This clipart is from the CIA World Factbook website. For a relatively small country, Japan has produced great scientists, including Dr. Hayashi. Hayashi found a disturbance in glucose metabolism in schizophrenia.
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This clipart from a century old version of Gray's Anatomy shows the dentate gyrus. The Japanese workers Nishimura et al (2000) reported "carbohydrate deposits deteted by histochemical methods in the molecular layer of the dentate gyrus in the hippocampal formation of patients with schizophrenia, Down's syndrome and dementia, and aged person". This not only tells us what is happening, but it also tells us where it is happening. This confirms Hayashi as well as work done in the Lafayette Clinic in Detroit. These carbohydrate deposits signify an error in glucose metabolism in the brain in schizophrenia. As can be seen from the diagram, the error is near the midline in the basal forebrain. The same region has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
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The Japanese workers Goto et al of Tokyo reported "neurotoxic effects" of dimethoxyphenylethylamine, a substance found only in schizophrenics and in the peyote cactus. The substance was put in culture with "dopaminergic neurons". The substance inhibited "mitochondrial respiration". This report appeared in 1997 in Brain Research, a medical journal.
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Unfortunately I was not able to obtain any images of Japanese scientists thus far. Therefore I decided to include an old photograph of the brain and simply describe Japanese research with text. Brilliant research on schizophrenia has been done in Japan. The results have been consistently positive. Japanese workers have demonstrated that schizophrenia is organic, and that it is caused by a toxic factor. This toxic factor is found in the urine.
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Shown here is another clipart from Anatomical Foundations of Neuroscience, a brilliant website which I highly recommend. It shows the various types of neurons. The Japanese neuropathologists Miyakawa and Tatetsu found various abnormalities in the neurons in schizophrenia. Their work was confirmed by the brilliant Russian neuropathologist Orlovskaya. I have searched the Internet for a picture of her, but I was unable to find one.
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This clipart is from the CIA's World Factbook website. The Japanese had an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse. Because of this experiments were done on rats. Methamphetamine intoxication resembles schizophrenia. The theory is that a substance similar to methamphetamine, but made in the body, causes schizophrenia. Catecholamines resemble methamphetamine. Therefore an abnormal catecholamine metabolite, probably methylated, has been suspected.
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THis cover is from Amazon.com. The book is edited by Tanaka et al. THis book on dementia also features contributions by two brilliant Canadian neuroscientist, Patrick and Edith McGeer. The McGeers became famous in the Fifties for reports about chromatographic abnormalities in schizophrenia. They studied the urine of schizophrenics.
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Shown here are various types of glia. The clipart is from an educational website. The Japanese scientists Miyakawa and Tatetsu used the electron microscope to find ultrastructural brain alterations in schizophrenia. Granules were found which may have represented glycogen deposits. Abnormalities were seen in the myelin sheaths. The myelin sheath represents the cell membrane of part of the neuron.
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This is a 19th century drawing of the brain. Neither Miyakawa nor Tatetsu won the Nobel Prize, but maybe they should have. Japanese work seems to have been neglected by the Nobel Prize committee, perhaps because Japan is so far away from Sweden, where the committee resides. Also there is a language barrier. Not all Japanese work has been in neuropathology. Mato and Yokoo have made biochemical contributions. They found an unknown flourescent substance in the blood of schizophrenics. SInce dopamine is flourescent, it could be similar to dopamine.
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Shown here is Dr. Noboru Hozumi, director of the Hozumi Clinic in Tokyo. Dr. Hozumi believes in psychotherapy.
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