本書は、井上茂博士に直接、間接の教えを受けた者たちが、その学恩に些かなりとも報いるべく執筆した論文集である。.

IntroductionDeep brain stimulation is an effective treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease with the targeting bilateral subthalamic nucleus or globus pallidus internus. So far, detailed studies on the efficacy of unilateral STN-DBS for motor symptoms have been reported, but few studies have been conducted on unilateral GPi-DBS.Materials and MethodsSeventeen patients with Parkinson’s disease who underwent unilateral GPi-DBS were selected. We conducted comparison analyses between scores obtained 6–42 months pre- and postoperatively using the following measurement tools: the Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson’s (...) Disease Rating Scale part III, the Hoehn and Yahr stage, the presence/absence of dyskinesia, Mini-Mental State Examination, Frontal Assessment Battery, Geriatric Depression Scale, levodopa equivalent dose, and cerebral blood flow by single photon emission computed tomography. Patient backgrounds were compared between four cohorts with favorable and unfavorable postoperative outcome.ResultsSignificant improvement was observed postoperatively in the following: total MDS-UPDRS Part III scores during the off period, contralateral scores, ipsilateral scores, and axial scores. Similarly, the Hoehn and Yahr stages during the off period, and GDS also showed significant decrease. In contrast, LED, MMSE, and FAB remained unchanged while the number of patients who scored positive for dyskinesia decreased by 40%. Abnormal cerebral blood flow preoperatively seen in the cerebral cortex had normalized in the total score-based good responder cohort. In the ipsilateral score-based good responder cohort, cerebral blood flow increased in the contralateral frontal lobe including in the premotor cortex, contralateral to the DBS. Compared to the poor responders, postoperative good responders demonstrated significantly higher preoperative MMSE scores.DiscussionUnilateral GPi-DBS therapy was effective in improving contralateral, ipsilateral, and axial motor symptoms of patients with advanced PD; in particular, it was found to be especially beneficial in PwPD whose cognitive function was unimpaired; the treatment efficacy rivaled that of bilateral counterparts up till at least 6 months postoperatively. Finally, normalization of preoperative abnormalities in cerebral blood flow and increased cerebral blood flow in the contralateral frontal lobe indicated the beneficial potential of this therapy on ipsilateral motor symptoms. (shrink)

According to Bikas Chakrabarti (2005, p. 225), the term econophysics was neologized in 1995 at the second Statphys-Kolkata conference in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India by the physicist H. Eugene Stanley, who was also the first to use it in print (Stanley, 1996). Mantegna and Stanley (2000, pp. viii-ix) define “the multidisciplinary field of econophysics” as “a neologism that denotes the activities of physicists who are working on economics problems to test a variety of new conceptual approaches deriving from the physical (...) sciences.” The list of such problems has included distributions of returns in financial markets (Mantegna, 1991; Levy and Solomon, 1997; Bouchaud and Cont, 1998; Gopakrishnan, Plerou, Amaral, Meyer, and Stanley, 1999; Sornette and Johansen, 2001; Farmer and Joshi, 2004) the distribution of income and wealth (Drăgulescu and Yakovenko, 2001; Bouchaud and Mézard, 2000; Chatterjee, Yarlagadda, and Charkrabarti, 2005), the distribution of economic shocks and growth rate variations (Bak, Chen, Scheinkman, and Woodford, 1993; Canning, Amaral, Lee, Meyer, and Stanley, 1998), the distribution of firm sizes and growth rates (Stanley, Amaral, Buldyrev, Havlin, Leschhorn, Maass, Salinger, and Stanley, 1996; Takayasu and Okuyama, 1998; Botazzi and Secchi, 2003), the distribution of city sizes (Rosser, 1994; Gabaix, 1999), and the distribution of scientific discoveries (Plerou, Amaral, Gopakrishnan, Meyer, and Stanley, 1999; Sornette 1 and Zajdenweber, 1999), among other problems, all of which are seen at times not to follow normal or Gaussian patterns that can be described fully by mean and variance. The main sources of conceptual approaches from physics used by the econophysicists have been from models of statistical mechanics (Spitzer, 1971), geophysical models of earthquakes (Sornette, 2003), and “sandpile” models of avalanches, the latter involving self-organized criticality (Bak, 1996). An early physicist to assert the essential identity of statistical methods used in physics and the social sciences was Majorana (1942). A common theme among those who identify themselves as econophysicists is that standard economic theory has been inadequate or insufficient to explain the non-Gaussian distributions empirically observed for various of these phenomena, such as “excessive” skewness and leptokurtotic “fat tails” (McCauley, 2004).. (shrink)