Publications by authors named "Okamoto Hiroshi"

Background: Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is standard for advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, though often ineffective. Therefore, predicting the response to chemotherapy before treatment is desirable. However, there is currently no established method for predicting response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

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Background: Infective endocarditis (IE) is still a fatal disease, and given its rarity, ongoing updates to patient characteristics and outcomes of IE are essential for providing precision diagnoses and effective treatments. This study sought to examine temporal trends in the clinical characteristics and in-hospital occurrence of adverse outcomes of IE.

Methods And Results: Using the Japan nationwide administrative database, we identified patients with IE in Japan from 2016 to 2021.

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Recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy remains a significant complication following minimally invasive esophagectomy for esophageal cancer. Despite advancements in surgical techniques and lymphadenectomy precision, the incidence of recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy has not been improved. Recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy predominantly affects the left side and may lead to unilateral or bilateral vocal cord paralysis, resulting in hoarseness, dysphagia, and an increased risk of aspiration pneumonia.

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Fusobacterium nucleatum is implicated in esophageal cancer; however, its distribution in esophageal cancer tissues remains unknown. This study aimed to clarify the presence and distribution of F. nucleatum in esophageal cancer tissues using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH).

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Background Postoperative chylothorax is a rare but life-threatening complication of esophagectomy. However, due to its rarity, researching the risk factors and selecting appropriate treatment options has been limited. Methods This study included 727 patients with esophageal cancer who underwent minimally invasive esophagectomy at our hospital.

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  • - This study examined how self-care behaviors affect mortality in chronic heart failure (CHF) patients, focusing on those with and without recent hospitalizations for heart failure.
  • - Researchers analyzed data from 1,907 CHF patients in Japan, finding that those with poor self-care (scores < 70 on a self-care scale) were more likely to face death or rehospitalization if they had been recently hospitalized for heart failure.
  • - The results suggest that self-care education is crucial for patients who have recently been hospitalized, as it significantly impacts their health outcomes.
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  • The study investigates the inflammatory responses in patients who develop pneumonia or anastomotic leakage following minimally invasive esophagectomy, focusing on serum C-reactive protein (CRP) and procalcitonin (PCT) levels after surgery.
  • It involved 439 patients and found that pneumonia occurred in 96 patients, and anastomotic leakage in 51, with CRP levels peaking on postoperative day 3 and PCT levels on day 2.
  • The results suggest that pneumonia elicits a stronger inflammatory response than anastomotic leakage, and measuring PCT levels post-surgery could help distinguish between these complications before further diagnostic procedures.
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Background & Aims: The benefits of physical activity, including exercise and daily and household chores, on the bioimpedance phase angle remain unclear. We aimed to examine the longitudinal association between objectively measured physical activity and bioimpedance phase angle among community-dwelling older adults.

Methods: This community-based cohort study enrolled individuals aged 65 years or older without any disability in the basic activities of daily living.

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This randomized pilot trial investigated the feasibility of an active learning physical activity intervention through video conferencing and its preliminary effects. Participants comprised community-dwelling older adults who could use e-mail. The intervention group underwent a 12-week active learning intervention via video conferencing to promote a healthy lifestyle, particularly physical activity.

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Aim: Emergency resuscitative thoracotomy is a potentially lifesaving procedure for patients with cardiac pulmonary arrest and profound circulatory failure resulting from a severe injury. However, survival rate post-emergency resuscitative thoracotomy shows considerable variation, with many studies constrained by limited sample sizes and ambiguous criteria for inclusion. Herein, we assessed the outcomes of emergency resuscitative thoracotomy and identified predictors of futility using Japan Trauma Data Bank data.

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Objective: The association between fluid balance and outcomes in patients who underwent out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) and received extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR) remains unknown. We aimed to examine the above relationship during the first 24 h following intensive care unit (ICU) admission.

Methods: We performed a secondary analysis of the SAVE-J II study, a retrospective multicenter study involving OHCA patients aged ≥ 18 years treated with ECPR between 2013 and 2018 and who received fluid therapy following ICU admission.

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  • Mixed-stack complexes made up of alternating donor and acceptor materials generally have poor electrical conductivity due to either being neutral or highly ionic, leading to a lack of conductive carriers.
  • This study successfully synthesized mixed-stack complexes at the neutral-ionic boundary, using specific donors and acceptors with compatible energy levels and orbital symmetry.
  • The resulting single-crystal complexes displayed greatly enhanced room-temperature conductivity, which is the highest reported for this type under normal conditions, and revealed significant changes in their electrical and optical properties based on temperature.
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To elucidate the relationship between in-hospital mortality and the institutional factors of intensive care units (ICUs), with a focus on the intensivist-to-bed ratio. A retrospective cohort study was conducted using a Japanese ICU database, including adult patients admitted between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021. We used a multilevel logistic regression model to investigate the associations between in-hospital mortality and the following institutional factors: the intensivist-to-bed ratios on weekdays or over weekends/holidays, different work shifts, hospital-to-ICU-bed ratio, annual-ICU-admission-to-bed ratio, type of hospital, and the presence of other medical staff.

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Organocatalytic ring-opening polymerization (ROP) is a versatile method for synthesizing well-defined polymers with controlled molecular weights, dispersities, and nonlinear macromolecular architectures. Despite spectacular advances in organocatalytic ROP, precision synthesis of polysiloxanes remains challenging due to the mismatch in polarity between highly polar initiators and nonpolar monomers and polymers and the difficulty in suppressing the formation of scrambling products via transetherification reactions during ROP of cyclic siloxanes. Here, we describe a binary organocatalytic ROP (BOROP) of hexamethylcyclotrisiloxane (D3) employing organic bases as catalysts and (thio)ureas as cocatalysts.

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  • Anastomotic leakage is a common complication after esophagectomy, and Laser Doppler flowmetry (LDF) helps assess blood flow in the gastric conduit used for reconstruction.
  • A study involving 326 patients identified zones in the gastric conduit to measure blood flow before surgery, revealing that leakage occurred in 32 patients, notably linked to low blood flow at the conduit tip.
  • The findings suggest that maintaining sufficient blood supply to the gastric conduit tip is crucial in reducing the risk of leakage, with a cutoff ratio of 0.41 indicating increased risk.
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The Japanese national guidelines recommend significantly lower doses of carvedilol for heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) management than the US guidelines. Using real-world data, we determined whether initial and target doses of carvedilol in Japanese patients (JPNs) differ from those in US patients (USPs), especially in Asian Americans (ASA) and Caucasians (CA), and investigated differences in outcomes. We collected data from the electronic medical records, including demographics, carvedilol dosing, tolerability, cardiac functional indicators like EF, cardiovascular events including all-cause deaths, and laboratory values from the University of California, San Diego Health and Osaka University.

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Background: Early detection and intervention for preclinical heart failure (HF) are crucial for restraining the potential increase in patients with HF. Thus, we designed and conducted a single-center retrospective cohort study to confirm the efficacy of B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) for the early detection of preclinical HF in a primary care setting.

Methods and results: We investigated 477 patients with no prior diagnosis of HF who were under the care of general practitioners.

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The single-stent strategy has generally been accepted as the default approach to bifurcation percutaneous coronary intervention. We have proposed the proximal balloon edge dilation (PBED) technique to prevent stent deformation during side branch (SB) dilation. This bench study aimed to evaluate the impact of stent link location and stent design on stent deformation, obstruction by stent struts at a jailed SB ostium, and incomplete stent apposition in the proximal optimization technique (POT)-PBED procedure.

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Background: Detection of left ventricular (LV) abnormalities is essential for patients with preclinical heart failure (HF) to delay progression to clinical HF. Global longitudinal strain (GLS) is a sensitive marker for the early occurrence of subtle abnormalities in LV function, but not all echocardiographic instruments can measure GLS.

Methods and results: We studied 853 preclinical HF patients to devise a scoring system for predicting low GLS (<16%).

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  • Remifentanil is an opioid known for its quick action and is commonly used after cardiac surgery, but its effectiveness compared to other specific opioids has not been studied until now.
  • This research analyzed randomized controlled trials to see if remifentanil leads to shorter mechanical ventilation (MV) times in post-cardiac surgery patients compared to opioids like fentanyl, morphine, and sufentanil.
  • The results showed no significant difference in MV times with remifentanil compared to the other opioids, indicating that remifentanil does not shorten ventilation durations after cardiac surgery.
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Certain types of media breaking both space-inversion (P) and time-reversal (T) symmetries but preserving their combination PT exhibit the polarization rotation of reflected light even when that of transmitted light is prohibited. Such an effect is termed nonreciprocal rotation of reflected light (NRR). Although NRR shows nearly the same phenomenon as the magnetooptical Kerr effect or, equivalently, the Hall effect at optical frequencies, its origin is distinct and ascribed to a magnetoelectric (ME) effect at optical frequencies, i.

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War is an extreme form of collective human behaviour characterized by coordinated violence. We show that this nature of war is substantiated in the temporal patterns of conflict occurrence that obey power law. The focal metric is the interconflict interval (ICI), the interval between the end of a conflict in a dyad (i.

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  • The study analyzed the effectiveness of video laryngoscopes (VL) versus direct laryngoscopes (DL) during intubations performed by emergency department residents.
  • Results showed that VL had a higher first-attempt success rate (77%) compared to DL (64%), which was statistically significant after adjusting for various factors.
  • Additionally, using VL was linked to a lower occurrence of adverse events (both overall and minor), suggesting it may improve patient safety during intubation procedures.
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Nearly monocyclic terahertz waves are used for investigating elementary excitations and for controlling electronic states in solids. They are usually generated via second-order optical nonlinearity by injecting a femtosecond laser pulse into a nonlinear optical crystal. In this framework, however, it is difficult to control phase and frequency of terahertz waves.

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