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IntroductionSchool refusal is one of the serious problems with children’s mental health, and various studies have examined its prevalence and factors among students. Although many studies suggested that anxiety and depression are deeply associated with school refusal, there is little agreement as to effective interventions. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of mindfulness yoga intervention in children with school refusal.MethodThis study is a multicenter, exploratory, open cluster-randomized controlled trial. 43 participants aged 10–15 years with school refusal were randomly assigned to a non-yoga group with treatment as usual (TAU) which includes cognitive behavioral therapy based on self-monitoring, or a yoga group (4-week mindfulness yoga program provided by video sessions + TAU). The primary outcome was symptoms of anxiety evaluated by Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale-Children (SCAS-C). Participants were assessed in four time periods: a 2-week baseline (Day −14), a baseline (Day 1), a post-test after 4 weeks of treatment (Day 29), and an 8-week follow-up (Day 85). Statistical analysis was conducted by a linear mixed effect model using SAS version 9.4.Results43 participants were included in the Full-analysis set (FAS) (21 in the mindfulness yoga group and 22 in the non-yoga group). The estimates of SCAS-C at post-test adjusted for baseline values in each treatment group were 39.9 in the mindfulness yoga group and 39.4 in the non-yoga group. The between-group difference for the estimates was 0.4 (80%CI −4.8 to −5.6, p = 0.54), which indicated mindfulness yoga program has no significant effect on anxiety compared with TAU. However, on an exploratory analysis of the subscale of SCAS-C, significant improvement was observed on the Physical Injury Fears subscale. The pulse rate was significantly lower in the yoga group compared to the non-yoga group.ConclusionThis study indicated the safety of a mindfulness yoga intervention for children with school refusal, but the effectiveness of the intervention for anxiety was limited. Further research is needed to determine the long-term effects of yoga and how it can best be integrated with other therapies.

BackgroundSchool refusal occurs in about 1–2% of young people. Anxiety and depression are considered to be the most common emotional difficulties for children who do not attend school. However, at present, no definitive treatment has been established for school refusal, although interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy have been used. This paper reports a protocol for a cluster-randomized controlled trial of a mindfulness yoga intervention for children with school refusal.MethodsThis study is a multicenter, exploratory, open cluster-randomized controlled trial. This study will recruit children aged 10–15 years with school refusal. After a 2-week baseline, participants for each cluster will be randomly assigned to one of two groups: with or without mindfulness yoga for 4 weeks. Mindfulness yoga will be created for schoolchildren for this protocol and distributed to the participants on DVD. The primary outcome is anxiety among children with school refusal using the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale-Children.DiscussionFor this study, we developed a mindfulness yoga program and protocol, and examine whether mindfulness yoga can improve anxiety in children with school refusal. Our mindfulness yoga program was developed based on the opinions of children of the same age, and is a program that children can continue to do every day without getting bored. In this way, we believe that we can contribute to the smooth implementation of support to reduce the anxiety of children with school refusal, and to the reduction of the number of children who refuse to go to school.

Even today when nearly 80 years have passed after the atomic bomb (A-bomb) was dropped, there are still debates about the exact doses received by the A-bomb survivors. While initial airborne kerma radiation (or energy spectrum of emitted radiation) can be measured with sufficient accuracy to assess the radiation dose to A-bomb survivors, it is not easy to accurately assess the neutron dose including appropriate weighting of neutron absorbed dose. Particularly, possible post-explosion exposure due to the radioactive particles generated through neutron activation have been almost neglected so far, mainly because of a large uncertainty associated to the behavior of those particles. However, it has been supposed that contribution of such non-initial radiation exposure from the neutron-induced radioactive particles could be significant, according to the findings that the stable chromosomal aberration rates which indicate average whole-body radiation doses were found to be more than 30% higher for those exposed indoors than for those outdoors even at the same initial dose estimated for the Life Span Study. In this Mini Review article, the authors explain that such apparently controversial observations can be reasonably explained by assuming a higher production rate of neutron-induced radioactive particles in the indoor environment near the hypocenter.

COVID-19 infection has been reported to be caused by droplet and contact infection. This paper proposes a model that visualizes the risk of contact infection to family members when viruses spread to various items at home. Behavior data after returning home are extracted from a questionnaire-based survey of home behavior to design the agent-based model. The data tables of contact behavior are created, including the room-to-room transfer probability table, the conditional probability table, and the contact probability table. The material transfer efficiency table is also created by measuring the virus transmission rate after contact with droplets in a virus experiment laboratory. In the experiment, the synthetic agent created from the acquired data probabilistically performs movement and contact behavior after returning home and reproduces the state in which the virus attached to the hand or belongings, when going out, propagates to objects at home. Next, we examine the risk of a second family member returning home. As a result, virus-attached contacts within around 30 minutes after returning home are widely confirmed around the entrance and kitchen, suggesting the effectiveness of early hand-washing behavior. And the experiment shows that even if the first person returning home disinfects their hands inside the entrance, the virus remains in a part of the entrance, and the virus is spread inside the room by the second person returning home.