Caprine arthritis encephalitis virus (CAEV) is a lentivirus of goats that leads to chronic mononuclear infiltration of various tissues, in particular, the radiocarpal joints. Cells of the monocyte/macrophage lineage are the major host cells of CAEV in vivo. We have shown that infection of cultured goat macrophages with CAEV results in an alteration of cytokine expression in vitro. Constitutive ...

Despite its potential importance in hand dysfunction, spasticity in the finger muscles following stroke has not been well described. To explore this area, we assessed the role of finger flexor spasticity, along with that of passive mechanical forces, in resisting finger movement in 13 chronic stroke subjects. Subjects were tested with a device that stretched the extrinsic finger muscles through...

A small minority of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients may develop a deforming arthritis, typically with a non-erosive (Jaccoud's) pattern, although erosive features indistinguishable from rheumatoid arthritis may also occur. High-resolution ultrasonography (HRUS) allows detailed 'real time' imaging of joint and tendon morphostructural changes involving the hand in patients with severa...

Storage and utilization of strain energy in the elastic tissues of the distal forelimb of the horse is thought to contribute to the excellent locomotory efficiency of the animal. However, the structures that facilitate elastic energy storage may also be exposed to dangerously high forces, especially at the fastest galloping speeds. In the present study, experimental gait data were combined with...

A horse's legs are compressed during the stance phase, storing and then returning elastic strain energy in spring-like muscle-tendon units. The arrangement of the muscle-tendon units around the lever-like joints means that as the leg shortens the muscle-tendon units are stretched. The forelimb anatomy means that the leg can be conceptually divided into two springs: the proximal spring, from the...

OBJECTIVE To demonstrate the role of sonography in depicting periarticular changes in juvenile systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and to find out whether certain tendons in juvenile SLE patients were different from those of healthy controls. METHODS Thirty juvenile SLE patients (27 female, 3 male) were recruited for this study. Sonographic evaluations were performed in the knee, ankle, elbow,...

Background Recent reports have shown that high-resolution ultrasound is a useful method of detecting pannus vascularization in inflamed finger joints patients with RA and also assessing the disease activity or monitoring therapeutic responses. Power Doppler ultrasonography (PDUS) techniques not only ability to detect but do depict flow patterns by using spectral analysis. Objectives To evaluate...

In the stationary hand, static joint-position sense originates from multimodal somatosensory input (e.g., joint, skin, and muscle). In the moving hand, however, it is uncertain how movement sense arises from these different submodalities of proprioceptors. In contrast to static-position sense, movement sense includes multiple parameters such as motion detection, direction, joint angle, and velo...

We investigate the multicritical behavior of three-dimensional Z_2 gauge Higgs model, at point (MCP) its phase diagram, where one first-order transition line and two continuous Ising-like lines meet. The duality properties model determine some features MCP located along self-dual line. Moreover, we argue that system develops a XY MCP, which is controlled by stable fixed Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson f...