With the economic growth and improvement of living standard, the life expectancy becomes higher. Changes into an aging society has become a worldwide trend; accordingly, its accompanying welfare, health, and medical fields for the elderly have also become a big social issue. According to such changes, the aspects of diseases are transferring to chronic diseases from bacteria and virus-borne infectious diseases. The chronic diseases, which usually occur by diverse causes, makes it difficult for the modern orthodox medicine to give proper treatment. Hereupon, the complementary alternative medicine therapy, which gives holistic healing based on the idea that a human is an organic body, are getting a wide response. Especially, the functional food for health that is the approach in way of food medicine that uses the food or herb for curing the chronic diseases in aspect of preventive medicine has been widely used for the purpose of keeping health of the aged or preventing and curing their diseases sing long before. As needs of consumers for functional food for health has increased like that, the investigation on the effectiveness and effect of functional food for health against chronic diseases becomes very important.
This study looked into the utilization behavior of the elderly with chronic diseases in the aging period who received a clinical diagnosis. As a result of the analysis of the research population of 233, it was found that 70.4% of the elderly, who contracted chronic diseases, had experience in using the complementary alternative medicine therapy more than once a year, and preferred the complementary alternative medicine therapy using dietary treatment. Looking into the odd ratio of using the complementary alternative medicine therapy consequent on demographical nature factors, it was found that women showed 1,6-2.2 times as high utilization rates as men by each therapy and gender while those who had a job showed 0.9-2.2 times as high utilization rate as those who didn''t, revealing that income level had a significant influence on the utilization rate. In addition, it was found that those, who used the therapy, paid expenses amounting to 270-290 thousand won a month for the therapy. Most of them were found to get a professional medical person''s advice and more then 11% of the users experienced a negative effect, but their utilization satisfaction was rated to be more than an average. What matters is that whether the research subjects had the prior perception of complementary alternative medicine therapy and the number of chronic diseases they suffered had a significant effect on the use of the complementary alternative medicine therapy.
The defensive system against oxidation of the internal and external body is exposing its limit to the chronic diseases caused by oxidative stress. On top of that, the reality is that synthetic antioxidant is subject to restriction on its use because of its low activity, toxicity and limitations of its use. Hereupon, this study analyzed the anti-oxidation bioactivity of the aloe group, which is a food therapeutics material much used as natural anti-oxidants, a natural herb group including grape seeds, green tea, ginger and acai berry, and made a comparative analsis of their enzymic anti-oxidation activity in order to get rid of active oxygen-one of the major causes of chronic diseases. In ORAC assay, aloe arborescence whole leaf powder and grape seeds extract showed the highest anti-oxidative activity with 20.84±0.70c μM TE and 30.61±3.51a μM TE, respectively. In DPPH assay, aloe arborescence whole leaf pow -der extract and grape seeds extract were found to show the most excellent DPPH radical scavenging activities. with 243.44 ug/ml, in the value of IC50, and with 1.03 ug/ml in the value of IC50, respectively. In ABTS+ assay, aloe arborescence whole leaf powder extract and grape seeds extract were found to have the excellent ABTS+ radical scaveng -ing activities with 197.31 ug/ml in the value of IC50, and with 1.60 ug/ml in the value of IC50, respectively. In total content of polyphenol and total flavonoid, grape seeds extracts were found to be the highest with more than 400 mg/g, and aloe arborescence whole leaf powder extract with 22.43mg/g, showing the similar quantity of content in general. The cell protection activities by oxidative stress, in the one- to-one mixture between aloe arborescence whole leaf powder extract and grape seed extracts under the concentration of H2O2 1.25, 2.5 mM of HepG2(human hepatocelluar carcinoma) and under the concentration of 18 ug showed 14.5%, and 8.7% cell life rate in comparison with control group, respectively while showing a significant(p<0.05) 10.6%, and 6% cell life rate in the one-to-one mixture between aloe arborescence whole leaf powder extract and grape seed extracts in comparison with control group under the concentration of H2O2 ,150, 300 uM of HDF(Human derma fibroblast), and 7.5 ug, respectively.
Individually one-to-one complex extracts showed higher cell-protection activities than a single sample of aloe or natural herb. From these results, this study was able to suggest the mechanism in which phytochemical complex extracts, as an oxygen radical scavenger, are attributable to the synergy effect by interaction.