心室中隔欠損症患児における心筋再分極の変動特性

藤田保健衛生大

Factor analysis of Japanese version of the Obsessional-Compulsive lnventory

The 30-items Maudsley Obsessional-Compulsive Inventory (MOCI) was developed as an instrument for assessing the existence and extend of different obsessional-compulsive complaints by Hodgson & Rachman (1977). MOCI is composed of two major types of complaint, checking and cleaning compulsions, and two minor types, slowness and doubting. Rachman & Hodgson (1980) considered the complaints of checking and cleaning as the representative coping behaviors of prevention and provocation. These types of coping behavior could be observed in daily stressful situation. This study was to explore the Japanese version of MOCI available to evaluate the degree of obsessional-compulsive tendency observed in non-clinical persons. The Japanese version of MOCI was administered to 600 normal students to re-investigate the factor structure of this scale. Principal factor analysis and varimax rotation were adopted to extract the significant factors from 30×30 correlation matrix. Three factors, checking, cleaning and doubting-ruminating were extracted independently, but the complaint of slowness was not found as a significant factor. Additively to explore in their correlations with obsessional-complsive complaints, trait anxiety and time anxiety, MOCI, STAI-T form and TAS were administered to 213 normal students. TAS is composed of three subscales, namely, time confusion, time irritation and time submissiveness. The results were as follows. (1) Checking, cleaning and doubting were positively correlated with trait anxiety, but slowness was negatively correlated. (2) All obsessional-compulsive complaints but slowness were positively correlated with time confusion. Slowness and cleaning were positively correlated with time irritation, and negatively correlated with time submissiveness. These results indicate that slowness and cleaning complaints are somewhat different from other obsessional-compulsive complaints

Charge Exchange X-ray Emission Detected in Multiple Shells of Supernova Remnant G296.1-0.5

Recent high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy revealed possible presence of charge exchange (CX) X-ray emission in supernova remnants (SNRs). Although CX is expected to take place at outermost edges of SNR shells, no significant measurement has been reported so far due to the lack of nearby SNR samples. Here we present an X-ray study of SNR G296.1$-$0.5, which has a complicated multiple-shell structure, with the Reflection Grating Spectrometer (RGS) onboard XMM-Newton. We select two shells in different regions and find that in both regions O VII line shows a high forbidden-to-resonance ($f/r$) ratio that cannot be reproduced by a simple thermal model. Our spectral analysis suggests a presence of CX and the result is also supported by our new radio observation, where we discover evidence of molecular clouds associated with these shells. Assuming G296.1$-$0.5 has a spherical shock, we estimate that CX is dominant in a thin layer with a thickness of 0.2--0.3\% of the shock radius. The result is consistent with a previous theoretical expectation and we therefore conclude that CX occurs in G296.1$-$0.5.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Relation between the instrumental activities of daily living and physical fitness tests in elderly women.

A cross-sectional study was conducted to quantitatively evaluate the relationship between the instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) and various physical fitness tests in elderly women living at home. The study focused on the total population of those women aged 65 years and over living in Y Town, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, who visited a nursing home for day services. A total of 128 subjects were divided into two groups: dependent in IADL group (n = 49) and independent in IADL group (n = 79). The magnitude of the relation was evaluated by the odds ratio (OR). The following tests showed a significant decrease in IADL: knee-raising test [age-adjusted OR = 4.23, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.81-9.87], height (age-adjusted OR = 4.09, 95% CI 1.75-9.56), grip strength (age-adjusted OR = 3.68, 95% CI 1.57-8.60), sit-and-reach test (age-adjusted OR = 2.76, 95% CI 1.20-6.34), and standing on one leg with closed eyes (age-adjusted OR = 2.56, 95% CI 1.09-5.97). Multivariate analysis using Hayashi's quantification method I indicated that knee-raising was the test most highly correlated with decreased IADL. These results suggest that measurement of knee-raising ability, muscle strength of the lower extremities and flexibility of hip joint could be the most useful factors to assess the level of instrumental self-support ability.</p

Pancreatic Cancer Research beyond DNA Mutations

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is caused by genetic mutations in four genes: KRAS proto-oncogene and GTPase (KRAS), tumor protein P53 (TP53), cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 2A (CDKN2A), and mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 4 (SMAD4), also called the big 4. The changes in tumors are very complex, making their characterization in the early stages challenging. Therefore, the development of innovative therapeutic approaches is desirable. The key to overcoming PDAC is diagnosing it in the early stages. Therefore, recent studies have investigated the multifaced characteristics of PDAC, which includes cancer cell metabolism, mesenchymal cells including cancer-associated fibroblasts and immune cells, and metagenomics, which extend to characterize various biomolecules including RNAs and volatile organic compounds. Various alterations in the KRAS-dependent as well as KRAS-independent pathways are involved in the refractoriness of PDAC. The optimal combination of these new technologies is expected to help treat intractable pancreatic cancer

Development of the photomultiplier tube readout system for the first Large-Sized Telescope of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation ground-based very high energy gamma-ray observatory. The Large-Sized Telescope (LST) of CTA targets 20 GeV -- 1 TeV gamma rays and has 1855 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) installed in the focal plane camera. With the 23 m mirror dish, the night sky background (NSB) rate amounts to several hundreds MHz per pixel. In order to record clean images of gamma-ray showers with minimal NSB contamination, a fast sampling of the signal waveform is required so that the signal integration time can be as short as the Cherenkov light flash duration (a few ns). We have developed a readout board which samples waveforms of seven PMTs per board at a GHz rate. Since a GHz FADC has a high power consumption, leading to large heat dissipation, we adopted the analog memory ASIC "DRS4". The sampler has 1024 capacitors per channel and can sample the waveform at a GHz rate. Four channels of a chip are cascaded to obtain deeper sampling depth with 4096 capacitors. After a trigger is generated in a mezzanine on the board, the waveform stored in the capacitor array is subsequently digitized with a low speed (33 MHz) ADC and transferred via the FPGA-based Gigabit Ethernet to a data acquisition system. Both a low power consumption (2.64 W per channel) and high speed sampling with a bandwidth of $>$300 MHz have been achieved. In addition, in order to increase the dynamic range of the readout we adopted a two gain system achieving from 0.2 up to 2000 photoelectrons in total. We finalized the board design for the first LST and proceeded to mass production. Performance of produced boards are being checked with a series of quality control (QC) tests. We report the readout board specifications and QC results.Comment: In Proceedings of the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2015), The Hague, The Netherlands. All CTA contributions at arXiv:1508.0589