Application of a Pedometer for the Management of Impaired Glucose Tolerance in Pregnant Women

The proper management of impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) in pregnant women is important for both obstetricians and diabetologists as this condition is of interest to both obstetrics and internal medicine. Although nutritional intervention along with insulin treatment is the mainstream approach of IGT treatment in pregnant women, exercise intervention is another important component of the IGT management. A pedometer is a useful tool for objective exercise evaluation. Nonetheless, its application in the management of IGT in pregnant women is limited. On the other hand, with the widespread use of smartphones equipped with pedometer function, exercise by walking is easily monitored and utilised in both healthy pregnant women and pregnant women with obesity and impaired glucose tolerance. In this chapter, we review the present perspective on the use of a pedometer in the management of IGT in pregnant women by introducing our recently published work

A Case of an Invasive Lobular Carcinoma with Extracellular Mucin: Radio-Pathological Correlation

A case of 77-year-old female with an invasive lobular carcinoma with extracellular mucin is presented. She felt palpable mass in her left breast. Then, she came to our hospital for further examination. Mammography of right in full view revealed architectural distortion in left upper portion. And ultrasonography demonstrated low-echoic mass about 2 cm in diameter and invasion of the fat tissue was observed. Hence, malignancy was suspected and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was performed. MRI findings showed irregular shaped and margined mass with small T2-high-signal intensity. These findings suggested invasive carcinoma with mucin. Because the cancer lesion was not large, partial mastectomy was performed. Interestingly, pathological diagnosis was invasive lobular carcinoma with extracellular mucin. Extracellular mucinous lesion was concordant with small T2-high-signal intensity. This type of carcinoma was previously reported only in three cases, and rare but important, because the treatment and prognosis might change by histological subtypes. We suggest one of the MRI special features of our case is not only irregular shaped and margined mass but also small T2-high-signal intensity. These MR findings might be one of the valuable findings for the diagnosis and differentiation between this type of carcinoma from other tumors

A Public-key Encryption Scheme Based on Non-linear Indeterminate Equations (Giophantus)

In this paper, we propose a post-quantum public-key encryption scheme whose security depends on a problem arising from a multivariate non-linear indeterminate equation. The security of lattice cryptosystems, which are considered to be the most promising candidate for a post-quantum cryptosystem, is based on the shortest vector problem or the closest vector problem in the discrete linear solution spaces of simultaneous equations. However, several improved attacks for the underlying problems have recently been developed by using approximation methods, which result in requiring longer key sizes. As a scheme to avoid such attacks, we propose a public-key encryption scheme based on the smallest solution problem in the non-linear solution spaces of multivariate indeterminate equations that was developed from the algebraic surface cryptosystem. Since no efficient algorithm to find such a smallest solution is currently known, we introduce a new computational assumption under which proposed scheme is proven to be secure in the sense of IND-CPA. Then, we perform computational experiments based on known attack methods and evaluate that the key size of our scheme under the linear condition. This paper is a revised version of SAC2017

The whole blood transcriptional regulation landscape in 465 COVID-19 infected samples from Japan COVID-19 Task Force

「コロナ制圧タスクフォース」COVID-19患者由来の血液細胞における遺伝子発現の網羅的解析 --重症度に応じた遺伝子発現の変化には、ヒトゲノム配列の個人差が影響する--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-08-23.Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a recently-emerged infectious disease that has caused millions of deaths, where comprehensive understanding of disease mechanisms is still unestablished. In particular, studies of gene expression dynamics and regulation landscape in COVID-19 infected individuals are limited. Here, we report on a thorough analysis of whole blood RNA-seq data from 465 genotyped samples from the Japan COVID-19 Task Force, including 359 severe and 106 non-severe COVID-19 cases. We discover 1169 putative causal expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) including 34 possible colocalizations with biobank fine-mapping results of hematopoietic traits in a Japanese population, 1549 putative causal splice QTLs (sQTLs; e.g. two independent sQTLs at TOR1AIP1), as well as biologically interpretable trans-eQTL examples (e.g., REST and STING1), all fine-mapped at single variant resolution. We perform differential gene expression analysis to elucidate 198 genes with increased expression in severe COVID-19 cases and enriched for innate immune-related functions. Finally, we evaluate the limited but non-zero effect of COVID-19 phenotype on eQTL discovery, and highlight the presence of COVID-19 severity-interaction eQTLs (ieQTLs; e.g., CLEC4C and MYBL2). Our study provides a comprehensive catalog of whole blood regulatory variants in Japanese, as well as a reference for transcriptional landscapes in response to COVID-19 infection