JOURNAL OF THE KYORIN MEDICAL SOCIETY

Presence of a birth order factor in the aetiology of schizophrenia, maladjustment, alcoholism, asthma etc., has been indicated by many psychiatrists, psychologists, and other investigators. Reviewing the previous reports, however, they had set about their investigations without strict design and then most statistical procedures by which they had attempted to analyse the effect of birth order, erred in determination of the universe, sampling and statistical inference. In the former papers, author criticized their mistakes from the view-points of systematic error, χ^2-criterion and analysis of variance, and in this report, estimates the decline of reliability about the information owing to the loose design of investigation by Student's t-test and analysis of variance.

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This is an over twenty-years follow-up report of a hospitalized "autistic child" who initially showed his abnormal behaviorsat his five years-old. Through his clinical obsevations mental retardation and organic brain syndrom are neglected, and nosological understanding, he has been an early infantile autism by L. Kanner. This case report is understood interesting from following points of view : having various abnormal behaviors, such as fundamentally extreme autistic aloneness and maintanance of sameness, and also partial but good intellectual development.

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As is generally known, sudden death of epileptics results from status epilepticus, supervening accidents or concomitant natural diseases. There are, however, unexpected epilepsy fatalities, for which no satisfactory explanations are found clinically as well as pathologically. Our case, 33-year-old female, had epileptic convulsions for about 7 years, with the frequency of 2 to 3 times a year. Her last seizure, which was witnessed by her husband, was rather milder than the previous ones. Moreover, complete gross and microscopic autopsy revealed no lethal anatomic lesion. As possible causes of this incident, severe autonomic nervous dysfunction, or acute disruptions of cardiac or respiratory functions in brain stem or both are suspected in the similar cases reported in the literature. It was suggested that various non-lethal abnormalities or changes might be involved in prompting the usual seizures to lethal. Although this facet of epilepsy mortality has received scant clinical attention, further investigation of factors related or concomitant to seisure will hopefully clarify the mechanism (s) of such a mysterious death.

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In the previous paper, it was shown that a polysaccharide extract of bamboo grass inhibits the growth of Ehrlich carcinoma transplanted intraperiton-gelfiltraeally into mice, such as the polysaccharide has the direct cytocidal against tumor cells (YAMAMOTO et al. : Journal of the Kyorin Medical Society 2 : 73-84 1971). The present study investigated the antitumor effect of polysaccharide on ascites and solid tumor, further, the the toxicity and antigenicity in vivo. The purified polysaccharide obtained by dialysis against distilled water and tion on Sephadex G-50 from the crude extract showed a strong antitumor effect action on Ehrlich ascites tumor in ddy mice when 2mg/mouse was injected i.p. twice a day for 2 days from 6hr after tumor transplantation. However, the polysaccharide was found to markedly inhibit the growth of Ehrlich solid tumor transplanted subcutaneously in mice when they were pretreated with a dose of 2mg/mouse for 5 days. On the other hand, when a various amounts of purified polysaccharide was added into the medium (RPMI-1640) for cell culture of Ehrlich ascites tumor cells and Yoshida sarcoma cells to examine a direct cytocidal effect on tumor cells in vitro, the growth of these cells were not inhibited by the polysac charide of a dose of 200-400μg/ml. The polysaccharide did not show the toxicity and was not found to be antigenic substance against ddy mice. When the polysaccharide was hydrolysed by acid, the antitumor effect of hydrolysate was markedly decreased in vivo.

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