Publications by authors named "Eriko Yamamoto"

Article Synopsis
  • Adult-onset Still's disease (AOSD) is a rare inflammatory disorder marked by symptoms like fevers, skin rashes, arthritis, and high ferritin levels, but its cause is unknown.
  • Detecting AOSD early is challenging due to its nonspecific symptoms and lack of biomarkers, making diagnosis difficult.
  • A study involving musculoskeletal ultrasound (MSKUS) on 11 patients revealed various inflammatory conditions such as tenosynovitis and bursitis, highlighting the diverse joint-related manifestations of AOSD.
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Introduction: The early detection of cognitive decline is key to maximizing the benefits of preventive and therapeutic interventions against dementia. Generally, dementia is first assessed by interview-based neuropsychological tests, but the lengthy interview and mental stress during the assessment process make screenings inefficient. We previously developed a rapid screening test for dementia using an eye-tracking technology (eye tracking-based cognitive assessment, ETCA) and reported its utility for clinically detecting cognitive impairment in dementia cases.

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TAFRO syndrome, a rare disease characterised by thrombocytopaenia, anasarca, fever, reticulin fibrosis, and organomegaly, is thought to be caused by hypercytokinaemia. It is a heterogeneous clinical entity, and a recent comprehensive international definition defined TAFRO syndrome with lymph node histopathology consistent with idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD) as iMCD-TAFRO. Herein, we present a rare case of iMCD-TAFRO following coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection.

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Article Synopsis
  • Post-dialysis fever is a frequent issue for patients on hemodialysis, but pinpointing its cause can be difficult due to various factors.
  • A 66-year-old man experienced persistent fevers that were initially attributed to pneumonia, only to later reveal that it was actually caused by alveolar hemorrhage from cryoglobulinemic vasculitis.
  • Treatment involving plasma exchange and managing dialysate temperature effectively reduced the fevers, highlighting the need to consider cryoglobulinemia in similar cases.
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Although the development of prosocial behavior has been widely studied from the behavioral aspect, the neural mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior in the early stages of development remain unclear. Therefore, this study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the emergence of prosocial behavior in 3-year-old children. Brain activity in the medial pFC and right TPJ (rTPJ) and facial expression activity, which are related to the ability to infer others' mental states (mentalizing), during the observation of prosocial and antisocial scenes were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy and electromyography, respectively.

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Maternal bonding for mammalian infants is critical for their survival. Additionally, it is important for human infants' development into social creatures. However, despite the ample neurobiological evidence of attachment for the mother's brain, the interplay of this system in infants is poorly understood.

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Background: Low-grade serous carcinoma (LGSC) of the ovary, which is extremely rare tumor, has better prognosis than high-grade serous carcinoma (HGSC). Genetic backgrounds of those are different, so that LGSC usually shows KRAS or BRAF mutation, whereas HGSC does not show such mutations. Since treatment strategies of those are different, differential pathological diagnosis between LGSC and HGSC is very important.

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Background: HER2 amplification has been identified in 2-3% of patients with colorectal cancer, although there are currently no approved HER2-targeted therapies for colorectal cancer. We aimed to study the antitumour activity and safety of trastuzumab deruxtecan (an antibody-drug conjugate of humanised anti-HER2 antibody with topoisomerase I inhibitor payloads) in patients with HER2-expressing metastatic colorectal cancer.

Methods: DESTINY-CRC01 is an open-label, phase 2 study that recruited patients from 25 clinics and hospitals in Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the USA.

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Children and adults with genetic generalized epilepsy may have focal clinical seizure symptoms as well as electroencephalographic (EEG) findings. This may pose a diagnostic challenge to clinicians, especially when concomitant focal neuroimaging findings exist and the epilepsy is medically refractory. We sought to highlight the challenges that clinicians may face through the description of 2 children with suspected genetic generalized epilepsy who had both focal seizure symptoms and EEG/neuroimaging findings and underwent invasive EEG monitoring.

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The relationship between temporal contiguity of mothers' teaching behaviors and children's imitation learning was investigated. Participants (2-year-old children) observed their mothers' demonstration of using novel toys over a double television system under live and delayed conditions. The dyads normally interacted in the live condition, whereas they interacted with a 1-s time delay inserted between the children's actions and mothers' responses in the delayed condition.

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An 81-year-old man was referred to our hospital with bilateral multiple patchy opacities on chest radiography. His chief complaints were a few months' history of intermittent mild cough and slightly yellow sputum. Chest computed tomography (CT) showed non-segmental air-space consolidations with ground-glass opacities.

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[Purpose] Forest walking may be effective for human health, but little information is available about effects of energy expenditure on blood pressure responses after forest walking. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the activity energy expenditure and changes in blood pressure in individuals after forest walking. [Subjects] The subjects were 54 middle-aged and elderly people.

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Biological motion point-light displays provide a powerful method for studying motion perception. Nonhuman animals are capable of discriminating point-light displays, but it remains unknown how they perceive biological motion in these displays. We trained two groups of pigeons to discriminate video stimuli using two different classification rules.

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Autophagy is a tightly regulated self-digestion system. As in other cell types, autophagy plays an essential role in the homeostasis of pancreatic beta cells. However, the mechanisms involved in the deterioration of beta cell function caused by autophagic failure have not yet been fully elucidated.

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Background: This multicenter, randomized phase II trial was conducted to compare the efficacy and safety of nimotuzumab plus irinotecan (N-IRI) versus irinotecan alone (IRI) in patients with advanced gastric cancer (AGC) showing disease progression after previous 5-fluorouracil-based therapy.

Methods: Irinotecan-naive patients (n = 82) received N-IRI (nimotuzumab 400 mg weekly plus irinotecan 150 mg/m(2) biweekly) or IRI (irinotecan 150 mg/m(2) biweekly) until disease progression. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival (PFS), and the secondary endpoints were overall survival (OS), response rate (RR), safety, tolerability, and the correlation between efficacy and tumor epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expression.

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In the present paper, we review the toxicity of sugar- and lipid-derived RCs (reactive carbonyls) and the RC-scavenging systems observed in photosynthetic organisms. Similar to heterotrophs, photosynthetic organisms are exposed to the danger of RCs produced in sugar metabolism during both respiration and photosynthesis. RCs such as methylglyoxal and acrolein have toxic effects on the photosynthetic activity of higher plants and cyanobacteria.

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To elucidate the scavenging systems of sugar- and lipid-derived reactive carbonyls (RCs) in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 (S. 6803), we selected proteins from S.

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Previous studies on laterality in face processing have indicated superiority of the right hemisphere in discriminating and recognizing faces; however, the reasons for this feature are poorly understood. We employed functional MRI (fMRI) to elucidate the origin of this feature and used a paired-stimulus paradigm in which face pairs were presented unilaterally at the left or right visual hemifield of the participants. Each face in a pair was at a different position in the visual field.

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Histamine H1 receptor antagonists (antihistamines) are widely used for the treatment of allergic disorders in young children. This study examined the effects of antihistamine on prefrontal cortex activity in preschool children using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), an emerging brain-imaging method suitable for psychological experiments, especially in young children. We examined the changes of oxygenated hemoglobin concentration in the prefrontal cortex while children performed a spatial working memory task, 3h after taking a first-generation antihistamine (ketotifen), second-generation antihistamine (epinastine), or placebo.

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Introduction: Antagonists of histamine H(1) receptors (antihistamines) are widely used for the treatment of allergic disorders in children. These drugs' sedative effect on brain function, however, has been mostly examined in adults.

Objective: The objective of this study was to examine the effects of anitihistamines on prefrontal cortex activity in young children using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a novel brain-imaging method.

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This study longitudinally compared activity in the frontal cortex during a spatial working memory task between 5-year-old and 7-year-old children using near-infrared spectroscopy. Eight children participated in this study twice, once at 5 years and once at 7 years of age. Behavioral analysis showed that older children performed the working memory task more precisely and more rapidly than younger children.

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Recently, we found that alpha-, beta- and gamma-cyclodextrins accelerated the 4-alpha-glucanotransferase action of porcine liver glycogen debranching enzyme (GDE) on Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-4(Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-6)Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-4Glcalpha1-4GlcPA (B5/84), and proposed the presence of an activator binding site in the GDE molecule. In liver cells, the structures of alpha-glucans proximal to the site GDE acts are not cyclodextrins, but glycogen and its degradation products. To estimate the structural characteristics of intrinsic activators and to inspect the features of the activator binding site, we examined the effects of four fluorogenic dextrins, (Glcalpha1-6)(m)Glcalpha1-4(Glcalpha1-4)(n)GlcPA (B5/51, m = 1, n = 3; B6/61, m = 1, n = 4; B7/71, m = 1, n = 5; G6PA, m = 0, n = 4), on the debranching of B5/84 by porcine liver GDE.

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We examined whether Java sparrows use imagery of auditory stimuli (imagery is a subject's mental representation of a stimulus by which the subject's behaviour may be governed under stimulus control even in the absence of the physical stimulus). Three types of ascending tone sequences were used. In the intact scale, sequence tones were played in ascending order.

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Rationale: It is well known that the newer H1-receptor antagonists elicit better performance of working memory and selective attention relative to the first generation drugs in this class. However, the neural correlates of the poorer performance associated with first-generation H1-receptor antagonists remain unknown.

Objectives: This study examined the effects of first- and second-generation H1-receptor antagonists on neural correlates of cognitive tasks using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a novel method of brain imaging suitable for psychological experiments.

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Glycogen debranching enzyme (GDE) has two enzymatic activities, 4-alpha-glucanotransferase and amylo-alpha-1,6-glucosidase. Products with 6-O-alpha-glucosyl structures formed from phosphorylase limit dextrin by the 4-alpha-glucanotransferase activity are hydrolyzed to glucose by the amylo-alpha-1,6-glucosidase activity. Here, we probed the active site of amylo-alpha-1,6-glucosidase in porcine liver GDE using various 6-O-alpha-glucosyl-pyridylamino (PA)-maltooligosaccharides, with structures (Glcalpha1-4)(m)(Glcalpha1-6)Glcalpha1-4(Glcalpha1-4)(n)GlcPA (GlcPA, 1-deoxy-1-[(2-pyridyl)amino]-D-glucitol residue).

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