5th Annual Meeting of Movement Disorder Society of Japan

October 6-8, 2011
Tokyo, Japan

Contributed by Ryosuke Takahashi and Yoshikazu Ugawa

The Movement Disorder Society of Japan (MDSJ) has been established in 2001 and became an affiliated member of MDS in 2009. MDSJ has currently 694 regular members, consisting of neurologists, neurosurgeons and other healthcare professionals. The current President is Professor Sadako Kuno at Kyoto Shijo Hospital and the President-elect, Professor Fumihito Yoshii at Tokai University, will assume office from November, 2011.

The fifth annual meeting of MDSJ has been held at Shinagawa Prince Hotel in Tokyo from October 6-8, 2011. The organizing committee, chaired by Dr. Fusako Yokochi at Tokyo Metropolitan Neurological Hospital, designed the scientific program of the meeting as follows. Opening seminars featured the etiopathogenesis, motor complications and cholinergic dysfunction of Parkinson's disease (PD), atypical parkinsonisms, Tourette syndromes, hereditary dystonia-parkinsonism and hereditary spinocerebellar ataxias.

Symposia highlighted the neural mechanisms and pathophysiology of olfaction, dementia with Lewy bodies and pathophysiology and treatment of dystonia. In video dinner session, we had 14 short talks on various interesting movement disorders for three hours.

In controversy sessions, whether PD is a homogenous disease, whether DLB pathology descends from the cortex to brainstem, and whether levodopa is effective for the life of PD patients were debated. We had 41 domestic invited speakers and 157 posters. There were 664 participants over three days. The next annual meeting will be held in Kyoto from October 11-13, 2012. We plan to make educational lecture sessions using MDS Basic Movement Disorders Educational Course slides for the next annual meeting.