Growth hormone (GH) treatment preference and adherence are affected by delivery device convenience, injection-site pain, confidence in correct dose administration, and device satisfaction. This survey investigated if switching device to NordiFlex® improved treatment experience in pediatric patients in South Korea.Patients aged 4-≤18 years were surveyed. Participants were NordiFlex® users who previously used NordiLet®/other devices. Participants compared preference, self-reported adherence, satisfaction, perceived ease of use, and device subjective benefits (across four domains: ease of use, self-efficacy, minimal disruption of daily life, positive feelings about injections) of NordiFlex® vs. previous device.Ninety-four patients were enrolled, of which 91.5% previously used NordiLet®. Significantly more patients preferred, and were more satisfied with NordiFlex® vs. previous device; mean score: 0.65 (95% confidence interval [CI]:0.41;0.88) and 0.61 (95% CI:0.36;0.85), respectively. Participants reported greater perceived ease of use (0.49 [95% CI:0.26;0.72]) and fewer missed injections (0.20 [95% CI:0.06;0.34], with NordiFlex® vs. previous device. Bivariate analysis showed significant associations between preference for NordiFlex® and higher scores on self-efficacy, ease of use, minimal disruption of daily life, and positive feelings about injection (all p < 0.001).These results suggest that improvements in device features could be associated with improved treatment experience.
The purpose of this study was to assess the physical activity level of Korean farmers to establish their estimated energy requirements during busy farming season. 113 farmers (mean age 51.9 ± 7.2 years, male 42, female 71) who own farmland area above 300 pyung participated in measurement of body weight and height and interviewing of oneday activity diaries. There was no significant difference in age, BMI between male and female. Obesity prevalence according to BMI among male and female farmers was 40.5% and 50.7% respectively. The farmers spent about 7 hours in sleeping and spent about 4 hours 35 minutes working on the farm and spent about 15 hours 30 minutes (64.6% of 24 hours) in “very light activities” and spent about 3 hours 31 minutes (14.7%) in “light activities”. Physical activity level (PAL, activity coefficient) of male farmers was 2.63 which was significantly higher than that (2.19) of female farmers (p < 0.05). Estimated energy requirements (EER) for farmers who were different in age and gender were suggested. For example, the estimated energy requirements for male and female farmers were 3058 kcal/ day and 2279 kcal/day, respectively. The results of this study suggest that estimated energy requirements (EER) of farmers should be differentiated according to seasonal workload and energy balance of farmers should be evaluated to prevent obesity. (Korean J Community Nutr 16(6) : 751~761, 2011)
Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.