Nobukatsu Sawamoto

Although behavioral studies suggest that pain distress may alter the perception of somatic stimulation, neural correlates underlying such alteration remain to be clarified. The present study was aimed to test the hypothesis that expectation of pain might amplify brain responses to somatosensory stimulation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the region including parietal operculum and posterior insula (PO/PI), both of which may play roles in regulating pain-dependent behavior. We compared

Idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) is often accompanied by a pattern of executive deficits similar to those found in patients with frontal lobe lesions. We investigated whether such cognitive deficits are attributable to frontal lobe dysfunction as a direct consequence of impaired mesocortical dopaminergic transmission or an indirect consequence of impaired nigrostriatal dopaminergic function. For this purpose, changes in synaptic dopamine levels during task performance were monitored using a m

Parkinson's disease is caused by the loss of dopamine neurons, causing motor symptoms. Initial cell therapies using fetal tissues showed promise but had complications and ethical concerns^1-5. Pluripotent stem (PS) cells emerged as a promising alternative for developing safe and effective treatments⁶. In this phase I/II trial at Kyoto University Hospital, seven patients (ages 50-69) received bilateral transplantation of dopaminergic progenitors derived from induced PS (iPS)

Parkinson's disease (PD) is attributable primarily to depletion of dopamine in the basal ganglia, but the full effects of this depletion are unknown. It is well known that PD involves motor slowing, and although it is not easy to distinguish between the motor and cognitive components of behavior, clinical observations suggest that cognitive processing may also be compromised. However, it remains unclear whether such cognitive involvement exists, and if so, to what extent. Previous studies of cog

Although the present study chose a liberal threshold and needs subsequent confirmation, the findings suggest that striatal disruption resulting in abnormal processing in the corticobasal ganglia circuit may contribute to cognitive slowing in Parkinson disease, as is the case in motor slowing.

We propose striatal dopaminergic terminal loss measured using ¹²³ I-ioflupane SPECT and nigral dopamine neuron loss assessed with NM-MRI as early stage and advanced stage motor impairment biomarkers, respectively. ANN NEUROL 2022;92:110-121.