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The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose significant challenges to nations. The Korean government aimed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 through stay-at-home strategies and maintaining social distance, which are likely to result in major changes in the lifestyle, mental health, and quality of life of citizens. This study aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these factors in Koreans over 20 years old. The study sample consisted of 104 adults in South Korea aged over 20 years. An online survey was conducted between August and October 2020, in which participants were asked to complete the Yonsei Lifestyle Profile to assess lifestyle changes, the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale, and the World Health Organization Quality of Life Scale abbreviated version. To investigate the changes in people's lifestyles, depression, and quality of life post COVID-19, descriptive statistics were calculated for these indicators before and after the onset of the pandemic. The p-value was two-sided, and values <0.05, were regarded as statistically significant. There was a significant decline in physical and other meaningful activities, including activities of daily living, leisure, social activity, and education. However, there were no significant changes in nutrition, except in the consumption of carbohydrates and minerals. Participants reported that their quality of life and mental health had decreased after the pandemic struck. We obtained novel data on the changes in the lifestyle, mental health, and quality of life of South Korean adults before and after the onset of the pandemic. The results of our study may assist health policymakers and practitioners in the development of health education or relevant interventions to deal with the pandemic situation as well as future crises.

Social Isolation and network are crucial factors which affect the quality of life and overall health of older adults. Therefore, in the field of health promotion, there's a growing attention to assess and evaluate the social health including social isolation and network of older adults. This study aimed to develop a Social Isolation and Social Network (SISN) evaluation tool that comprehensively measure the social isolation and network of older adults. Between April and June 2024, we gathered insights from 23 experts in lifestyle and health. Based on the previous research, a two-round Delphi survey was conducted to obtain expert consensus on key assessment components. In the initial survey, we collected expert's opinions through open and closed-ended questions about social isolation and social network evaluation items. After the first survey, we corrected several items that didn't meet the Content Validity Ratio (CVR) standard before proceeding. We presented the first survey's findings to an expert panel, leading to a consensus. The initial Delphi round produced 32 items and the second round resulted in 30 items after adjusting those with CVR scores of 0.37 or less. The final CVR was 0.87 with a convergence of 0.87, a consensus level of 0.31 and stability level of 0.12. This study successfully developed a comprehensive social isolation and social network assessment using a modified Delphi technique. The 30 items are categorized into three sections. The SISN is able to provide a systematic approach to evaluate social isolation and social network of older adults. Future studies should be conducted to examine the reliability and validity.

In the field of health promotion, there's a growing focus on adopting an academic approach to assess and evaluate the intricate and ever-evolving nature of lifestyles. This approach is crucial for shaping and improving a healthy way of life. Systematic measurement of lifestyles is essential for enhancing overall health and well-being, encompassing physical, mental, and social dimensions. This study's goal is to create an assessment tool that measures the diversity and intensity of lifestyle behaviors linked to human health. Our efforts involved developing quantitative measurement items that encompass the holistic concepts of health and lifestyle and validating them. Between March and April 2023, we gathered insights from 14 experts in lifestyle and health. Building on previous research, we conducted a Delphi survey twice. In the initial survey, we collected expert opinions through open and closed-ended questions about lifestyle evaluation items. After the first survey, we corrected several items that didn't meet the Content Validity Ratio (CVR) standard before proceeding. We presented the first survey's findings to an expert panel, leading to a consensus. The initial Delphi round produced 76 items, and the second round resulted in 72 items after adjusting those with CVR scores of 0.51 or less. The final Content Validity Ratio was 0.83, signifying a robust validation process, with a convergence of 0.50 and a consensus level of 0.75. In summary, this study successfully developed a comprehensive lifestyle assessment tool using a modified Delphi technique. The 72 items are categorized into eight subcategories and four overarching themes. This tool provides a systematic approach to evaluate lifestyles, promoting health and well-being across physical, mental, and social dimensions. It also assists in identifying specific lifestyle elements that require more in-depth intervention strategies, all while preserving the academic integrity of the content.

The purpose of this study is to identify lifestyle factors that affect the subjective health conditions of adolescents in South Korea by utilizing data from the Korean Children's and Youth Panel Survey 2018 conducted in Korea. This cross-sectional study used data from 4,490 students (2,399 students in the fourth grade of elementary school and 2,541 students in the first grade of middle school). The data obtained were evaluated using living time (sleep time, study time, leisure time), emotions (happiness, self-esteem, emotional problems), capabilities (cooperative attitude, grit), health (life satisfaction, exercise time, number of breakfasts, quality of sleep), media (smartphone use and dependence), school (school life satisfaction, relationship with friends and teachers), and home (time spent with parents, parenting attitude). We confirmed that regardless of grade, living time (leisure time), emotion (happiness, self-esteem, emotional problems), capabilities (grit), health (life satisfaction, exercise time, quality of sleep), media (smartphone dependence), and school (school life satisfaction, friendly, and teacher relations) are related to subjective health conditions. These results confirmed that evaluation parameters are related to subjective health conditions regardless of grade. This investigation revealed that the higher the quality of sleep enhanced positive emotions while increased exercise.

Organ size is regulated by intercellular signaling for cell growth and proliferation. The TOR pathway mediates a key signaling mechanism for controlling cell size and number in organ growth. Chaperonin containing TCP-1 (CCT) is a complex that assists protein folding and function, but its role in animal development is largely unknown. Here we show that the CCT complex is required for organ growth by interacting with the TOR pathway in Drosophila . Reduction of CCT4 results in growth defects by affecting both cell size and proliferation. Loss of CCT4 causes preferential cell death anterior to the morphogenetic furrow in the eye disc and within wing pouch in the wing disc. Depletion of any CCT subunit in the eye disc results in headless phenotype. Overgrowth by active TOR signaling is suppressed by CCT RNAi. The CCT complex physically interacts with TOR signaling components including TOR, Rheb, and S6K. Loss of CCT leads to decreased phosphorylation of S6K and S6 while increasing phosphorylation of Akt. Insulin/TOR signaling is also necessary and sufficient for promoting CCT complex transcription. Our data provide evidence that the CCT complex regulates organ growth by directly interacting with the TOR signaling pathway.

Background COVID-19 pandemic causes psychological problems such as stress. It is important to accurately identify the level of stress and establish effective intervention. The Impact of Event Scale-6 (IES-6) is widely used for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) screening by measuring the level of subjective stress, but there has been no research on its psychometric properties with individuals who experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A random sample of 600 participants were randomly selected from a COVID-19 survey database ( n  = 6391). Rasch analysis was conducted to examine item fit, rating scale structure, construct validity, differential item functioning (DIF), and precision of the IES-6. Results The principal component analysis of Rasch residuals (54.1% of the raw variance explained) and the average of residual correlations (average r  = .19) supported the unidimensionality structure in the IES-6. The rating scale was suitable, and the item difficulty hierarchy was logical. The item fit and the DIF contrast were acceptable, except for item 5. The IES-6’s person reliability was .76, which was also an acceptable level. Conclusions This study showed that the IES-6 has acceptable item-level psychometrics for screening the stress level in adults in the United States for individuals who have experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings suggested that the IES-6 would be useful for the rapid identification of the high-level stressand allow clinicians to quickly provide interventions for people with the COVID-19 related stress and their families.

The damage investigation and inspection methods for infrastructures performed in small-scale (type III) facilities usually involve a visual examination by an inspector using surveying tools (e.g., cracking, crack microscope, etc.) in the field. These methods can interfere with the subjectivity of the inspector, which may reduce the objectivity and reliability of the record. Therefore, a new image analysis technique is needed to automatically detect cracks and analyze the characteristics of the cracks objectively. In this study, an image analysis technique using deep learning is developed to detect cracks and analyze characteristics (e.g., length, and width) in images for small-scale facilities. Three stages of image processing pipeline are proposed to obtain crack detection and its characteristics. In the first and second stages, two-dimensional convolutional neural networks are used for crack image detection (e.g., classification and segmentation). Based on convolution neural network for the detection, hierarchical feature learning architecture is applied into our deep learning network. After deep learning-based detection, in the third stage, thinning and tracking algorithms are applied to analyze length and width of crack in the image. The performance of the proposed method was tested using various crack images with label and the results showed good performance of crack detection and its measurement.

Healthy living habits (healthy eating, regular physical activity, abstinence from smoking, restrictions on alcohol consumption, and stress management) can help prevent a significant number of diseases. The purpose of this study is to use a bibliometric analysis to analyze the relationships between countries, institutions and authors through lifestyle studies from 2016 to 2020 to find out the latest research trends. This study utilized bibliometric data collected through Scopus including thesis titles, authors, agencies, countries/regions, publication years, and keywords. Data were analyzed using the VOS viewer (Vers. 1.6.13; Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands) and the findings were used to visualize similarity mapping techniques. Publication of lifestyle-related research papers has steadily increased between 2016 and 2020. The country/region most actively conducting such research was the United States, also home to the majority of institutions conducting work in the field. PloS ONE published the most lifestyle-related research under the field of Medicine. Identified keywords were related to risk measures, psychosocial factors, prevention, health promotion, and risk factors. Lifestyle research is a promising field of research worldwide and has great potential to improve human health, the environment, and quality of life. The findings are expected to promote future research and give direction to the advancement of the field of research by comprehensively analyzing and summarizing lifestyle research trends.

Cytokines are small proteins that bind to the extracellular domains of transmembrane receptors to activate signaling pathways inside the cell. They often act by dimerizing their receptors, and changes in dimer orientation of the extracellular domains can change the signaling output. Mohan et al. systematically explored this tuning effect by designing a series of dimer ligands for the erythropoietin receptor in which they varied the distance and angle between monomers. The topology affected the strength of activation and differentially affected different pathways, which raises the potential for exploiting such ligands in medicinal chemistry. Science , this issue p. eaav7532 Designed ligands tune cytokine receptor signaling. Although tunable signaling by G protein–coupled receptors can be exploited through medicinal chemistry, a comparable pharmacological approach has been lacking for the modulation of signaling through dimeric receptors, such as those for cytokines. We present a strategy to modulate cytokine receptor signaling output by use of a series of designed C2-symmetric cytokine mimetics, based on the designed ankyrin repeat protein (DARPin) scaffold, that can systematically control erythropoietin receptor (EpoR) dimerization orientation and distance between monomers. We sampled a range of EpoR geometries by varying intermonomer angle and distance, corroborated by several ligand-EpoR complex crystal structures. Across the range, we observed full, partial, and biased agonism as well as stage-selective effects on hematopoiesis. This surrogate ligand strategy opens access to pharmacological modulation of therapeutically important cytokine and growth factor receptor systems.

Expansion of the available repertoire of reagents for visualization and manipulation of proteins will help understand their function. Short epitope tags linked to proteins of interest and recognized by existing binders such as nanobodies facilitate protein studies by obviating the need to isolate new antibodies directed against them. Nanobodies have several advantages over conventional antibodies, as they can be expressed and used as tools for visualization and manipulation of proteins in vivo. Here, we characterize two short (<15aa) NanoTag epitopes, 127D01 and VHH05, and their corresponding high-affinity nanobodies. We demonstrate their use in Drosophila for in vivo protein detection and re-localization, direct and indirect immunofluorescence, immunoblotting, and immunoprecipitation. We further show that CRISPR-mediated gene targeting provides a straightforward approach to tagging endogenous proteins with the NanoTags. Single copies of the NanoTags, regardless of their location, suffice for detection. This versatile and validated toolbox of tags and nanobodies will serve as a resource for a wide array of applications, including functional studies in Drosophila and beyond.