OBJECTIVE Lumbar disc degeneration (LDD) is a serious social and medical problem which has been shown to be highly heritable. It has similarities with peripheral joint osteoarthritis (OA) in terms of both epidemiology and pathologic processes. A few known genetic variants have been identified using a candidate gene approach, but many more are thought to exist. GDF5 is a gene whose variants have...

OBJECTIVE Death receptor 4 (DR4), an apoptosis-associated gene, plays an important role in the pathophysiology of lumbar disc degeneration (LDD). The present study aimed to determine whether the C626G polymorphism (rs4871857) of the DR4 gene is associated with the risk and severity of LDD in the Chinese Han population. METHODS A total of 296 patients with LDD and 208 healthy controls were enr...

OBJECTIVE Low back pain (LBP) is a common musculoskeletal disorder, but it is still unclear which individuals develop it. The authors examined the contribution of genetic factors, lumbar disc degeneration (LDD) and other risk factors in a female sample of the general population. MATERIAL AND METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted among 2256 women (371 and 698 monozygotic and dizygotic ...

The persistence of species may depend upon their capacity to keep pace with climate change. However, dispersal has been ignored in the vast majority of studies that aimed at estimating and predicting range shifts as a response to climate change. Long distance dispersal (LDD) in particular might promote rapid range shifts and allow species to track suitable habitat. Many aquatic plant species ar...

We treated eight dysplastic acetabula in six skeletally mature patients with Down's syndrome by a modified Bernese periacetabular osteotomy. The mean age at the time of surgery was 16.5 years (12.8 to 28.5). Mean length of follow-up was five years (2 to 10.4).Pre-operatively the mean (Tonnis) acetabular angle was 28 degrees, the centre-edge angle was -9 degrees, and the extrusion index was 60%;...

OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to explore the univariate and multivariate differences in behavioural problems among children with disorders in expressive or mixed receptive-expressive language development and children with unimpaired language development. METHOD Ninety-four children with language development disorders (LDD) between the ages of 4 and 6 years and 94 children (matched ...

BACKGROUND CONTEXT In situ fusion is the gold standard method of treatment of spondylolisthesis. There is no study in the literature evaluating the effect of sagittal contour realignment on clinical outcomes in comparison with the addition of anterior slippage reduction. PURPOSE The correction of sagittal plane vs. reduction with instrumentation in the patients with low or high dysplastic spo...

Kuwait has a very high incidence of all types of developmental dysplasia of the hip. One of the most complicated forms is the deformed dysplastic acetabulum, which has not only abnormal orientation but it also has lost its shape by the pressure of the subluxed femoral head. The outer part of the socket involves the upper part of the original acetabulum, thus giving it a bipartite appearance. Cl...

Atypical moles, also called dysplastic nevi (DN), are considered by many to reside in the grey portion of the spectrum between benign nevi and melanoma. Because of the difficulty of assessing the behavior of an individual DN, and the association with an increased overall risk of melanoma, physicians and patients have grappled with the choice between observation and surgical excision.1 In the ab...

MOTIVATION Recently, several information extraction systems have been developed to retrieve relevant information out of biomedical text. However, these methods represent individual efforts. In this paper, we show that by combining different algorithms and their outcome, the results improve significantly. For this reason, CONAN has been created, a system which combines different programs and the...