We undertook a neurophysiological investigation of the responses of low-threshold mechanoreceptors in the human finger pad to surfaces of differing softness. Unitary recordings were made from 26 slowly adapting type I (SAI), 17 fast-adapting type I (FAI), and 9 slowly adapting type II (SAII) afferents via tungsten microelectrodes inserted into the median nerve at the wrist. A servo-controlled s...

QUESTIONS UNDER STUDY In this work we wanted to evaluate the effect of intra-articular injection (IAI) at the knee joint of 1 ml of Diprospan on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. METHODS Consecutive patients attending the rheumatology or orthopaedic clinic with osteoarthritic knee pain not responding satisfactorily to medical and physical therapy were asked to participate in our ...

Immersive, interactive applications grouped under the concept of Immersipresence require on-line processing and mixing of multimedia data streams and structures. One critical issue seldom addressed is the integration of different solutions to technical challenges, developed independently in separate fields, into working systems, that operate under hard performance constraints. In order to reali...

OBJECTIVE We investigated the transient effect of short-duration paired-pulse electrical stimulation (ppES) on corticospinal excitability and the after-effect of long-duration ppES on excitability, short-latency afferent inhibition (SAI), and afferent facilitation (AF). METHODS A total of 28 healthy subjects participated in two different experiments. In Experiment 1, motor-evoked potentials (...

The aim of this study was to address whether deficits in the central cholinergic activity may contribute to the increased difficulty to allocate attention during gait in the elderly with heightened risk of falls. We recruited 50 participants with a history of two or more falls (33 patients with Parkinson's Disease and 17 older adults) and 14 non-fallers age-matched adults. Cholinergic activity ...

BACKGROUND Environmental contexts have been shown to predict health behaviours and outcomes either directly or via interaction with individual risk factors. In this paper, we created indexes of socioeconomic disadvantage (SEDI) and socioeconomic advantage (SAI) in Singapore to test the applicability of these concepts in an Asian context. These indices can be used for health service resource all...

Elucidating vector distribution based on an accurate species identification is important to understanding the nature of the species complex in order to achieve vector control. Morphologically, An. minimus s.l. is difficult to distinguish from both its species complex and its closely related species. A polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) technique and a ...

This study tests the applicability of Eurasian snow cover increase in October, as described by the recently published snow advance index (SAI), for forecasting December–February precipitation totals in Europe. On the basis of a classical correlation analysis, global significance was obtained and locally significant correlation coefficients of up to 0.89 and 20.78 were found for the Iberian Peni...