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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Appl. Math. Stat.
Sec. Dynamical Systems
Volume 10 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fams.2024.1468556

On Disease and Healing: A Theoretical Sketch

Provisionally accepted
Maria Mannone Maria Mannone 1,2*Peppino Fazio Peppino Fazio 3Patrizia Ribino Patrizia Ribino 1Norbert Marwan Norbert Marwan 2,4
  • 1 National Research Council (CNR), Roma, Italy
  • 2 Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany
  • 3 Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Veneto, Italy
  • 4 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The onset and progression of a neurological disease can often be explained in terms of brain-network alteration. They can be formalized as the action of an operator representing the disease, the so-called K-operator, acting on the network. The healing process can thus be seen as the inverse of the disease mechanism. However, perfect healing is often impossible to achieve. Here, we formalize the ideal healing in terms of perturbative variation of the possible partial healing. The modeling and analytical strategy is based on techniques from theoretical physics, with the language of matrix operators. In addition, Using the language of category theory, we also formalize the progressive abstraction from the reality of diseased patients to the definition of a disease and the comparison between different diseases as a natural transformation between colimits. This theoretical presentation can provide a new, interdisciplinary perspective on neurological investigation and possibly foster new theoretical-experimental developments.

    Keywords: complex networks, Neurodegenerative Diseases, Alzheimer, Parkison, operator algebra

    Received: 22 Jul 2024; Accepted: 27 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Mannone, Fazio, Ribino and Marwan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Maria Mannone, National Research Council (CNR), Roma, Italy

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