Ryoichi Nagatomi

• MD, PhD
• Tohoku University

Functional constipation is the most common gastrointestinal disorder during childhood. Oral stimulation (mastication and toothbrushing) reportedly improves bowel movements, but the association between daily toothbrushing behavior and functional constipation remains unknown. Data (n = 83,660) from fetal records (n = 104,059) in the Japan Environment...

Visually emotive stimuli modulate postural control via cognitive pathways, and while colored lenses alter emotional responses, their impact on postural control remains uncertain. Previous studies showed that individually optimized colored glasses enhanced reading performance. However, it remains unclear if these effects extend to postural control....

Vision plays a fundamental role in the control of human locomotion, including walking gait. Given that side-dominance is associated with differences in motor control, the present study aimed to determine if patches obscuring half of the visual field affect left- and right-side dominant individuals’ gait kinematics and accompanying leg muscle activa...

Human movement is influenced by emotions, yet their effect on proprioceptive behavior remains unclear. This study examined how emotions impact ankle joint proprioception during ipsilateral and contralateral target-matching tasks. Twenty participants performed ankle matching tasks under four conditions: no music, happy, sad, and neutral. Emotional s...

Offspring growth requires establishing maternal behavior associated with the maternal endocrine profile. Placentae support the adaptations of the mother, producing bioactive molecules that affect maternal organs. We recently reported that placentae produce superoxide dismutase 3 (SOD3) that exerts sustained effects on the offspring liver via epigen...

Introduction Cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P), the most prevalent congenital anomaly, has been associated with higher rates of child maltreatment. In particular, the presence of cleft lip has more of an impact on external appearance and may increase the risks of negative health outcomes such as parental postpartum depression; however, this concept re...

In our work, we discuss the effects of carbon dioxide exposure on sleep latency using the Multiple Sleep Latency Test(#MSLT). We found that participants in the carbon dioxide group (4,851 ± 229 ppm) showed a shorter sleep latency and stronger subjective sleepiness, but no significant changes in cognitive performance compared to the Control conditio...

Background Physical activity is a crucial aspect of health benefits in the public society. Although studies on the temporal physical activity patterns might lead to the protocol for efficient intervention/program, a standardized procedure to determine and analyze the temporal physical activity patterns remains to be developed. Here, we attempted to...

Sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM) is a muscle disease in older people and is characterized by inflammatory cell invasion into intact muscle fibers and rimmed vacuoles. The pathomechanism of sIBM is not fully elucidated yet, and controversy exists as to whether sIBM is a primary autoimmune disease or a degenerative muscle disease with secondar...

Adipose tissue remodeling and plasticity are dynamically regulated by the coordinated functions of adipocytes, macrophages, and endothelial cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) that provides stiffness networks in adipose tissue component cells. Inflammation and fibrosis are crucial exogenous factors that dysregulate adipose tissue functions and dra...

To enhance therapeutic outcomes from a pharmacological perspective, we propose MiranDa, designed for medication recommendation, which is the first actionable model capable of providing the estimated length of stay in hospitals (ELOS) as counterfactual outcomes that guide clinical practice and model training. In detail, MiranDa emulates the educatio...

Introduction: This study aimed to determine the association between cumulative maternal physical activity level and their children’s physical activity in early childhood. We also compared the influence of each maternal physical activity on children’s physical activity in early childhood. Methods: We analyzed the data from 1,067 Japanese mother-chil...

Emotions have the potential to modulate human voluntary movement by modifying muscle afferent discharge which in turn may affect kinesthetic acuity. We examined if heart rate (HR)-related physiological changes induced by music-elicited emotions would underlie alterations in healthy young adults’ ankle joint target-matching strategy quantified by jo...

Background Physical activity is a crucial aspect of health benefits in the public society. Although studies on the temporal physical activity patterns might lead to the protocol for efficient intervention/program, a standardized procedure to determine and analyze the temporal physical activity patterns remains to be developed. Here, we attempted to...

Background Depression is a global burden with profound personal and economic consequences. Previous studies have reported that the amount of physical activity is associated with depression. However, the relationship between the temporal patterns of physical activity and depressive symptoms is poorly understood. In this exploratory study, we hypothe...

Background: The use of individually preferred colored glasses has gained popularity with the expectation that it may improve balance control and sports performance, however, the results of previous studies remain inconclusive. Aim of the study: In the present pilot study, we aimed to determine the association between participants’ subjective prefer...

Purpose The previous studies that examined the effectiveness of unsupervised machine learning methods versus traditional methods in assessing dietary patterns and their association with incident hypertension showed contradictory results. Consequently, our aim is to explore the correlation between the incidence of hypertension and overall dietary pa...

Background Depression is a global burden with profound personal and economic consequences. Previous studies have reported that the amount of physical activity is associated with depression. However, the relationship between the temporal patterns of physical activity and depressive symptoms is poorly understood. We hypothesize that the temporal patt...

Recent advancements in sequence-structure co-design have demonstrated the efficacy of integrating pre-trained language models (PLMs) with Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based modules for antigen-specific antibody design. A significant advantage of PLMs is their ability to directly predict the Complementarity-Determining Region (CDR), or reduce reliance...

Recent studies have shown that clustering latent variables, derived from autoencoders (AEs) through reconstruction tasks, is effective for identifying spatial domains of spatial transcriptomics (ST). Despite their utility, AEs exhibit inherent limitations due to discontinuities in latent spaces where similar inputs might not closely map. Variationa...

Prolyl hydroxylase domain 2 (PHD2) deficiency has been shown to activate hypoxia inducible factor (HIF), which improves the effects of endurance exercise training. In previous research, although systemic knockout of Phd2 causes an increase in blood hematocrit levels, only knockout Phd2 does not cause an increase in exercise capacity. At the time wh...

Sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM) is a muscle disease in older people and is characterized by inflammatory cell invasion into intact muscle fibers and rimmed vacuoles. The pathomechanism of sIBM is not fully elucidated yet, and controversy exists as to whether sIBM is a primary autoimmune disease or a degenerative muscle disease with secondar...

Background Upper and lower extremity muscle strengths predict health outcomes. However, the difference between each muscle's strength in physiological factors affecting the causal association is unclear. We aimed to evaluate the association between physiological data and muscle strength, measured using the grip and leg extension strengths, among Ja...

Depression is a global burden with profound personal and economic consequences. Previous studies have reported that the amount of physical activity is associated with depression. However, the relationship between the temporal patterns of physical activity and depressive symptoms are not well understood. We hypothesize that the temporal patterns of...

Skeletal muscle maintenance depends largely on muscle stem cells (satellite cells) that supply myoblasts required for muscle regeneration and growth. The ubiquitin-proteasome system is the major intracellular protein degradation pathway. We previously reported that proteasome dysfunction in skeletal muscle significantly impairs muscle growth and de...

Objectives Physical activity is a crucial aspect of health benefits in the public society. Although studies on the temporal physical activity patterns might lead to the protocol for efficient intervention/program, a standardized procedure to determine and analyze the temporal physical activity patterns remains to be developed. Here, we attempted to...

Otitis media, one of the most common childhood diseases, is characterized by inflammation or infection of the middle ear. Due to their ease of access, daily probiotics are recommended for the prevention of early childhood otitis media. This study aimed to assess the impact of probiotics on the incidence of otitis media using a dataset (n = 95,380)...

Lactate serves as the major glucose alternative to an energy substrate in the brain. Lactate level is increased in the fetal brain from the middle stage of gestation, indicating the involvement of lactate in brain development and neuronal differentiation. Recent reports show that lactate functions as a signaling molecule to regulate gene expression...

Background The prone plank test has been often used to assess the strength and endurance of trunk muscles. We aimed to develop a new measurement protocol to objectively monitor the changes in spinal curves and muscle activity simultaneously. Methods Eleven adolescent male basketball athletes (13–17 years) performed a one-minute plank test. Spinal...

Background: Previous studies have focused on the relationship between specific dietary factors (such as sodium intake or consumption of fruits and vegetables) and the development of hypertension. However, less is known about the role of overall dietary patterns (food intake, dietary behaviors, and cooking methods) in the development of hypertension...

Skeletal muscle fiber type specification is changeable during muscle regeneration following cardiotoxin (CTX) injection; however, the mechanism of muscle fiber shift in regenerating muscle fibers remains unclear. Furthermore, it is unclear as to which factors determine skeletal muscle fiber types in regenerating muscle fibers. Previous studies show...

Background Knee is the most commonly injured part of the body in young athletes. Knee pain in several studies have been seen to be more prevalent in active adolescents compared to inactive, although common in both groups. Nevertheless, few studies with large sample size have been published reporting the difference of the prevalence of knee pain for...

Adequate physical activity during pregnancy is crucial for maternal and fetal health. Although physical activity during pregnancy is restricted, social support and trust may have a favorable influence on physical activity. This study aimed to examine the association between cognitive social capital during pregnancy and prenatal physical activity am...

Patients undergoing unilateral orthopedic or neurological rehabilitation have different levels of impairments in the right- or left-dominant hand. However, how handedness and the complexity of the motor task affect motor skill acquisition and its interlimb transfer remains unknown. In the present study, participants performed finger key presses on...

Otitis media, one of the most common childhood diseases, is characterized by inflammation or infection of the middle ear. Due to their ease of access, daily probiotics are recommended for the prevention of early childhood otitis media. This study aimed to assess the impact of probiotics on the incidence of otitis media using a dataset (n = 95,380)...

Myoblast integrity is essential for skeletal muscle regeneration. Many intracellular proteins are degraded by the proteasome and converted to amino acids by aminopeptidases through the protein degradation pathway. Although we previously reported its importance for myoblast integrity, the involved mechanism remains unclear. In this study, we focused...

We examined the effects of side-dominance on the laterality of standing stability using ground reaction force, motion capture (MoCap), and EMG data in healthy young adults. We recruited participants with strong right (n = 15) and left (n = 9) hand and leg dominance (side-dominance). They stood on one or two legs on a pair of synchronized force plat...

Vision transformer is the new favorite paradigm in medical image segmentation since last year, which surpassed the traditional CNN counterparts in quantitative metrics. The significant advantage of ViTs is to utilize the attention layers to model global relations between tokens. However, the increased representation capacity of ViTs comes with corr...

Background There is a need to develop strategies that could contribute to the physical and mental preparation of motorsport athletes. A common method used by experienced motorsport athlete physical trainers is flashing light devices to train or assess reactive agility, despite limited evidence. Therefore, in the present study, we determined the eff...

Background: The use of compression garments (CGs) during or after training and competition has gained popularity in the last few decades. However, the data concerning CGs’ beneficial effects on muscle strength-related outcomes after physical exercise remain inconclusive. Objective: The aim was to determine whether wearing CGs during or after physi...

This study aimed to clarify the contribution of L-menthol administration to endurande exercise capacity. Thirteen male runners (age, 35.8 ± 7.8 years; peak oxygen uptake, 62.7 ± 6.8 mL kg⁻¹ min⁻¹) ran on treadmills at fixed intensities of their anaerobic thresholds to exhaustion. All participants underwent three trials—water ingestion (W-IG), L-men...

Background Bruxism is defined as a repetitive masticatory muscle activity, characterized by clenching or grinding of the teeth and/or by bracing or thrusting of the mandible. Although the bruxism etiology can be bidirectionally described with sleep disorders, there are few studies available to understand the association of sleep duration with bruxi...

Purpose: Task complexity could affect acquisition efficiency of motor skills and interlimb transfer; however, how task complexity affects interlimb transfer remains unclear. We hypothesized that left- and right-handed participants may have different interlimb transfer efficiency depending on the task complexity. Methods: Left-hand (n=28) and right...

Environmental carbon dioxide (CO2) could affect various mental and physiological activities in humans, but its effect on daytime sleepiness is still controversial. In a randomized and counterbalanced crossover study with twelve healthy volunteers, we applied a combinational approach using classical frequentist and Bayesian statistics to analyze the...

Background Knee pain is a common symptom among young sports players. Nevertheless, few studies with large sample size have been published reporting the difference of the prevalence of knee pain for each sport among young sports players. Methods This study was to investigate the point prevalence of knee pain according to age, sex and sports discipli...

Physical fitness in childhood consequently affects and determines the risk of acquiring non-communicable diseases in adulthood. Therefore, it is important for children to acquire adequate physical fitness during childhood. It has been reported that children’s physical fitness is related to environmental factors, and one of this is their parents’ he...

The recent global pandemic of Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19) has impacted all aspects of society, producing a growing demand for a powerful virus inactivation method. To assess a potential and mechanism of human coronavirus inactivation using atmospheric pressure plasma (APP) technology, replication of a human coronavirus (HCoV-229E) after He +...

Purpose: Vegetable intake is an important part of our everyday diet and is associated with many positive health outcomes. Although previous studies have investigated the association between vegetable consumption and depressive symptoms among various populations, no study has examined this association in the adult working population. The present st...

Preclinical studies reveal maternal exercise as a promising intervention to reduce the transmission of multi-generational metabolic dysfunction caused by maternal obesity. The benefits of maternal exercise on offspring health may arise from multiple factors and have recently been shown to involve DNA demethylation of critical hepatic genes leading...

Cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P), the most prevalent congenital anomaly, is understood to negatively affect a wide range of child development. Since the concept remains controversial, because most published work is from cross‐sectional studies, we examined the neurodevelopmental trajectories in participants with CL/P through a longitudinal comparison...

Featured Application This work provides a collection of validated basketball-related field tests and test packages intended to aid coaches and other experts in the selection of tests and the building of testing protocols. In addition to collecting study results using these tests, practical advice on test planning and execution is also given to help...

Background: Low back pain (LBP) is a common health problem — sitting on a chair for a prolonged time is considered a significant risk factor. Furthermore, the level of LBP may vary at different times of the day. However, the role of the time-sequence property of sitting behavior in relation to LBP has not been considered. During the dynamic sitting...

Rhinovirus (RV) is a primary etiologic agent of common cold that can subsequently acutely exacerbate bronchial asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Kakkonto (Ge-gen-tang in Chinese), one of the most frequently prescribed traditional Japanese (Kampo) medicines, is used for treating common cold, shoulder stiffness, or inflammatory disease...

Objectives Daily toothbrushing behaviour is very effective for the prevention of early childhood dental caries (ECC), but is mostly dependent upon parental management. Intrapersonal association between lower toothbrushing frequency and depression is well known; however, the impact of maternal postpartum depression on child toothbrushing behaviour w...

Basketball is one of the most popular team sports in the world. A wide variety of athletic skills can be valuable indicators of a talented player. Testing these skills help trainers and scouts to make the best decisions during both youth and adult player selection of different competitive levels and field positions. However, scientific data regardi...

Background Daily toothbrushing effectively prevents early childhood caries, but it depends on facilitative parenting behaviours. Mother‐to‐infant bonding, the maternal affection toward the infant, is an environmental factor that strongly influences parenting. Aim This study examined the association between maternal bonding and children’s daily too...

Communication between parents and their children’s coaches is important for children’s sports activities, but the relationship between parents and coaches is not well understood. It is possible that parents feel a lack of communication with coaches, which could be due to parents’ experience with sports activities or the social environment of the te...

Study design: A cross-sectional study. Objective: The purpose of this large cohort study was to assess the prevalence of low back pain (LBP) among young players participating in several types of sports. Summary of background data: LBP is a significant problem among young sports players. Sport discipline among young players is thought to be ass...

Purpose: We examined the possibility that wearing a below-knee compression garment (CG) reduces fatigue-induced strength loss and joint position sense (JPS) errors in healthy adults. Methods: Subjects (n = 24, age = 25.5 ± 4 years) were allocated to either one of the treatment groups that performed 100 maximal isokinetic eccentric contractions at...

The ubiquitin‐proteasome system is a major protein degradation pathway in the cell. Proteasomes produce several peptides that are rapidly degraded to free amino acids by intracellular aminopeptidases. Our previous studies reported that proteolysis via proteasomes and aminopeptidases is required for myoblast proliferation and differentiation. Howeve...

Exercise can alter the composition of gut microbiota. However, studies examining the effects of exercise on gut microbiota in the elderly are lacking. This study aims to investigate whether an 8-week exercise training affect gut microbiota in physically inactive elderly women. Fourteen women were randomly assigned to either exercise group or contro...

A large number of intracellular proteins are degraded by the ubiquitin-proteasome system, one of the major protein degradation pathways. It produces peptides of several different sizes through protein degradation, and these peptides are rapidly degraded into free amino acids by various intracellular aminopeptidases. Previously, we reported that the...

BACKGROUND: Background: Although previous studies targeted S1 by TMS to investigate its effect on the corticospinal pathway, there is no evidence if such stimuli produced by TMS would distinctly be restricted to it and not reach M1 interneurons adjacent to S1. AIM: The aim of the present pilot study was to determine the effects of stimulation locat...

It has been reported that Bach1-deficient mice show reduced tissue injuries in diverse disease models due to increased expression of heme oxygenase-1 (HO-1)that possesses an antioxidant function. In contrast, we found that Bach1 deficiency in mice exacerbated skeletal muscle injury induced by cardiotoxin. Inhibition of Bach1 expression in C2C12 myo...

Martial arts, such as judo, kendo, and karate, are popular worldwide, not only among adults but also among children and adolescents. Although low back pain (LBP) is considered to be a common problem in these sports, it has been scarcely studied, especially in young athletes. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the point prevalence of and fac...

Background: Low back pain (LBP) is a common problem among young basketball players in addition to lower extremity injuries. However, studies that focus on LBP with lower extremity pain are limited. From the perspective of the kinematic chain, disrupted lower extremity function can lead to LBP. The association between these two symptoms in basketba...

Working memory (WM) training (WMT), aerobic exercise training (AET), and dual-task training improve cognitive functions and alter neural systems in older adults. In particular, the effects have been investigated of dual-task training that combines a walking or standing activity (balance exercise) simultaneously performed with cognitive training (wh...

Background: Grip strength reflects systemic muscle strength and mass and is reportedly associated with various metabolic variables. However, its prognostic association with dyslipidemia is unknown. We examined the association of grip strength and other physical fitness markers with the incidence of dyslipidemia among Japanese adults. Methods: A tot...

Background: After abdominal surgery, patients may strongly complain of pain during exercise, especially during the motion of rising from the supine to a sitting position. The effect of exhalation on wound pain relief during the rising motion was examined. Methods: Seventy-seven patients who had undergone open renal biopsy and 11 patients who had un...

Motor skill practice improves performance not only in the trained - but also in the untrained contralateral limb - a phenomenon called as interlimb transfer. Handedness affects motor skill acquisition and interlimb transfer, but it remains unknown whether handedness affects interlimb transfer when practicing with the dominant or non-dominant limb....

The number of patients infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has rapidly increased, although the WHO declared a pandemic. However, drugs that function against SARS-CoV-2 have not been established. SARS-CoV-2 has been suggested to bind angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, the receptor of the SARS coronavirus. SARS co...

Background Loss of skeletal muscle mass in the elderly, namely sarcopenia, is a rapidly growing global health problem. Understanding the mechanism of muscle mass regulation is essential to confront this problem. The balance of muscle protein synthesis and degradation is thought to be one of the key issues. Previous reports showed that muscle‐specif...

INTRODUCTION We recently established a conditional knockout mouse which exhibits hypoxic response under normoxia. Prolyl hydroxylase domain 2 (PHD2), an enzyme responsible for oxygen dependent hydroxylation of hypoxia inducible factor (HIF), turns HIF susceptible to ubiquitination and subsequent degradation by the proteasome. We previously examined...

Introduction Hypoxic training is one of the methods supposed to improve the performance of endurance athletes. Under a normoxic condition, prolyl hydroxylase domain containing protein 2 (PHD2) leads hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) to proteasomal degradation. Under hypoxia, PHD2 becomes inactive and let HIF be stabilized. HIF, then, promotes the expr...

The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway is essential for skeletal muscle growth and development. Proteasomes generate oligopeptides in the cytoplasm, and these peptides are considered to be rapidly degraded to amino acids by several intracellular aminopeptidases. However, the role of intracellular aminopeptidases in muscle growth remains unknown. In this...

Mutations in dysferlin are responsible for a group of progressive, recessively inherited muscular dystrophies known as dysferlinopathies. Using recombinant proteins and affinity purification methods combined with LC/MS/MS, we found that AMPKγ1 was bound to a region of dysferlin located between the third and fourth C2 domains. Using ex vivo laser in...

Basketball is a major sport worldwide among different age groups that leads to a high frequency of injuries at multiple body sites. Upper and lower extremities and lower back are common pain sites in basketball players; however, there is little information about the relationship between upper or lower extremity pain and lower back pain. This study...

Background: Lower back pain (LBP), as well as lower extremity injuries, are major problems among young volleyball players. Nevertheless, only few studies have focused on the relationship between lower extremity injuries and LBP. Objective: This study investigated the association between LBP and lower extremity pain, including knee and ankle pain...

Background: Cleft lip and/or palate is among the most prevalent congenital birth defects, and negatively affects maternal psychological status and may consequently result in higher prevalence of child maltreatment. However, the association of childbirths of infants with cleft lip and/or palate with maternal emotional involvement still remains uncl...

Verbal or physical abuse from coaches has negative effects on young athletes, and the parents of athletes also have an influence on the sports environment. It is therefore important to understand parents' attitudes towards abuse against their children from the coaches. This study aimed to elucidate the characteristics of parents who accept the infl...

Background: Cleft lip and/or palate is among the most prevalent congenital birth defects, and negatively affects maternal psychological status and may consequently result in higher prevalence of child maltreatment. However, the association of childbirths of infants with cleft lip and/or palate with maternal emotional involvement still remains uncle...

Background: Cleft lip and/or palate is among the most prevalent congenital birth defects, and negatively affects maternal psychological status and may consequently result in higher prevalence of child maltreatment. However, the association of childbirths of infant with cleft lip and/or palate with maternal emotional involvement still remains unclea...