Publications by authors named "Katahira K"

Background: Risk preference changes nonlinearly across development. Although extensive developmental research on the neurotypical (NTP) population has shown that risk preference is highest during adolescence, developmental changes in risk preference in autistic (AUT) people, who tend to prefer predictable behaviors, have not been investigated. Here, we aimed to investigate these changes and underlying computational mechanisms.

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Background: The decision-making process has been investigated separately in the context of externally guided decision-making (EDM, e.g., a gambling task) and internally guided decision-making (IDM, e.

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Background: Profiling or clustering individuals based on personality and other characteristics is a common statistical approach used in marketing, medicine, and social sciences. This approach improves data simplicity, supports the implementation of a data-driven decision-making process, and guides intervention strategies, such as personalized care. However, the clustering process involves loss of information owing to the discretization of continuous variables.

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Background: Smartphone apps and wearable activity trackers are increasingly recognized for their potential to promote physical activity (PA). While studies suggest that the use of commercial mobile health tools is associated with higher PA levels, most existing evidence is cross-sectional, leaving a gap in longitudinal data.

Objective: This study aims to identify app-use patterns that are prospectively associated with increases in and maintenance of PA.

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Article Synopsis
  • The research focuses on creating drug delivery systems (DDSs) to transport medications effectively to the brain, targeting central nervous system diseases like schizophrenia.* -
  • It describes the development of a new strategy using two peptides, KS-487 for targeting the brain and KS-133 as the actual drug, which were combined to enhance drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier.* -
  • The study shows that administering nanoparticles containing these peptides leads to improved cognitive functions in mouse models of schizophrenia, marking a significant advancement in potential therapies for this condition.*
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  • The study investigates the role of serum and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) markers KL-6, SP-A, and SP-D in predicting the prognosis of chronic fibrosing interstitial pneumonia (CFIP).
  • By analyzing 39 patients with CFIP, researchers categorized them into rapidly progressing or slowly progressing groups based on their yearly decline in lung function.
  • Results indicated that specific BALF marker levels and ratios were significantly lower in the rapidly progressing group, highlighting their potential utility in diagnosing and predicting disease progression in CFIP patients.
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Objectives: Insufficient physical activity (PA) has long been a global health issue, and a number of studies have explored correlates of PA to identify the mechanisms underlying inactive lifestyles. In the literature, dozens of correlates have been identified at different (eg, individual, environmental) levels, but there is little or no direct evidence for the mutual associations of these correlates. This study analysed 44 variables identified as theoretically and empirically relevant for PA to clarify the factors directly and indirectly associated with PA.

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  • - Community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) infections are rising as a public health concern, particularly in community settings like maternity clinics, with a specific outbreak in Japan identified through analysis techniques.
  • - A study analyzed 151 CA-MRSA isolates, identifying 133 related to the outbreak, which belonged to a lineage called the TDC clone, part of the clonal complex 30 (SWP clone).
  • - The research highlighted that the TDC clone had been present before the outbreak, showing long persistence in carriers, high transmission within households, and significant genetic changes tied to mobile genetic elements that affected antibiotic resistance.
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Background: Wearable activity trackers have become key players in mobile health practice as they offer various behavior change techniques (BCTs) to help improve physical activity (PA). Typically, multiple BCTs are implemented simultaneously in a device, making it difficult to identify which BCTs specifically improve PA.

Objective: We investigated the effects of BCTs implemented on a smartwatch, the Fitbit, to determine how each technique promoted PA.

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All humans must engage in decision-making. Decision-making processes can be broadly classified into internally guided decision-making (IDM), which is determined by individuals' internal value criteria, such as preference, or externally guided decision-making (EDM), which is determined by environmental external value criteria, such as monetary rewards. However, real-life decisions are never made simply using one kind of decision-making, and the relationship between IDM and EDM remains unclear.

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Rats were the first mammals to be domesticated for scientific research, and abundant physiological data are available on them. Rats are expected to continue to play an important role as experimental animals, especially with advancements such as CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Environmental enrichment aims to promote species-specific behaviors and psychological well-being.

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Computational modeling of behavior is increasingly being adopted as a standard methodology in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and computational psychiatry. This approach involves estimating parameters in a computational (or cognitive) model that represents the computational processes of the underlying behavior. In this approach, the reliability of the parameter estimates is an important issue.

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Background: The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) has been the basis of health promotion programs, which are, for example, used to tailor behavioral interventions according to the stages of change. Empirical studies have shown that the TTM effectively describes the processes of behavioral adaptation to acquire healthier lifestyles; however, it has been argued that TTM-based interventions are not superior to non-TTM-based interventions for promoting physical activity (PA). Evidence has also highlighted some inconsistencies with theoretical assumptions, especially regarding how each process-of-change strategy emerges across the stages.

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Background: Physical inactivity is a global health issue, and mobile health (mHealth) apps are expected to play an important role in promoting physical activity. Empirical studies have demonstrated the efficacy and efficiency of app-based interventions, and an increasing number of apps with more functions and richer content have been released. Regardless of the success of mHealth apps, there are important evidence gaps in the literature; that is, it is largely unknown who uses what app functions and which functions are associated with physical activity.

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An 82-year-old man had been diagnosed with asthma. He experienced repeated exacerbations requiring treatment with a systemic corticosteroid despite being treated with medications including high-dose fluticasone furoate/umeclidinium/vilanterol, montelukast sodium, and theophylline; treatment with mepolizumab was then initiated. The patient had been free from exacerbations for 15 months; however, he suffered from post-obstructive pneumonia and atelectasis secondary to mucoid impaction in the right middle lobe of the lung, accompanied by a productive cough, wheezing, dyspnea, and right chest pain.

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Humans often perform rhythmic synchronized movements. Professional musicians and dancers particularly perform such movement tasks well and have a higher interoceptive accuracy (IAcc) than non-musicians and non-dancers. We thus hypothesized that rhythmic synchronized movements might be enhanced by a higher IAcc.

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Heterogeneity is a frequent issue in population data analyses in medicine, biology, and the social sciences. A common approach for handling heterogeneity is to use a clustering algorithm to group similar samples, considering samples within the same group to be homogeneous. This approach is known as "subtyping" or "subgrouping.

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Article Synopsis
  • Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) negatively impacts the prognosis of miliary tuberculosis (MTB), and the role of steroid pulse therapy in these cases was investigated.
  • A study analyzed 13 patients with MTB and ARDS from medical records, revealing that those receiving steroid pulse therapy had better survival rates than those who did not.
  • The results indicated that steroid pulse therapy significantly improves short-term survival in patients with MTB complicated by ARDS, presenting it as a strong prognostic factor.
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This study investigates whether decision-making under uncertainty is influenced by the cardiac cycle. To test this hypothesis, we examined the influence of the cardiac cycle on an individual's decision-making process in a gambling experiment. Participants were asked to choose one option with a sure payout or uncertain option with varying degrees of winning probability, ambiguity, and monetary amounts.

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Cryptogenic new-onset refractory status epilepticus (C-NORSE) is a neurologic emergency condition characterized by refractory status epilepticus (RSE) of unknown cause. Brain atrophy in a setting of C-NORSE is usually irreversible. A 33-year-old woman who was highly suspected of C-NORSE once showed mild frontotemporal atrophy on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), but follow-up MRI revealed recovery of the brain atrophy.

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Purpose: Similar to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the diffusing capacity of the lung (D) might be decreased and associated with poor prognosis in preserved ratio impaired spirometry (PRISm), a clinical entity as a prodromal phase of COPD. The aims of the present study were to evaluate the distributions of D and to assess the association between D and mortality among subjects with PRISm.

Patients And Methods: We conducted an observational cohort study at the National Hospital Organization Fukuoka National Hospital.

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People sometimes persistently pursue hard-to-get targets. Why people pursue such targets is unclear. Here, we hypothesized that choice perseverance, which is the tendency to repeat the same choice independent of the obtained outcomes, leads individuals to repeatedly choose a hard-to-get target, which consequently increases their preference for the target.

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The reliability and validity of measurements in questionnaire surveys are affected by the survey design. Previous studies have discussed whether the items on a multidimensional scale should be grouped by subscale or randomized to increase the reliability and validity of the measurement. However, it is not clear what effect item order has on the true reliability and validity and whether the order causes bias in these estimates.

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This study aimed to investigate whether instrumental reward learning is affected by the cardiac cycle. To this end, we examined the effects of the cardiac cycle (systole or diastole) on the computational processes underlying the participants' choices in the instrumental learning task. In the instrumental learning task, participants were required to select one of two discriminative stimuli (neutral visual stimuli) and immediately receive reward/punishment feedback depending on the probability assigned to the chosen stimuli.

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