BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Determining the source of a patient's pain in the upper thoracic region can be difficult. Costovertebral (CV) and costotransverse (CT) joint hypomobility and active trigger points (TrPs) are possible sources of upper thoracic pain. This case report describes the clinical decision-making process for a patient with posterior upper thoracic pain. CASE DESCRIPTION The patie...

OBJECTIVE Patients with RA have an increased risk of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular (CV) diseases compared with the general population. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of inflammatory burden in the formation of carotid plaques in patients with RA. METHODS We performed carotid artery US to measure the carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and plaques in 406 patients with RA a...

STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional study of healthy volunteers. PURPOSE We aimed to investigate the variation in the lumbar facet joint orientation in an adult Asian population. The relationship between the facet joint orientation and muscle cross-sectional area (CSA) of multifidus and erector spinae was also clarified. OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE Several studies have reported that lumbar pathologies,...

BACKGROUND There is an increasing interest among pediatric rheumatologist for using ultrasonography (US) in the daily clinical examination of children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Loss of joint cartilage may be an early feature of destructive disease in JIA. However, US still needs validation before it can be used as a diagnostic bedside tool in a pediatric setting. This study aims...

We propose a method for the time-resolved joint analysis of two related aspects of single neuron variability, the spiking irregularity measured by the squared coefficient of variation (CV(2)) of the ISIs and the trial-by-trial variability of the spike count measured by the Fano factor (FF). We provide a calibration of both estimators using the theory of renewal processes, and verify it for spik...

BACKGROUND Several recent studies have indicated an association between key inflammatory mediators and atherosclerotic diseases. We evaluated whether high levels of antibodies against heat shock proteins and cholesterol (ACHA) predicted cardiovascular (CV) events. METHODS AND RESULTS We used blood samples from the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation (HOPE) study to conduct a nested case-cont...

Obesity has been increasing in epidemic proportions, with a disproportionately higher increase in morbid or class III obesity, and obesity adversely affects cardiovascular (CV) hemodynamics, structure, and function, as well as increases the prevalence of most CV diseases. Progressive declines in physical activity over 5 decades have occurred and have primarily caused the obesity epidemic. Despi...

BACKGROUND Higher cardiovascular (CV) morbidity and mortality in depressed patient has demonstrated repeatedly. AIM Determine the degree of occurrence of hypertension, metabolic syndrome (MetS) and depression in the pit miners and the impact of the six-month holistic treatment of all CV risk factors and depression in the overall CV risk in miners with hypertension, MetS and depression. METH...

Introduction. Performance of nonuniformity correction approaches is usually evaluated indirectly, on the basis of remaining tissue intensity variability rather than the actual estimated bias field. Common indirect measures include coefficient of variation of white matter CV(WM) and gray matter CV(GM), and coefficient of joint variation CJV between WM and GM [1]. However, disagreements between i...