Publications by authors named "Kei Hirakawa"

Article Synopsis
  • Zebrafish can regenerate their retinas throughout life, while other species like birds and mammals only have this ability during early development; medaka fish have shown limited regeneration post-hatch.
  • Researchers induced retinal injury in medaka embryos using gamma-ray irradiation and studied the healing process up to 21 days.
  • The study found that the medaka retina completely regenerated 18 days after injury, although some abnormal structures lingered temporarily, and despite a decrease in number, Müller glial cells retained important stem cell markers.
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A 43-year-old male patient with spontaneous hemopneumothorax of the right lung underwent emergency video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery for drainage, hemostasis and bullae resection. Fifteen minutes after reexpansion of the right lung, we found bubbly sputum coming out from the right tracheal tube and cloudy shadow in the right field of his chest X-ray. The occurrence of reexpansion pulmonary edema (RPE) was considered.

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Radiation therapy (RT) is pivotal in the treatment of many central nervous system (CNS) pathologies; however, exposure to RT in children is associated with a higher risk of secondary CNS tumors. Although recent research interest has focused on the reparative and therapeutic role of microglia, their recruitment following RT has not been elucidated, especially in the developing CNS. Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of microglia during tissue repair in the irradiated embryonic medaka brain by whole-mount in situ hybridization using a probe for Apolipoprotein E (ApoE), a marker for activated microglia in teleosts.

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A 51-year-old women with cardiac dysfunction due to catecholamine-induced cardiomyopathy underwent laparoscopic adrenalectomy for pheochromocytoma. Her preoperative cardiac status was New York Heart Association (NYHA) class IIand left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) was 45%. In her anesthetic management, we used FloTrac® system and monitored arterial pressure-based cardiac output (APCO) and stroke volume variation (SVV) continuously as the indicator of intraoperative hemodynamics.

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Amyloidosis is a protein conformational disorder with the distinctive feature of extracellular accumulation of amyloid fibrils that come from different proteins. In the ligamentum flavum of the lumbar spine, amyloid deposits were frequently found in elderly patients with lumbar spinal canal stenosis and were at least partially formed by wild-type transthyretin. However, how amyloid deposits in the ligamentum flavum affect lumbar spinal canal stenosis has remained unclear.

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Dystrophic calcinosis in soft tissue occurs in damaged or devitalized tissues in the presence of normal calcium and phosphorous metabolism. It is often noted in subcutaneous tissues in patients with collagen vascular diseases and may involve a relatively localized area or be widespread. A 74-year-old Japanese woman with an overlap of rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren's syndrome, and systemic sclerosis developed a huge tumor-like mass at the atlanto-axial vertebral joint region that caused severe cervical pain and difficulty in activities of daily living.

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A 68-year-old obese woman (BMI 35) underwent posterior lumbar interbody fusion in prone position. Immediately after changing position postoperatively from prone to supine, severe ventilation disorder and poor oxygenation occured. Chest X-ray showed severe atelectasis.

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Hypertrophic pachymeningitis (HP) is extremely rare and an inflammatory process that thickens the dura mater. A 59-year-old Japanese woman developed backache, became paraplegic, and magnetic resonance imaging revealed diffuse thickening of the thoracic dura mater encompassing the spinal cord. Although a test for myeloperoxidase antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody (MPO-ANCA) was shown to be positive, vasculitis was not found and CD8(+) T lymphocytes that predominated in the inflammatory foci.

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