ABSTRACT
Background: School 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. Methods: This 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. Discussion: For 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.
Subject(s)
Mindfulness , Yoga , Adolescent , Anxiety/therapy , Child , Humans , Mindfulness/methods , Multicenter Studies as Topic , Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic , Schools , Yoga/psychologyABSTRACT
Genetic polymorphism has been reported in the 3'-untranslated region (3'-UTR) of the human dopamine transporter (DAT) gene and the variable number of tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism has been proposed to be associated with normal personal traits or psychoneurological disorders. To assess the variation of this region in nonhuman primates, we amplified the VNTR regions by the polymerase chain reaction in several species of apes and monkeys, and determined their DNA sequences. The 3'-UTR of the chimpanzee DAT gene was also polymorphic and alleles with one or two unit(s) of a 40 bp sequence were found, while all gorillas and orangutans examined had only 2-repeat allele. Cynomolgus macaques and African green monkeys shared 11- or 12-repeat and 5-repeat alleles, respectively. By performing transient transfection assay, we found that most of the VNTR sequences of nonhuman primates exhibited higher activities on reporter gene assay as compared to those of human 9-, 10- and 11-repeat sequences.
