Publications by authors named "Kingo Sawada"

Aim: To support the achievement of life goals and social participation of persons with mental illness, based on the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF), we generated items, identified domains, and examined the content validity of the Comprehensive Assessment of Functioning for Mental Illness-Subjective Version (CAMI-S). The purpose was to assess patients' strengths and weaknesses by incorporating the patient and public involvement perspective.

Methods: Focus group interviews on the items to be included were conducted with Group A.

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Previous studies reported decreased glutamate levels in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in non-treatment-resistant schizophrenia and first-episode psychosis. However, ACC glutamatergic changes in subjects at high-risk for psychosis, and the effects of commonly experienced environmental emotional/social stressors on glutamatergic function in adolescents remain unclear. In this study, adolescents recruited from the general population underwent proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) of the pregenual ACC using a 3-Tesla scanner.

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Several animal models of schizophrenia and patients with chronic schizophrenia have shown increased spontaneous power of gamma oscillations. However, the most robust alterations of gamma oscillations in patients with schizophrenia are reduced auditory-oscillatory responses. We hypothesized that patients with early-stage schizophrenia would have increased spontaneous power of gamma oscillations and reduced auditory-oscillatory responses.

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Birth order is a crucial environmental factor for child development. For example, later-born children are relatively unlikely to feel secure due to sibling competition or diluted parental resources. The positive effect of being earlier-born on cognitive intelligence is well-established.

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There is clear evidence of intergenerational transmission of life values, cognitive traits, psychiatric disorders, and even aspects of daily decision making. To investigate biological substrates of this phenomenon, the brain has received increasing attention as a measurable biomarker and potential target for intervention. However, no previous study has quantitatively and comprehensively investigated the effects of intergenerational transmission on functional and structural brain networks.

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Maternal breastfeeding has an impact on motor and emotional development in children of the next generation. Elucidating how breastfeeding during infancy affects brain regional structural development in early adolescence will be helpful for promoting healthy development. However, previous studies that have shown relationships between breastfeeding during infancy and cortical brain regions in adolescence are usually based on maternal retrospective recall of breastfeeding, and the accuracy of the data is unclear.

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Article Synopsis
  • Parent-child personality transmission can occur through both genetic processes and environmental influences, including shared upbringing and parenting styles.
  • A study found a link between prosociality in children and their parents, along with a negative relationship between prosociality and certain brain chemical levels (GABA and Glx) in both groups.
  • Key findings suggest that parental affection positively impacts children's prosocial behavior, while socioeconomic status affects parental prosociality but not children's.
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Early-maturing girls are relatively likely to experience compromised psychobehavioral outcomes. Some studies have explored the association between puberty and brain morphology in adolescents, while the results were non-specific for females or the method was a region-of-interest analysis. To our knowledge, no large-scale study has comprehensively explored the effects of pubertal timing on whole-brain volumetric development or the neuroanatomical substrates of the association in girls between pubertal timing and psychobehavioral outcomes.

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Aim: Utena's Brief Objective Measures (UBOM) was developed to assess psychophysiological functions proximal to real-world functioning in individuals with psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia (SCZ), to facilitate shared decision-making. However, the validity of UBOM has not been fully examined.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional observational study to evaluate the validity of each of the three tests in UBOM: UBOM-Pulse, UBOM-Ruler, and UBOM-Random.

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Human prosocial behavior (PB) emerges in childhood and matures during adolescence. Previous task-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have reported involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in social cognition in adolescence. However, neurometabolic and functional connectivity (FC) basis of PB in early adolescence remains unclear.

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Aim: Adolescence is a crucial stage of psychological development and is critically vulnerable to the onset of psychopathology. Our understanding of how the maturation of endocrine, epigenetics, and brain circuit may underlie psychological development in adolescence, however, has not been integrated. Here, we introduce our research project, the population-neuroscience study of the Tokyo TEEN Cohort (pn-TTC), a longitudinal study to explore the neurobiological substrates of development during adolescence.

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Subcortical structures may have an important role in the pathophysiology of psychosis. Our recent mega-analysis of structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data has reported subcortical volumetric and lateralization alterations in chronic schizophrenia, including leftward asymmetric increases in pallidal volume. The question remains, however, whether these characteristics may represent vulnerability to the development of psychosis or whether they are epiphenomena caused by exposure to medication or illness chronicity.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Previous research highlighted that both glutamatergic and GABAergic dysfunctions play roles in schizophrenia, indicating a disrupted balance of excitatory and inhibitory signals in the brain.
  • - A study involving participants with recent-onset schizophrenia, ultra-high risk individuals, and healthy controls found significant impairments in mismatch negativity (MMN) and gamma-band auditory steady-state response (ASSR) in those with schizophrenia and at ultra-high risk.
  • - The results showed a notable correlation between MMN and gamma-band ASSR in individuals with recent-onset schizophrenia, suggesting a potential link between NMDAR and GABA dysfunctions during the early stages of psychosis.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the gamma-band auditory steady-state response (ASSR) as a potential biomarker for predicting long-term outcomes in early psychosis, particularly in patients with recent-onset schizophrenia and ultra-high risk individuals.
  • It found that both groups exhibited reduced gamma-band ASSR levels, and this reduction was linked to future symptoms in recent-onset schizophrenia patients.
  • The findings suggest that measuring gamma-band ASSR could be useful for forecasting the symptomatic progression of early psychosis, indicating its potential as a long-term prognosis biomarker.
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Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a globally prevalent psychiatric disorder that results from disruption of multiple neural circuits involved in emotional regulation. Although previous studies using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) found smaller values of fractional anisotropy (FA) in the white matter, predominantly in the frontal lobe, of patients with MDD, studies using diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) are scarce. Here, we used DKI whole-brain analysis with tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) to investigate the brain microstructural abnormalities in MDD.

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Aim: There is an increasing need for identifying neurocognitive predictors of global functional outcome in early psychosis toward optimizing an early intervention strategy.

Methods: We conducted a longitudinal observational study to investigate an association between neurocognitive assessments at baseline and global functional outcome at an average of 1-year follow up. Participants included ultra-high-risk for psychosis (UHR) individuals who had not converted to psychosis during the follow-up period (UHR-NP) and those with first-episode psychosis (FEP).

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