Jellyfish envenomation is a world-wide health problem, which often seriously affect the fishery and bathing activities. To date, few individual jellyfish venoms proteins have been thoroughly characterized yet. In this work, four species of scyphozoan jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai, Cyanea nozakii, Aurellia aurita and Rhopilema esculentum) are compared according to their, cytotoxicity, hemolytic potency, brine shrimp toxicity and protein components. Jellyfish venoms showed higher cytotoxicity in H9C2 heart myoblast than in C2C12 skeletal myoblast, with the exception of C. nozakii venom. This result suggests that the selective cytotoxic effects may be possibly related to their in vivo effects of cardiac tissue dysfunction. On the other hand, hemolytic activity could be also observed from all tested jellyfish venoms. N. nomurai jellyfish venom displaying the greatest hemolytic activity. As an alternative method of evaluating the toxicities of jellyfish venoms, the toxicity on brine shrimp was examined with the four jellyfish venoms. From this, the venom of N. nomurai showed higher toxicity against brine shrimp than the other jellyfish venoms, which is consistent with the results of cytotoxicity assay as well as hemolysis assay of the present study. SDS-PAGE analysis of four jellyfish venoms showed the similar pattern with molecular weight of around 40 kDa, and appeared to be the major protein components. These results provided that N. nomurai jellyfish venom was potently toxic than other scyphozoan jellyfish venoms and may explain to some extent the deleterious effects associated with human envenoming.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the needs for environmental improvement and dementia patients' activity of daily living (ADL) and behavior and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) in dementia patients living in urban type dementia care villages. The subjects of this study were 70 households with cognitive impairment and dementia among residents of dementia care village in Gunsan City. The survey was conducted with the permission of their family. Frequency analysis and descriptive statistical analysis were performed on the main variables to analyze the characteristics of the subjects. Bivariate correlation analysis was performed to verify the relationship between the two variables. According to the analysis results, the order of environment improvement was in the order of entrance (51.4%), toilet and stairs (48.6%), kitchen (11.4%), bedroom and laundry room (10.0%). In the relationship between the variables, The ADL was correlated with age (r=.315, p <.01), BPSD (r=.322, p<.01) and living environment inconvenience (r=.640, p<.01) while, living environment inconvenience correlated with environment improvement need (r=.669, p<.01). This study suggests that improvement of the residential environment of dwellers in dementia care villages, especially the stairway and entrance hall is necessary.