in the numbers of overweight and obese. The accompanying epidemiological transition is marked by a shift away from endemic deficiency and infectious diseases toward chronic diseases such as obesity, adult-onset diabetes, hypertension, stroke, hyperlipidaemia, coronary heart disease, and cancer. Obesity is now a major public health problem in Asia. Obesity is a problem of the urban poor as well as the rich, and the urban poor have the added predisposing factors associated with low birthweight. Costs of chronic disease are estimated for China and Sri Lanka. Diet-related chronic disease is projected to increase and dietary factors (principally overweight) will account for an increased share of chronic disease, and childhood factors will decline in significance. Few program and policy options to address these issues have been undertaken in Asia. Agricultural policy is important, and the relatively cheap availability of vegetable oil may have had dramatic (adverse) dietary effects in Asia. Price policy has considerable potential, in particular the pricing of oils. Promoting a traditional diet has been quite helpful in holding down fat intake and obesity in Korea. Health promotion efforts in Mauritius succeeded in reversing several adverse trends contributing to coronary heart disease. Thailand has successfully used mass media for other health promotion efforts and is moving to pilot schemes in the area of chronic disease. And Singapore has been the leader in the region in exercise promotion and weight control in schools.Urbanization Asia ,Nutritionally induced diseases Asia. ,Diet Developing countries. ,Public health Developing countries ,

The nutritional transition and diet-related chronic diseases in Asia

The nutritional transition currently occurring in Asia is one facet of a more general demographic/nutritional/epidemiological transition that accompanies development and urbanization, marked by a shift away from relatively monotonous diets of varying nutritional quality toward an industrialized diet that is usually more varied, includes more preprocessed food, more food of animal origin, more added sugar and fat, and often more alcohol. This is accompanied by shift in the structure of occupations and leisure toward reduced physical activity, and leads to a rapid increase in the numbers of overweight and obese. The accompanying epidemiological transition is marked by a shift away from endemic deficiency and infectious diseases toward chronic diseases such as obesity, adult-onset diabetes, hypertension, stroke, hyperlipidaemia, coronary heart disease, and cancer. Obesity is now a major public health problem in Asia. Obesity is a problem of the urban poor as well as the rich, and the urban poor have the added predisposing factors associated with low birthweight. Costs of chronic disease are estimated for China and Sri Lanka. Diet-related chronic disease is projected to increase and dietary factors (principally overweight) will account for an increased share of chronic disease, and childhood factors will decline in significance. Few program and policy options to address these issues have been undertaken in Asia. Agricultural policy is important, and the relatively cheap availability of vegetable oil may have had dramatic (adverse) dietary effects in Asia. Price policy has considerable potential, in particular the pricing of oils. Promoting a traditional diet has been quite helpful in holding down fat intake and obesity in Korea. Health promotion efforts in Mauritius succeeded in reversing several adverse trends contributing to coronary heart disease. Thailand has successfully used mass media for other health promotion efforts and is moving to pilot schemes in the area of chronic disease. And Singapore has been the leader in the region in exercise promotion and weight control in schools.Urbanization Asia ,Nutritionally induced diseases Asia. ,Diet Developing countries. ,Public health Developing countries ,

Towards Neural Decoding of Imagined Speech based on Spoken Speech

Decoding imagined speech from human brain signals is a challenging and important issue that may enable human communication via brain signals. While imagined speech can be the paradigm for silent communication via brain signals, it is always hard to collect enough stable data to train the decoding model. Meanwhile, spoken speech data is relatively easy and to obtain, implying the significance of utilizing spoken speech brain signals to decode imagined speech. In this paper, we performed a preliminary analysis to find out whether if it would be possible to utilize spoken speech electroencephalography data to decode imagined speech, by simply applying the pre-trained model trained with spoken speech brain signals to decode imagined speech. While the classification performance of imagined speech data solely used to train and validation was 30.5 %, the transferred performance of spoken speech based classifier to imagined speech data displayed average accuracy of 26.8 % which did not have statistically significant difference compared to the imagined speech based classifier (p = 0.0983, chi-square = 4.64). For more comprehensive analysis, we compared the result with the visual imagery dataset, which would naturally be less related to spoken speech compared to the imagined speech. As a result, visual imagery have shown solely trained performance of 31.8 % and transferred performance of 26.3 % which had shown statistically significant difference between each other (p = 0.022, chi-square = 7.64). Our results imply the potential of applying spoken speech to decode imagined speech, as well as their underlying common features.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

The unique aspects of the nutrition transition in South Korea: the retention of healthful elements in their traditional diet

OBJECTIVE: The purposes of this paper are to describe the unique aspects of the nutrition transition in South Korea, including trends in food consumption and obesity, patterns of morbidity and mortality; to focus on efforts to maintain the traditional diet in the midst of rapid economic growth and the introduction of Western culture; and to provide insights for other countries. DESIGN: We analysed secondary dietary intake, anthropometric, morbidity and mortality data from published reports and articles. RESULTS: In South Korea, the level and rate of increase in fat intake have remained very low, whereas vegetable intake has been high and fruit intake has increased greatly. South Korea also has a relatively low prevalence of obesity compared with other Asian countries. The traditional Korean diet is a low-fat and high-vegetable diet. Therefore, the government and nutrition specialists have been initiating numerous efforts to advertise and teach the public that the traditional diet is a healthy diet. They are also working on revival of the traditional diet using an approach that is acceptable to contemporary Koreans. CONCLUSIONS: The nutrition transition in South Korea is unique. A range of government, nutrition specialists and some private organisation efforts has worked to retain healthful elements of the traditional diet in South Korea. The continued low level of total fat in the overall diet and the high intake of fruits and vegetables bode well for South Korea

Brain-Driven Representation Learning Based on Diffusion Model

Interpreting EEG signals linked to spoken language presents a complex challenge, given the data's intricate temporal and spatial attributes, as well as the various noise factors. Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs), which have recently gained prominence in diverse areas for their capabilities in representation learning, are explored in our research as a means to address this issue. Using DDPMs in conjunction with a conditional autoencoder, our new approach considerably outperforms traditional machine learning algorithms and established baseline models in accuracy. Our results highlight the potential of DDPMs as a sophisticated computational method for the analysis of speech-related EEG signals. This could lead to significant advances in brain-computer interfaces tailored for spoken communication

Corrigendum: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence for Facial Emotion Recognition in Elderly Korean Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer's Disease, and Frontotemporal Dementia

Background: Facial emotion recognition (FER) is impaired in individuals with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) when compared to healthy older adults. Since deficits in emotion recognition are closely related to caregiver burden or social interactions, researchers have fundamental interest in FER performance in patients with dementia.Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the performance profiles of six facial emotions (i.e., fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, and happiness) and neutral faces measured among Korean healthy control (HCs), and those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), AD, and FTD. Additionally, the neuroanatomical correlates of facial emotions were investigated.Methods: A total of 110 (33 HC, 32 MCI, 32 AD, 13 FTD) older adult participants were recruited from two different medical centers in metropolitan areas of South Korea. These individuals underwent an FER test that was used to assess the recognition of emotions or absence of emotion (neutral) in 35 facial stimuli. Repeated measures two-way analyses of variance were used to examine the distinct profiles of emotional recognition among the four groups. We also performed brain imaging and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) on the participants to examine the associations between FER scores and gray matter volume.Results: The mean score of negative emotion recognition (i.e., fear, anger, disgust, and sadness) clearly discriminated FTD participants from individuals with MCI and AD and HC [F(3,106) = 10.829, p 2 = 0.235], whereas the mean score of positive emotion recognition (i.e., surprise and happiness) did not. A VBM analysis showed negative emotions were correlated with gray matter volume of anterior temporal regions, whereas positive emotions were related to gray matter volume of fronto-parietal regions.Conclusion: Impairment of negative FER in patients with FTD is cross-cultural. The discrete neural correlates of FER indicate that emotional recognition processing is a multi-modal system in the brain. Focusing on the negative emotion recognition is a more effective way to discriminate healthy aging, MCI, and AD from FTD in older Korean adults.</p

Interactions between subjective memory complaint and objective cognitive deficit on memory performances

Background Subjective memory complaint (SMCs) is a common trait amongst older population. The subjective cognition about their memory could depend on objective cognition. The aim of the current study was to examine the interaction between subjective memory cognition (i.e., SMC) and objective cognition on cognitive functions in participants from older generation. Methods A total of 219 patients, 181 normal control (NC) patients and 38 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), were examined through standardized and comprehensive clinical evaluation and neuropsychological assessment. The Subjective Memory Complaints Questionnaire was used to assess SMCs along with five cognitive tasks were used to evaluate cognitive decline over following areas: verbal memory, visuospatial memory, attention, fluency, and language. Results The results of 2 × 2 two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that there were significant interactions between SMCs and cognitive status (NC, MCI) on memory performances. NC with SMCs showed significantly lower performance in verbal memory and visuospatial memory compared to NCs without SMCs. Conversely, no effect was observed in the MCI group. Conclusion There are interactions between subjective cognition (i.e., SMC) and objective cognition (i.e., cognitive status) on memory performances in older adults. The roles of SMCs on memory performances should be interpreted with older adults objective cognitive status.This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (No. NRF-2017R1D1A1A02018479). This funding source had no role in the design of this study and will not have any role during its execution, analyses, interpretation of the data, or decision to submit result