Papers

New Paper: Supporting municipalities by community organizing intervention reduced the three-year mortality risk for older male residents by 0.92 times.(Assitant Professor Maho Haseda)

Assistant Professor Maho Haseda’s paper has been published in the Health & Place.

Haseda M, Takagi D, Stickley A, Kondo K, & Kondo N. (2022). Effectiveness of a community organizing intervention on mortality and its equity among older residents in Japan: A JAGES quasi-experimental study. Health & place, 74, 102764.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102764

Abstract
Interventions that involve key aspects of community organizing, such as quantitative community assessments and organizational partnership support for the community, may promote residents’ health. We evaluated the effectiveness of this form of intervention on mortality and its variability across individual-level household equivalized income tertiles, comparing 52,858 residents aged 65 and above in 12 intervention municipalities to 39,006 residents in nine control municipalities in Japan. During 1,166 days of follow-up, the adjusted hazard ratio for cumulative mortality among men in the intervention municipalities was 0.92 (95% confidence interval: 0.86, 0.99) compared to those in the control group, with similar results being observed across all income levels. Active utilization of data to evaluate communities and building intersectoral partnerships might lower older male residents’ mortality risk, regardless of their income status.

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New Paper: Community reciprocity was associated with 10% less risk of depression during the COVID-19 pandemic(Assistant Professor Koryu Sato)

Assistant Professor Koryu Sato’s paper has been published in the Health & Place.

Sato, K., Kondo, N., Kondo, K. Pre-pandemic individual- and community-level social capital and depressive symptoms during COVID-19: A longitudinal study of Japanese older adults in 2019-21. Health & Place, 74; 102772 (2022).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102772

Abstract
During a pandemic, it is important to know whether social capital can mitigate the risk of mental disorders, given the restrictions on social interactions. However, evidence using longitudinal data is scarce. This study examined the association between pre-pandemic social capital and depressive symptoms during COVID-19 among older adults. We used longitudinal data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study (JAGES), including 8291 participants aged 65 or older who were physically and cognitively independent and not depressed at baseline. We conducted baseline and follow-up mail surveys in ten municipalities in Japan from November 2019 to January 2020 (pre-pandemic period) and from November 2020 to February 2021 (pandemic period), respectively. We measured depressive symptoms using the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale. Social capital was measured with three validated subscales, namely, civic participation, social cohesion, and reciprocity. We performed a multilevel logistic regression analysis to examine the association. A total of 1089 (13.1%) participants newly developed depressive symptoms during the pandemic. The logistic regression showed that pre-pandemic individual-level social cohesion (odds ratio = 0.79, 95% confidence interval: 0.73 to 0.86) and reciprocity (0.89, 0.82 to 0.96) and community-level reciprocity (0.93, 0.88 to 0.98) were negatively associated with the odds of depressive symptoms. Even after adjusting for declines in social capital during the pandemic, the observed associations of pre-pandemic social capital remained. Fostering social cohesion and reciprocity may increase resilience to mental disorders during a pandemic of infectious disease.

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New paper: Effectiveness of a community organizing intervention on mortality and its equity among older residents in Japan: A JAGES quasi-experimental study. (Haseda M)

Our new paper has been published in the Health Place.

Haseda M, Takagi D, Stickley A, Kondo K, Kondo N. Effectiveness of a community organizing intervention on mortality and its equity among older residents in Japan: A JAGES quasi-experimental study. Health Place. 2022 Feb 9;74:102764. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102764. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35151182.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35151182/

New paper: Ikigai and subsequent health and wellbeing among Japanese older adults: Longitudinal outcome-wide analysis. (Okuzono SS)

Our new paper has been published in the Lancet Reg Health West Pac.

Okuzono SS, Shiba K, Kim ES, Shirai K, Kondo N, Fujiwara T, Kondo K, Lomas T, Trudel-Fitzgerald C, Kawachi I, VanderWeele TJ. Ikigai and subsequent health and wellbeing among Japanese older adults: Longitudinal outcome-wide analysis. Lancet Reg Health West Pac. 2022 Feb 3;21:100391. doi: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2022.100391. PMID: 35141667; PMCID: PMC8814687.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35141667/

New paper: Comparison of three indices of relative income deprivation in predicting health status (Gero K)

Our new paper has been published in the Soc Sci Med.

Gero K, Yazawa A, Kondo N, Hanazato M, Kondo K, Kawachi I. Comparison of three indices of relative income deprivation in predicting health status. Soc Sci Med. 2022 Feb;294:114722. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114722. Epub 2022 Jan 13. PMID: 35065345.

New paper: Geographical socioeconomic inequalities in healthy life expectancy in Japan, 2010-2014: An ecological study

We have published a paper from The Lancet Regional Health-Western Pacific.

Kataoka A, Fukui K, Sato T, Kikuchi H, Inoue S, Kondo N, Nakaya T, Ito Y. Geographical socioeconomic inequalities in healthy life expectancy in Japan, 2010-2014: An ecological study. Lancet Reg Health West Pac. 2021 Jul 15;14:100204. doi: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2021.100204. PMID: 34527999; PMCID: PMC8355904.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(21)00113-9/fulltext

New paper: Expectations and problems of the healthcare management support program for public assistance recipients

A new paper from Nihon Koshu Eisei Zasshi.

Ueno K, Nishioka D, Kondo N. Expectations and problems of the healthcare management support program for public assistance recipients. Nihon Koshu Eisei Zasshi. 2021 Oct 29. Japanese. doi: 10.11236/jph.21-070. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34719539.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jph/advpub/0/advpub_21-070/_article/-char/ja/

New paper: A mixed methods study on specifying the inhibitory factors to access medical services and effective support for foreign residents living in Japan

A new paper has been published from Journal of International Health.

Morita Naomi, Kanamori Mariko, Nochi Masahiro, and Kondo Naoki. A mixed methods study on specifying the inhibitory factors to access medical services and effective support for foreign residents living in Japan. Kokusai Hoken Iryo (Journal of International Health) 36(3), 107-121, 2021
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jaih/36/3/36_107/_article/-char/ja/

New paper: Dementia risks identified by vocal features via telephone conversations: A novel machine learning prediction model

We published a new paper from PLoS One.

Shimoda A, Li Y, Hayashi H, Kondo N. Dementia risks identified by vocal features via telephone conversations: A novel machine learning prediction model. PLoS One. 2021 Jul 14;16(7):e0253988. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0253988. PMID: 34260593.

Abstract

Due to difficulty in early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) related to cost and differentiated capability, it is necessary to identify low-cost, accessible, and reliable tools for identifying AD risk in the preclinical stage. We hypothesized that cognitive ability, as expressed in the vocal features in daily conversation, is associated with AD progression. Thus, we have developed a novel machine learning prediction model to identify AD risk by using the rich voice data collected from daily conversations, and evaluated its predictive performance in comparison with a classification method based on the Japanese version of the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS-J). We used 1,465 audio data files from 99 Healthy controls (HC) and 151 audio data files recorded from 24 AD patients derived from a dementia prevention program conducted by Hachioji City, Tokyo, between March and May 2020. After extracting vocal features from each audio file, we developed machine-learning models based on extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), random forest (RF), and logistic regression (LR), using each audio file as one observation. We evaluated the predictive performance of the developed models by describing the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, calculating the areas under the curve (AUCs), sensitivity, and specificity. Further, we conducted classifications by considering each participant as one observation, computing the average of their audio files’ predictive value, and making comparisons with the predictive performance of the TICS-J based questionnaire. Of 1,616 audio files in total, 1,308 (81.0%) were randomly allocated to the training data and 308 (19.1%) to the validation data. For audio file-based prediction, the AUCs for XGboost, RF, and LR were 0.863 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.794-0.931), 0.882 (95% CI: 0.840-0.924), and 0.893 (95%CI: 0.832-0.954), respectively. For participant-based prediction, the AUC for XGboost, RF, LR, and TICS-J were 1.000 (95%CI: 1.000-1.000), 1.000 (95%CI: 1.000-1.000), 0.972 (95%CI: 0.918-1.000) and 0.917 (95%CI: 0.918-1.000), respectively. There was difference in predictive accuracy of XGBoost and TICS-J with almost approached significance (p = 0.065). Our novel prediction model using the vocal features of daily conversations demonstrated the potential to be useful for the AD risk assessment.

Article: Income Inequality Becomes Health Inequality (Public Assistance Research Quarterly)

Naoki Kondo and Daisuke Nishioka (visiting researcher) have published an article in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Public Assistance Research.

Click here for the table of contents of the Quarterly Journal of Public Assistance Research No. 261 (in Japanese).
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Daisuke Nishioka will continue to write a series of articles.

Special Feature: Income Inequality Becomes Health Inequality
Why Health Care Assistance is Necessary: A Perspective from the Concept of Capital
Naoki Kondo, Graduate School of Kyoto University

Toward Effective Implementation of Health Management Support Program for Protected Persons
Daisuke Nishioka, Osaka Medical College Graduate School of Medicine

Reference
The Power of Accompaniment: A Survey Study on the Actual Conditions of Medical Service Use by the Needy and the Effectiveness of Accompaniment Support for Medical Consultations（PDF, in Japanese)

Daisuke Nishioka’s website is here.