%0 Journal Article
%T Functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies in children
%A Shinichiro Nagamitsu
%A Yushiro Yamashita
%A Hidetaka Tanaka
%A Toyojiro Matsuishi
%J BioPsychoSocial Medicine
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1751-0759-6-7
%X The medical management and treatment of children with psychosomatic, behavioral, and psychiatric disorders have gained recent attention among pediatricians because of the increased number of such patients visiting outpatient clinics. According to a nationwide epidemiological survey in Japan, 5.8% of all children who visited an outpatient pediatric clinic on a given day were considered to have a psychosomatic or psychosocial disorder [1]. As most pediatricians are not accustomed to examining these children, the Japanese Society of Psychosomatic Pediatrics has published clinical practice guidelines, which provide recommendations for the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of pediatric psychosomatic disorders in primary care settings [2]. However, patient-reported outcome measurements may be required to establish clear evidence-based assessment of the effectiveness of these guidelines. Furthermore, better scientific understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying these disorders would highlight the significant associations between physical symptoms and the mind.Developmental cognitive neuroscience in children is a rapidly growing research field that seeks to understand how the development of a child's brain is involved in the growth of the child's mind. In particular, advances in functional neuroimaging have revealed how localized cortical activity may be associated with behavioral responses during early human development and the impaired neural substrates in behavioral and cognitive dysfunction observed in child psychosomatic or psychiatric disorders. Over the past 20 years, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology has also greatly enhanced our understanding of developmental cognitive function in working memory and attention [3-5], and has revealed aberrant neural activation in adults with cognitive dysfunction such as depression, schizophrenia, and eating disorders [6,7]. This functional neuroimaging technique has also been applied to the unders
%K Development
%K Children
%K Cognitive neuroscience
%K Near-infrared spectroscopy
%U http://www.bpsmedicine.com/content/6/1/7