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This paper reports four cases of osteosarcoma of the jaw, a rare malignant bone tumor in the oral and maxillofacial region. Two patients were males and two were females. The age at the first visit ranged 55–69 years (average age, 63.8 years). Three and one patients had a tumor in the mandible and the maxilla, respectively. One mandibular patient had a history of radiotherapy for laryngeal cancer. Radiologically, two cases were of the osteolytic type, and two were of the osteosclerotic type. Two cases of the osteolytic type were diagnosed as malignant tumors, while the other two cases of the osteosclerotic type were as benign lesions (e.g., epulis osteoplastica and osteomyelitis). Pathologically, three and one cases were classified as conventional (osteoblastic type) and secondary (radiation-induced) osteosarcomas, respectively. All patients underwent surgical tumor resection without any adjunctive treatments. Consequently, one patient had no recurrence for 14 years after surgical treatment and the other three had local recurrence and/or distant metastasis, resulting in unfavorable outcomes despite further treatments. Osteosarcoma should be included as a differential diagnosis for bone-forming lesions of the jaw. Furthermore, complete surgical resection combined with adjuvant therapies would be necessary to improve the treatment outcome of jaw osteosarcomas.

Immunotherapy with nivolumab for patients with recurrent/metastatic oral squamous cell carcinoma has not been evaluated. Here, we aimed to examine the efficacy, safety, and prognostic factors of nivolumab in these patients.This multicentre retrospective observational study involved patients who received nivolumab between April 2017 and June 2019. The patient characteristics were evaluated for association with progression-free and overall survival. Progression-free and overall survival rates were calculated; parameters that were significant in the univariate analysis were used as explanatory variables. Independent factors for progression-free and overall survival were identified using multivariate analysis.Totally, 143 patients were included. The overall response and disease control rates were 27.3% and 46.2%, respectively. The median, 1-year, and 2-year progression-free survival rates were 2.7 months, 25.4%, and 19.2%, respectively; those for overall survival were 11.2 months, 47.3%, and 33.6%, respectively. The independent factors affecting progression-free survival were performance status and immune-related adverse event occurrence, whereas those affecting overall survival were performance status, target disease, and number of previous lines of systemic cancer therapy. Eight patients reported grade ≥3 immune-related adverse events.Nivolumab was effective for recurrent/metastatic oral squamous cell carcinoma treatment and was well tolerated by patients.

Survivors’ adaptation to a suicide loss is likely influenced by their attitudes toward suicide and their respective sociocultural contexts. Our study aimed to compare suicide attitudes and their association with depressive symptoms and sense of community safety in Japanese and American suicide loss survivors. A total of 193 Japanese survivors and 232 American survivors completed online surveys. The results show that Japanese survivors tended not to consider suicide as an illness or to recognize that others understood their experience but were more likely than American survivors to consider suicide as justifiable. Regression analyses indicated that taking suicide as a right was associated with depressive symptoms. Further, their sense of being understood by others was positively correlated with perceived community safety in both samples, but justifying suicide and considering it to be an illness was positively related to perceived community safety only among Japanese survivors.

Objective This study aimed to identify specific RAS-GAPs involved in RAS activation squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) of the tongue, and to investigate the role of RAS signaling in tongue SCC progression. Subjects and methods We analyzed mutations in K-RAS, H-RAS, and N-RAS genes by PCR-single strand conformational polymorphism (PCR-SSCP), and relative levels of mRNA of three genes encoding RAS-GAPs (RASAL1, NF1, and DAB2IP) by real-time reverse transcriptional-PCR (RT-PCR) in 20 cases of tongue SCCs. To examine if the interaction between RAS-GAPs and phosphorylated ERK1/2 (p-ERK1/2) activated the RAS signaling pathway, we evaluated the expression of p-ERK1/2, a kinase located downstream of RAS, by immunohistochemistry. Finally, the association between p-ERK1/2 overexpression and clinicopathological factors was examined in 45 cases of tongue SCCs. Results No mutations were detected in K-RAS, H-RAS, and N-RAS genes in 20 cases of tongue SCC. The levels of mRNA of RASAL1, NF1 and DAB2IP were downregulated in 80.0 %, 31.6 % and 25.0 %, respectively. There was a statistically significant relationship between RASAL1 downregulation and p-ERK1/2 overexpression (p = 0.014), suggesting that RAS/ERK signaling pathway was controlled by RASAL1 in tongue SCC. Furthermore, we showed that p-ERK1/2 was overexpressed more frequently in advanced-staged tumors than in early-staged ones. Conclusions The findings of the present study suggest that activation of the RAS/ERK signaling pathway, which is triggered by RASAL1 downregulation, is involved in the progression of tongue SCC.

This article presents a new method to synthesize the Cauer-equivalent circuit for inductors that can represent the hysteresis, eddy current, anomalous core losses, dc and ac winding losses as well as inductance. Only the measurement of inductor loss under the sinusoidal excitation is required to synthesize the SPICE loss model. The proposed circuit model can be used to evaluate the loss under arbitrary voltage/current excitations. In the proposed approach, the measured loss is subdivided into the ac and hysteresis losses. Then, the Cauer-equivalent circuit for SPICE simulation is synthesized from the loss model. It is shown that the losses evaluated by the proposed model are in good agreement with the measured results under the condition of the sinusoidal and triangular cases with and without dc bias current.

When two-frame apparent motion stimuli are presented with an appropriate inter-stimulus interval (ISI), motion is perceived in the direction opposite to the actual image shift. Herein, we measured a simple eye movement, ocular following responses (OFRs), in macaque monkeys to examine the ISI reversal effect on oculomotor. Two-frame movies with an ISI induced reversed OFRs. Without ISI, the OFRs to the two-frame movie were induced in the direction of the stimulus shift. However, with ISIs ≥10 ms, OFRs in the direction opposite to the phase shift were observed. This directional reversal persisted for ISIs up to 160 ms; for longer ISIs virtually no ocular response was observed. Furthermore, longer exposure to the initial image (Motion onset delay: MOD) reduced OFRs. We show that these dependences on ISIs/MODs can be explained by the motion energy model. Furthermore, we examined the dependence on ISI reversal using various spatial frequencies. To account for our findings, the optimal frequency of the temporal filters of the energy model must decrease between 0.5 and 1 cycles/°, suggesting that there are at least two channels with different temporal characteristics. These results are consistent with those from humans, suggesting that the temporal filters embedded in human and macaque visual systems are similar. Thus, the macaque monkey is a good animal model for the early visual processing of humans to understand the neural substrates underlying the visual motion detectors that elicit OFRs.

Organic-inorganic lead halide perovskites are promising materials for realization of low-cost and high-efficiency solar cells. Because of the toxicity of lead, Sn-based perovskite materials have been developed as alternatives to enable fabrication of Pb-free perovskite solar cells. However, the solar cell performance of Sn-based perovskite solar cells (Sn-PSCs) remains poor because of their large open-circuit voltage (

Desmoplastic fibroma of bone (DFB), a bone tumor, is considered to be an osseous counterpart of desmoid-type fibromatosis (DF). Herein, we report a case of DFB with CTNNB1 point mutation. The 5-year-old male patient had complained of trismus and pain in the jaw. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed a mass in the left mandible. Radical treatment involved surgical resection. Microscopically, the lesion consisted of a bundle-like proliferation of uniform spindle-shaped cells with abundant collagenous stroma, which resembled DF. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed intranuclear accumulation of β-catenin in the tumor cells. Based on clinical and histologic analysis, we diagnosed the patient as having DFB. We examined the CTNNB1 and APC sequence and found an A-to-G transition at codon 41 of CTNNB1; i.e., Thr was substituted by Ala. Our findings suggest that the dysregulation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is related to the tumorigenesis of some cases of DFB. This hypothesis indicates that there are some cases of DFB in which nuclear positive expression of β-catenin is useful for diagnosis.

Abstract. Background: The sociocultural context shapes attitudes toward suicide. Japanese literary works such as the Hagakure and the Bunraku Sonezaki-Shinju depict suicide as beautiful and honorable. Although suicide acceptance is likely to affect suicide rates and prevention efforts in Japan, studies in this area are limited. Aims: This study aimed to explore suicide acceptance and related factors among Japanese participants. Method: Using an Internet research company, questionnaires were distributed that measured acceptance of suicide, suicide stigma, mental health, an opinion on suicide prevention efforts, and demographic variables. Data from 2,051 participants were analyzed using t tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and hierarchical regression analysis. Results: We found a two-factor model (comprising beautification and justification factors) for the suicide acceptance scale and confirmed the scale's validity and reliability. The results showed significant differences in suicide acceptance by gender, age, educational level, employment status, and bereavement experience. A hierarchical regression analysis model revealed that suicide beautification was negatively related to positive opinion on suicide prevention efforts. Limitations: This study only focused on Japanese participants; therefore, further studies and cross-cultural comparisons are needed. Conclusion: The results revealed that suicide beautification was negatively associated with positive opinion on suicide prevention efforts after controlling for other variables.

Inverse temperature crystallization (ITC) growth of formamidinium tin iodide (FASnI3) is realized using γ-valerolactone (GVL) solvent, which possesses a low Gutmann acceptor number. The high-crysta...

This paper introduces a novel identification method of the magnetization properties of the core material for an inductor from measured inductance data. The proposed method allows us to obtain the magnetic hysteresis characteristics without a special measurement instrument for material $B - H$ properties. The proposed method determines the parameters included in the distribution function for the Preisach model from the measured $L - I$ characteristics. It is shown that the identified initial magnetization curve and the minor loops are in good agreement with the original $B - H$ curves. The uniqueness for the identification problem is numerically verified.

Two successive image frames presented with a blank inter-stimulus interval (ISI) induce reversals of perceived motion in humans. This illusory effect is a manifestation of the temporal properties of image filters embedded in the visual processing pathway. In the present study, ISI experiments were performed to identify the temporal characteristics of vision underlying optokinetic responses (OKRs) in mice. These responses are thought to be mediated by subcortical visual processing. OKRs of C57BL/6 J mice, induced by a 1/4-wavelength shift of a square-wave grating presented with and without an ISI were recorded. When a 1/4-wavelength shift was presented without, or with shorter ISIs (≤106.7 ms), OKRs were induced in the direction of the shift, with progressively decreasing amplitude as the ISI increased. However, when ISIs were 213.3 ms or longer, OKR direction reversed. Similar dependence on ISIs was also obtained using a sinusoidal grating. We subsequently quantitatively estimated temporal filters based on the ISI effects. We found that filters with biphasic impulse response functions could reproduce the ISI and temporal frequency dependence of the mouse OKR. Comparison with human psychophysics and behaviors suggests that mouse vision has more sluggish response dynamics to light signals than that of humans.

When two-frame apparent motion stimuli are presented with an appropriate inter-stimulus interval (ISI), motion is perceived in the direction opposite to the actual image shift. Herein, we measured a simple eye movement, ocular following responses (OFRs), in macaque monkeys to examine the ISI reversal effect on oculomotor. Two-frame movies with an ISI induced reversed OFRs. Without ISI, the OFRs to the two-frame movie were induced in the direction of the stimulus shift. However, with ISIs ≥10 ms, OFRs in the direction opposite to the phase shift were observed. This directional reversal persisted for ISIs up to 160 ms; for longer ISIs virtually no ocular response was observed. Furthermore, longer exposure to the initial image (Motion onset delay: MOD) reduced OFRs. We show that these dependences on ISIs/MODs can be explained by the motion energy model. Furthermore, we examined the dependence on ISI reversal using various spatial frequencies. To account for our findings, the optimal frequency of the temporal filters of the energy model must decrease between 0.5 and 1 cycles/°, suggesting that there are at least two channels with different temporal characteristics. These results are consistent with those from humans, suggesting that the temporal filters embedded in human and macaque visual systems are similar. Thus, the macaque monkey is a good animal model for the early visual processing of humans to understand the neural substrates underlying the visual motion detectors that elicit OFRs.