Comparison of mental cognitive function of A‐bomb survivors and non‐A‐bomb survivors in Nagasaki
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1945, an atomic bomb (A-bomb) was dropped on Nagasaki City, killing an estimated 74 000 citizens and injuring another 75 000. About 40 449 A-bomb survivors suffering from symptoms of radiation exposure currently live in Nagasaki Prefecture. As of March 2018, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare reported that the mean age of A-bomb survivors in Japan was 82.06 years. In 2015–2016, we investigated the prevalence of cognitive and psychiatric symptoms among A-bomb survivors in Nagasaki City. We conducted face-to-face surveys with 145 A-bomb survivors and 70 non-A-bomb survivors who agreed to participate. We have protected the privacy of subjects and this survey followed the Declaration of Helsinki (2013, Brazil). The protocol of this survey was conducted with the approval of the Ethics Committee of Nagasaki University. All participants gave informed consent and their anonymity has been preserved. The mean age of participants was 77.5 years. In the first-stage survey, the Japanese version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment function test (MoCA-J)1 was used to assess each participant's cognitive function. The result showed that 59% and 67% of participants in the A-bomb and non-A-bomb groups, respectively, did not exceed the cut-off value of 26 on the MoCA-J. No significant difference in MoCA-J score was found between the two groups (χ2-test; P = 0.23). In addition, the odds ratio (OR) for a low MoCA-J score (<26) was 0.69 times higher for the A-bomb group than for the non-A-bomb group, but this difference was not significant (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.38–1.26). In addition, the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) was used to evaluate each participant's general psychiatric symptoms. The results showed that 17% and 8.6% of participants in the A-bomb and non-A-bomb groups, respectively, exceeded the GHQ-12 cut-off value. However, the difference between the two groups was not significant (χ2- test; P = 0.11). The OR for a high GHQ-12 score (≥4) was 2.1 times higher for the A-bomb group than for the non-A-bomb group, but this difference was not significant (95%CI, 0.82–5.44). Next, a second-stage survey was conducted on the participants with a GHQ-12 score ≥ 4 and/or a MoCA-J score < 26. In the second-stage survey, the OR for the appearance of dementia were determined based on Mini-Mental State Examination scores. Overall, 12.3% and 21.4% of the participants in the A-bomb and non-A-bomb groups, respectively, showed possible dementia (mean Mini-Mental State Examination score < 24). Although the OR for the A-bomb group was 0.51 times higher than that for the non-A-bomb group, the difference was not significant (95%CI, 0.15–1.70). No definite conclusions have been reached regarding the relationship between traumatic stress and dementia onset, as several previous studies have reported mixed findings.2, 3 On the other hand, it has been reported that no relationship exists between radiation exposure and dementia onset in A-bomb survivors in Hiroshima.4 In the present survey, no significant difference in the frequency of dementia occurrence was found between A-bomb and non-A-bomb survivors. However, two main limitations should be noted. First, it is impossible to disentangle the full effects of other types of life events and disaster-related stress in the participants’ lives, although we did attempt to resolve this issue to some extent by recruiting mainly individuals who had been living in almost the same areas. Second, in this survey we targeted only elderly people living at home. Therefore, further research involving A-bomb survivors living in senior homes and elderly hospitals is needed. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".