OBJECTIVE To investigate the therapeutic effect of extracorporeal shockwave therapy (ESWT) according to treatment session on gastrocnemius muscle spasticity in children with spastic cerebral palsy (CP). METHODS Twelve children with spastic CP underwent 1 ESWT and 2 sham ESWT sessions for gastrocnemius (group 1) or 3 ESWT sessions (group 2) once per week for 3 weeks. Modified Ashworth Scale (M...

This work presents an extensive study on Monte Carlo radiation transport simulation and thermoluminescent (TL) dosimetry for characterising mixed radiation fields (neutrons and photons) occurring in nuclear reactors. The feasibility of these methods is investigated for radiation fields at various locations of the Portuguese Research Reactor (RPI). The performance of the approaches developed in ...

Background Low back pain (LBP) is a common pain syndrome in athletes, responsible for 28% of missed training days/year. Psychosocial factors contribute to chronic pain development. This study aims to investigate the transferability of psychosocial screening tools developed in the general population to athletes and to define athlete-specific thresholds. Methods Data from a prospective multicen...

  Introduction: Studies with single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) have revealed inconsistent changes of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in schizophrenia. Some studies investigated the rCBF and its relationship with psychopathology, positive and negative symptoms in treated patients. However, there is a little information about the pattern of rCBF in ...

Through structure-based and directed evolution approaches, a new catalytic activity has been established on the (β/α)8 barrel enzyme triosephosphate isomerase (TIM). This work started from ml8bTIM, a monomeric variant of TIM, in which the phosphate-binding loop (loop-8) had been shortened. Structure analysis suggested an additional point mutation (V233A), converting ml8bTIM into A-TIM. A-TIM ha...

A new construction is presented for point interactions (PI) and generalised point interactions (GPI). The construction is an inverse scattering procedure, using integral transforms suggested by the required scattering theory. The usual class of PI in 3 dimensions (i.e. the self adjoint extensions of the Laplacian on the domain of smooth functions compactly supported away from the origin) is rec...

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. In constructing collinear operators, which describe the production of energetic jets or energetic hadrons, importan...

Important in biotechnology is the establishment of cell culture methods that reflect the in vivo situation accurately. One approach for reaching this goal is through 3D cell cultivation that mimics tissue or organ structures and functions. We present here a newly designed and constructed random positioning incubator (RPI) that enables 3D cell culture in simulated microgravity (0 g). In addition...

A novel RNA polymerase I (RPI) driven reporter gene has been used to investigate the in vivo role of the architectural ribosomal transcription factor UBF in gene activation and species specificity. It is shown that the level of UBF overexpression in NIH3T3 cells leads to a proportionate increase in the activities of both reporter and endogenous ribosomal genes. Further, co-expression of UBF ant...

Recent determinations of the E2/M1 ratio are reviewed. Many aspects of these studies have been questioned. Here we focus on the selection of a database, methods used in the extraction of this ratio, and interpretation(s) of the results. I. THE DATA: OLD VS NEW Soon after the Baryons ’92 conference, the VPI group wrote a short note [1] claiming a value of −1.5± 0.5% for the E2/M1 ratio a value i...