The high percentage of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) in various populations underlines the need for distinguishing between severely and mildly affected individuals. To investigate MSD from various body parts reported in 1998 as predictors of health related quality of life reported in 2002, we examined the frequency of MSD on a five-point scale, health related quality of life (SF-36) and sickn...

BACKGROUND The aim was to study the impact of psychosocial risk factors on long-term sickness absence due to mental health problems (LSA-MH) or musculoskeletal disorders (LSA-MSD) in 2983 Belgian middle-aged workers. METHODS Data were collected from 1372 male and 1611 female workers in the Belstress III study. Considered psychosocial risk factors were job demands, job control, social support,...

OBJECTIVE Multisomatoform disorder (MSD) is characterised by > or = 3 medically inexplicable, troublesome physical symptoms, together with a > or = 2-year history of somatisation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders in a South African sample MSD, and to compare demographic and clinical outcomes in those patients with and without co-morbidity....

BACKGROUND Diarrheal disease remains among the leading causes of global mortality in children younger than 5 years. Exposure to domestic animals may be a risk factor for diarrheal disease. The objectives of this study were to identify animal-related exposures associated with cases of moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD) in children in rural western Kenya, and to identify the major zoonotic enteric...

Ultrasound is one of the most widely used multipurpose imaging modalities that is ideal for monitoring and diagnosing early pregnancy events. The first sign and measurable element of an early pregnancy is the Gestational Sac (GS). Currently, the size of GS is manually measured from an ultrasound image of the GS. This paper argues that the Mean Sac Diameter (MSD) derived from the manual measurem...

This study was conducted to investigate pervasiveness of the musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) among staffs in a specialized healthcare centre. Sixty-eight staffs from three departments namely Cardiovascular Lab (CVL), Nuclear Radiology, and General Radiography were recruited in this study. A modified Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (NMQ) was distributed among study population. The result sho...

In our previous work, we have proposed a speaker modeling technique using spectral and pitch features for text-independent speaker identification based on Multi-Space Probability Distribution Gaussian Mixture Models (MSD-GMMs). We have presented a maximum likelihood (ML) estimation procedure for the MSD-GMM parameters and demonstrated its high recognition performance. In this paper, we describe...

BACKGROUND Unionization has been found to be related to higher filing of workers' compensation (WC) claims, but the extent of the relationship and the relationships to other variables have not been previously reported. METHODS Telephone interviews were conducted with both a population-based and WC-based samples of musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) cases. RESULTS Workers at unionized facilities...

BACKGROUND Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) are a common cause of disability and absence from work. There is no consistent evidence in the literature regarding predictors for short- and long-term absences due to these disorders. AIMS To investigate work-related factors influencing short- and long-term absences due to MSD in German-speaking countries. METHODS The study is based on data from t...

From the standpoint of the mechanism of mechanochemical polymerization, two kinds of copolymeric prodrug, whose monomer sequence distribution (MSD) is different from each other, can be prepared by this polymerization under appropriate operational conditions: one is a random copolymer abundant in the longer block consisting of the same repeating units (multi-block copolymer), and the other is a ...