1: Aqueous olanexidine versus aqueous povidone-iodine for surgical skin antisepsis on the incidence of surgical site infections after clean-contaminated surgery: a multicentre, prospective, blinded-endpoint, randomised controlled trial
Science of the Month - August 2020
Lancet Infectious Dis.,
2020 Jn 15: S1473-3099(20)30225-5. DOI: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30225-5
Hideaki Obara*, Masashi Takeuchi*, Hirofumi Kawakubo, Masahiro Shinoda, Koji Okabayashi, Koki Hayashi, Yasuhito Sekimoto, Yusuke Maeda, Takayuki Kondo, Yasunori Sato, Yuko Kitagawa
Surgical site infection (SSI) is an infection that occurs at the site of a surgical procedure. It is one of the most common postoperative complications and can occur after any type of surgery. It includes postoperative wound infections and intra-abdominal abscesses due to suture failure, which can lead to postoperative death and increased medical costs. The most basic and important measure against SSI is skin antisepsis of the incision site immediately before surgery. This physician-led, prospective, randomized controlled trial of 600 cases revealed that olanexidine, a new skin antiseptic developed in Japan, halved the rate of SSIs compared to conventional iodine-based antiseptics widely used in the country. This suggests that SSIs can be minimized by the extremely simple method of just changing the skin antiseptic for the surgical site to olanexidine. These research findings are applicable not only to the field of gastrointestinal surgery but also to all areas of surgery and medical procedures, and are expected to benefit many patients in clinical practice.
(Hideaki Obara, Class of '72, and Masashi Takeuchi, Class of '91, General and Gastroenterological Surgery)
2: Excess tau PET ligand retention in elderly patients with major depressive disorder.
Molecular Psychiatry,
2020-07-01 , DOI: 10.1038/s41380-020-0766-9
Sho Moriguchi, Keisuke Takahata, Hitoshi Shimada, Manabu Kubota, Soichiro Kitamura, Yasuyuki Kimura, Kenji Tagai, Ryosuke Tarumi, Hajime Tabuchi, Jeffrey H. Meyer, Masaru Mimura, Kazunori Kawamura, Ming-Rong Zhang, Shigeo Murayama, Tetsuya Suhara & Makoto Higuchi
In this study, we used positron emission tomography (PET) technology to visualize tau in the living brain, non-invasively measuring the accumulation of tau and amyloid-β in the brains of elderly patients with major depressive disorder and examining the relationship with clinical symptoms. The results showed that some elderly patients with major depressive disorder had significantly higher tau accumulation in the cerebral cortex, and that brain tau accumulation was particularly pronounced in patients with psychotic symptoms such as delusions and auditory hallucinations (Figure). Next, to validate these findings, we accessed postmortem brain data from the Elderly Brain Bank Project and found tau accumulation in some cases diagnosed with depression. These results indicate that objective diagnosis of major depressive disorder in the elderly may become possible using tau accumulation in the living brain, as captured by PET, as a biomarker. Furthermore, it is hoped that new therapeutic drugs being developed as radical treatments for dementia that suppress brain tau accumulation may also be effective for major depressive disorder in the elderly.
(Sho Moriguchi, Class of '86, Department of Neuropsychiatry)
3: Human-specific ARHGAP11B increases size and folding of primate neocortex in the fetal marmoset
Science.
2020 Jun 18; 369(6503): 546-550, 2020. doi: 10.1126/science.abb2401.
Michael Heide, Christiane Haffner, Ayako Murayama, Yoko Kurotak , Haruka Shinohara, Hideyuki Okano, Erika Sasaki, Wieland B Huttner
Our joint research group, consisting of researchers from the Department of Physiology (including Project Assistant Professor Ayako Murayama), Professor Wieland Huttner of the Max Planck Institute, and Dr. Erika Sasaki, Director of the Central Institute for Experimental Animals, is working to unravel the mystery of the expansion of the cerebral cortex, which supports higher brain functions in humans. For this purpose, we used an approach that utilizes the gene-modification technology for marmosets, a primate species, which we developed (Sasaki et al., Nature, 2009). In this study, we created transgenic marmosets that express ARHGAP11B, a gene that is absent in chimpanzees and exists only in humans. Analysis of their brains in the late fetal stage revealed that the neocortex was enlarged and thickened, and gyri and sulci formed in areas where they do not normally exist. This was found to be caused by an increase in basal radial glia (bRG) cells, a type of neural progenitor cell that newly appeared during evolution. Furthermore, the number of superficial layer neurons in the cerebral cortex, which are involved in corticocortical connections and are more abundant in humans among primates, was selectively increased. The expansion of the neocortex brought about by ARHGAP11B is thought to be related to the structural changes in the human brain that occurred during evolution.
(Hideyuki Okano, Class of '62, Department of Physiology)
Other Published Papers
1: Visualizing and Modulating Mitophagy for Therapeutic Studies of Neurodegeneration.
Cell.
Katayama H, Hama H, Nagasawa K, Kurokawa H, Sugiyama M, Ando R, Funata M, Yoshida N, Homma M, Nishimura T, Takahashi M, Ishida Y, Hioki H, Tsujihata Y, Miyawaki A.
2: Development and Validation of a Deep Neural Network for Accurate Evaluation of Endoscopic Images From Patients With Ulcerative Colitis.
Gastroenterology.
Takenaka K, Ohtsuka K, Fujii T, Negi M, Suzuki K, Shimizu H, Oshima S, Akiyama S, Motobayashi M, Nagahori M, Saito E, Matsuoka K, Watanabe M.