Publications by authors named "Yajima J"

Rotablator-associated coronary perforation can be fatal if bailout is delayed. Successful bailout is typically defined as the disappearance of contrast extravasation after a haemostatic intervention. We report a case of recurrent cardiac tamponade in the subacute phase, wherein haemostasis appeared to have been achieved on angiography following the implantation of a covered stent during the index procedure.

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Background: Premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) and nonsustained ventricular tachycardia (NSVT) are common arrhythmias in cardiovascular clinical settings. However, the clinical significance of PVCs and NSVT in the absence of structural heart disease has not yet been fully elucidated. This study aimed to evaluate the association between PVCs, NSVT, and clinical outcomes.

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Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) has significantly contributed to reducing the mortality of patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) even in cardiogenic shock and is now the standard of care in most of Japanese institutions. The Task Force on Primary PCI of the Japanese Association of Cardiovascular Intervention and Therapeutics (CVIT) proposed an expert consensus document for the management of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) focusing on procedural aspects of primary PCI in 2018 and updated in 2022. Recently, the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) published the guidelines for the management of acute coronary syndrome in 2023.

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  • The kinesin-9 family has two subfamilies that play a crucial role in ciliary bending and formation in eukaryotic cells.
  • Current knowledge on the motor properties of kinesin-9 is limited and has not been systematically compared across the same species.
  • Research on Tetrahymena thermophila's kinesin-9 proteins, TtK9A and TtK9B1, reveals that both display slow movement towards microtubule plus-ends with TtK9A showing less processivity than TtK9B1, indicating this slow movement is characteristic of the entire kinesin-9 family.
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Natural kinesin motors are tethered to their cargoes via short C-terminal or N-terminal linkers, whose docking against the core motor domain generates directional force. It remains unclear whether linker docking is the only process contributing directional force or whether linker docking is coupled to and amplifies an underlying, more fundamental force-generating mechanical cycle of the kinesin motor domain. Here, we show that kinesin motor domains tethered via double-stranded DNAs (dsDNAs) attached to surface loops drive robust microtubule (MT) gliding.

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Pericardial effusion (PE) presentation varies from an incidental finding to a life-threatening situation; thus, its etiology and clinical course remain unknown. The aim of the present study was to retrospectively investigate these factors.We analyzed 171 patients (0.

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  • A study examined the effectiveness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) integrated with electrocardiograms (ECGs) for identifying hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and dilated HCM (dHCM) in a large patient dataset (19,170 total, with 140 HCM/dHCM cases).
  • The analysis focused on two diagnostic models—one for overall disease detection and another that considered different disease subtypes—showing that while overall sensitivity started at 76%, it reached 100% when specific conditions were met (diagnostic probability ≥ 0.9 and left ventricular hypertrophy present).
  • The research concluded that while initial detection rates of HCM or dHCM using CNNs in
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  • * The CNN model achieved a high area under the curve (AUC) score of 0.936 for AD detection with eight-lead ECGs but had a low overall positive predictive rate (PPR) of 7%. However, the PPR improved significantly to 35% for patients with high D-dimer levels and a history of hypertension.
  • * The single-lead V1 ECG also demonstrated strong performance, with an A
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  • - We created a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect atrial fibrillation (AF) using sinus rhythm ECGs (SR-ECG), analyzing data from 616 AF cases and 3,412 sinus rhythm cases among over 19,000 patients.
  • - The CNN model showed strong performance with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.872 for detecting AF with eight-lead ECGs, indicating high accuracy in distinguishing AF from sinus rhythm.
  • - Notably, the double-lead ECG using leads I and V1 had a similar AUC of 0.871, suggesting that this simpler approach could be a viable alternative for AF screening in clinical settings.
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  • Mechanical forces are essential for various biological processes like cell movement and division, largely driven by the interaction between actin filaments and myosin motors in the actin cytoskeleton.
  • Recent research highlights the importance of two key factors in actin network contraction: F-actin buckling caused by motor activities and the tension-induced fragmentation of F-actins, which disrupts network integrity.
  • This study used experiments and computational models to reveal that tension-induced fragmentation not only contributes to network contraction but also creates different rupture dynamics compared to other mechanisms, emphasizing its significance in highly interconnected actomyosin networks.
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  • - Myosin family proteins are motor proteins that use ATP to generate force along actin filaments, and this study focuses on how temperature affects their corkscrewing motion.
  • - The research involved in vitro assays with a specific myosin (Drosophila myosin IC) and found that increasing temperature (from 25°C to 35°C) leads to higher gliding and rotational velocities of actin filaments.
  • - Results show that at warmer temperatures, the gliding velocity increases more than the rotational velocity, suggesting temperature influences how myosin IC generates torque on actin filaments, which could be important for understanding muscle function at physiological temperatures.
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  • * This study tracked the movement of actin filaments using quantum dots to show that myosin IC can cause the filaments to rotate as they glide across a surface coated with myosin IC.
  • * The research found that the degree of rotation is influenced by the concentration of a specific phospholipid (PI[4,5]P) in the membrane, suggesting that the mechanical actions of myosin IC can be adjusted depending on the lipid environment.
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  • The study aimed to create an AI model for detecting the dilated phase of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (dHCM) using digital electrocardiograms (ECGs).
  • It utilized a retrospective analysis of 17,378 ECGs from a database, identifying 54 dHCM patients and evaluating the model's effectiveness with different lead configurations (eight-lead, single-lead, and double-lead).
  • The results showed high accuracy, with the single-lead V5 ECG performing almost as well as the eight-lead ECG, suggesting it as a viable option for dHCM screening.
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Kinesin motor domains generate impulses of force and movement that have both translational and rotational (torque) components. Here, we ask how the torque component influences function in cargo-attached teams of weakly processive kinesins. Using an assay in which kinesin-coated gold nanorods (kinesin-GNRs) translocate on suspended microtubules, we show that for both single-headed KIF1A and dimeric ZEN-4, the intensities of polarized light scattered by the kinesin-GNRs in two orthogonal directions periodically oscillate as the GNRs crawl towards microtubule plus ends, indicating that translocating kinesin-GNRs unidirectionally rotate about their short (yaw) axes whilst following an overall left-handed helical orbit around the microtubule axis.

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The shortening of microtubules attached to kinetochores is the driving force of chromosome movement during cell division. Specific kinesins are believed to shorten microtubules but are dispensable for viability in yeast, implying the existence of additional factors responsible for microtubule shortening. Here, we demonstrate that Dis1, a TOG/XMAP215 ortholog in fission yeast, promotes microtubule shortening to carry chromosomes.

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Eukaryotic cilia/flagella are cellular bio-machines that drive the movement of microorganisms. Molecular motor axonemal dyneins in the axoneme, which consist of an 9 + 2 arrangement of microtubules, play an essential role in ciliary beating. Some axonemal dyneins have been shown to generate torque coupled with the longitudinal motility of microtubules across an array of dyneins fixed to the coverglass surface, resulting in a corkscrew-like translocation of microtubules.

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Kinesin-14 microtubule-based motors have an N-terminal tail attaching the catalytic core to its load and usually move towards microtubule minus ends, whilst most other kinesins have a C-terminal tail and move towards plus ends. Loss of conserved sequences external to the motor domain causes kinesin-14 to switch to plus-end motility, showing that an N-terminal attachment is compatible with plus-end motility. However, there has been no systematic study on the role of attachment position in minus-end motility.

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The aim of this study is to evaluate the long-term safety and efficacy of the 2.25 mm bioresorbable-polymer sirolimus-eluting Ultimaster stent in a Japanese patient population. Treatment of coronary artery disease in very small vessels is associated with an increased risk for cardiac events.

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High alkaline phosphatase (ALP) levels are reported to be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Given the pathological link with CKD, a similar relationship may exist in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). We retrospectively evaluated 1,719 patients with AF and normal hepatic function who were registered in the Shinken Database between November 2011 and March 2017.

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Acute eosinophilic pneumonia is a rare but severe side effect of daptomycin, which has been recommended as empirical antimicrobial drug therapy for blood culture-negative prosthetic valve endocarditis. Here, we present a case of an 82-year-old man who developed fever, cough, and shortness of breath after 23-day treatment with daptomycin for prosthetic valve endocarditis. Bilateral ground-glass opacities were observed on computed tomography with peripheral eosinophilia of 640/μL (7%).

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Article Synopsis
  • Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) has become the standard treatment for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) in Japan, effectively reducing mortality rates, even for patients in cardiogenic shock.
  • Key guideline updates include recommending radial access and drug-eluting stents (DES) over bare-metal stents (BMS) for STEMI patients, and endorsing complete revascularization before discharge as a Class IIa recommendation.
  • For Non-ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction (NSTEMI) patients, early invasive strategies and complete revascularization without cardiogenic shock are now highlighted, along with changes in antithrombotic therapy for patients with atrial fibrillation, leading to
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Discriminating between different patterns of diastolic dysfunction in heart failure (HF) is still challenging. We tested the hypothesis that an unsupervised machine learning algorithm would detect heterogeneity in diastolic function and improve risk stratification compared with recommended consensus criteria. This study included 279 consecutive patients aged 24-97 years old with clinically stable HF referred for echocardiographic assessment, in whom diastolic variables were measured according to the current guidelines.

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Glasgow prognostic score (GPS) has been used to evaluate inflammatory response and nutritional status. This study aimed to investigate the impact of nutritional status on cardiac prognosis by using GPS in patients after undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). We included 862 patients who underwent PCI for stable angina pectoris between 2015 and 2018.

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