Integration of Western Medicine and Eastern Medicine / 日本東洋医学雑誌

Recently, eastern medicine is reconsidered favorably. For example, most of Kampo-drugs are covered by health insurance and the essence of the eastern medicine is now included in the curriculum of medical education program. However, eastern medicine can not yet get rid of “placebo” effects, and should be re-evaluated through randomized double blind controlled studies. It is absolutely important to know merits and demerits of Western and Eastern medicine and to apply to the patients integrative medicine.

Therapeutic Strategies in Huntington's Disease

This article provides an overview of the therapeutic strategies, from ordinary classical drugs to the modern molecular strategy at experimental level, for Huntington's disease. The disease is characterized by choreic movements, psychiatric disorders, striatal atrophy with selective small neuronal loss, and autosomal dominant inheritance. The genetic abnormality is CAG expansion in huntingtin gene. Mutant huntingtin with abnormally long glutamine stretch aggregates and forms intranuclear inclusions. In this review, I summarize the results of previous trials from the following aspects; 1. symptomatic/palliative therapies including drugs, stereotaxic surgery and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, 2. anti-degenerative therapies including anti-excitotoxicity, reversal of mitochondrial dysfunction and anti-apoptosis, 3. restorative/reparative therapies including neural trophic factors and tissue or stem cell transplantation, and 4. molecular targets in specific and radical therapies including inhibition of truncation of huntingtin, inhibition of aggregate formation, normalization of transcriptional dysregulation, enhancement of autophagic clearance of mutant huntingtin, and specific inhibition of huntingtin expression by sRNAi. Although the strategies mentioned in the latter two categories are mostly at laboratory level at present, we are pleased that one can discuss such "therapeutic strategies", a matter absolutely impossible before the causal gene of Huntington's disease was identified more than 10 years ago. It is also true, however, that some of the "therapeutic strategies" mentioned here would be found difficult to implement and abandoned in the future.

Trinucleotide Repeat Polymorphisms of SBMA Locus in Koreans Chinese, Japanese and Caucasoids / 체질인류학회지

SBMA (Spinal bulbar muscular atrophy) is a neurodegenerative disease and the extension of the triplet repeat DNA tracks on this SBMA locus is related with the onset of the genetic disease. In this study we investigated the PCR -based STRs (Short Tandem Repeats) polymorphisms for the SBMA locus in healthy South Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and Caucasoids. As the result, we could detect the significant differences among the four populations. And the allele distribution of each population was single modal. The CAG alleles of South Koreans and Chinese showed very similar distributions each other, but the distribution of CAG alleles in Japanese population was clsoer to the one of Caucasoids. The T test after doing the F test also detected the significant difference reflecting this similarity between Japanese and Caucasoids.