Comparison of neck movement smoothness between patients with mechanical neck disorder and healthy volunteers using the spectral entropy method

Purpose

Mechanical neck disorder is one of the most common health issues. No related observations have applied spectral entropy to explore the smoothness of cervical movement. Therefore, the objectives were to ascertain whether the spectral entropy of time-series linear acceleration could extend to estimate the smoothness of cervical movement and compare the characteristics of the smoothness of cervical movement in patients with mechanical neck pain (MND) with healthy volunteers.

Methods

The smoothness of cervical movement during cervical circumduction from 36 subjects (MND: n = 18, asymptomatic: n = 18) was quantified by the spectral entropy of time-series linear acceleration and other speed-dependent parameters, respectively.

Results

Patients with MND showed significantly longer movement time, higher value in the spectral entropy and wider band response in frequency spectrum than healthy volunteers (P = 0.01).

Conclusions

The spectral entropy would be suitable to discriminate the smoothness of cervical movement between patients with MND with healthy volunteers and demonstrated patients with MND had significantly less smooth cervical movement.     

血管内超声指导下冠状动脉左主干介入治疗的护理配合

对42例冠状动脉左主干病变患者在血管内超声检查术（IVUS）与主动脉球囊反搏术（IABP）辅助下行冠状动脉左主干介入诊疗术.结果 42例均植入药物涂层支架,介入手术成功率100%,未发生心脏骤停,左主干内膜撕裂等严重并发症.出院时心功能Ⅰ～Ⅱ级.提出护理人员熟练掌握IVUS及IABP的工作原理及操作方法,熟练护理配合可有效提高介入治疗成功率.     

Auditory tasks for assessment of sensory function and affective prosody in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia patients exhibit impairments in auditory-based social cognition, indicated by deficits in detection of prosody, such as affective prosody and basic pitch perception. However, little is known about the psychometric properties of behavioral tests used to assess these functions. The goal of this paper is to characterize the properties of prosody and pitch perception tasks and to investigate whether they can be shortened. The pitch perception test evaluated is a tone-matching task developed by Javitt and colleagues (J-TMT). The prosody test evaluated is the auditory emotion recognition task developed by Juslin and Laukka (JL-AER). The sample includes 124 schizophrenia patients (SZ) and 131 healthy controls (HC). Properties, including facility and discrimination, of each item were assessed. Effects of item characteristics (e.g., emotion) were also evaluated. Shortened versions of the tests are proposed based on facility, discrimination, and/or ability of item characteristics to discriminate between patients and controls. Test–retest reliability is high for patients and controls for both the original and short forms of the J-TMT and JL-AER. Thus, the original as well as short forms of the J-TMT and JL-AER are suggested for inclusion in clinical trials of social cognitive and perceptual treatments. The development of short forms further increases the utility of these auditory tasks in clinical trials and clinical practice. The large SZ vs. HC differences reported here also highlight the profound nature of auditory deficits and a need for remediation.     

Usefulness of contrast enhanced FLAIR imaging for predicting the severity of meningitis

The aim of this study was to evaluate whether contrast enhanced fluid attenuated inversion recovery (CE-FLAIR) imaging can be used to predict the severity of meningitis based on leptomeningeal enhancement (LE) score and cerebrospinal fluid signal intensity (CSF-SI) on CE-FLAIR. We retrospectively analyzed data collected from 43 consecutive patients admitted to our hospital due to meningitis. Clinical factors including initial Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score, CSF glucose ratio, log CSF protein, log CSF WBC, and prognosis were evaluated. The LE score was semi-quantitatively scored, and we evaluated CSF-SI ratio at the interpeduncular or quadrigerminal cisterns on CE-FLAIR. We evaluated the differences in clinical variables, LE scores and CSF-SI ratios between the recovery and the complication group. We assessed the correlation between clinical variables, LE scores and CSF-SI ratios. The values of log CSF protein, CSF-SI ratio, and LE score were significantly higher in the complication group (p value <0.05). GCS score and CSF glucose ratio were significantly lower in the complication group (p value <0.01). The LE scores had significant negative correlation with GCS scores and CSF glucose ratios (p value <0.001). The LE score was significantly positively correlated with the value of log CSF protein and CSF-SI ratio (p value <0.01). The CSF-SI ratio was negatively correlated with GCS score and CSF glucose ratio (p value <0.01). The CSF-SI ratio was positively correlated with the value of log CSF protein (p value <0.05). Our results suggest that LE score and CSF-SI ratio are well correlated with clinical prognostic factors. We may predict the clinical severity of meningitis by using LE scores and CSF-SI ration on CE-FLAIR imaging.     

Molecular phylogeny of the genus Sticta (lichenized Ascomycota: Lobariaceae) in Colombia

We present a molecular phylogenetic study of the lichen genus Sticta focusing on Colombia, using the ITS fungal barcoding gene for a total of 370 ingroup OTUs, with 322 newly generated sequences. The topology resulting from a maximum likelihood approach does not support current species concepts in Sticta, which use a morphological concept, but in contrast shows that similar morphodemes evolved multiple times independently within the genus. As a consequence, currently applied names such as S. fuliginosa and S. weigelii comprise numerous (up to more than 20) unrelated species-level lineages, which can be distinguished also phenotypically using previously unrecognized characters such as lobe configuration, lobe surface structure, tomentum type, and anatomy of the basal membrane of the cyphellae. We conclude that the genus Sticta contains about four to five times the number of species currently recognized. In Colombia alone, approximately 150 species of Sticta are present.     

鼻咽癌患者淋巴细胞近端着丝粒染色体随体联合频率的分析

本文对60例鼻咽癌患者用银染及非银染方法比较分析了近端着丝粒染色体随体联合的频率(SAs及Ag-AA),发现每细胞平均出现的SAs及Ag-AA分别为0.55和1.29(P<0.01)。D、G组染色体在随体联合中的比例分别为DSAf0.620及0.597,GSAf为0.380及0.403,具有随机性。G显带证实13、14、21号染色体更多地参与随体联合。