AIM To evaluate the larynx involvement in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in a clinical setting and correlate with the different clinical features related to more aggressive disease. METHODS Cross-sectional study including 36 consecutive patients with RA. Reflux symptoms were evaluated by the Reflux Symptom Index (RSI) and vocal cord impairment by the Voice Handicap Index-10 (VHI-10)....

Adductor spasmodic dysphonia (SD) is a focal laryngeal dystonia mainly resulting in a strained voice quality with spastic voice breaks and frequency shifts, perturbing fluency and intelligibility. SD-patients report unusually high impairment of their quality of life. The standard treatment is botulinum toxin injection in the thyroarytenoid muscles, in order to interfere with the perturbed senso...

Baker, Anthony J., Vincent M. Figueredo, Edmund C. Keung, and S. Albert Camacho. Ca21 regulates the kinetics of tension development in intact cardiac muscle. Am. J. Physiol. 275 (Heart Circ. Physiol. 44): H744–H750, 1998.— The goal of this study was to determine whether Ca21 plays a role in regulating tension development kinetics in intact cardiac muscle. In cardiac muscle, this fundamental iss...

To evaluate the suitability of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) as a solvent for muscle-contraction studies in the chicken, its effect on the slow muscle contracture induced by high-K(+) solution was explored using the anterior latissimus dorsi (ALD) muscle from one-week-old chicks. Measurements were made of isometric tension and various characteristics of the contractures [peak tension, total tension...

PURPOSE Auditory-perceptual evaluation of dysphonia may be influenced by the type of speech/voice task used to render judgements during the clinical evaluation, i.e., sustained vowels versus continuous speech. This study explored (a) differences in listener dysphonia severity ratings on the basis of speech/voice tasks, (b) the influence of speech/voice task on dysphonia severity ratings of stim...

Vocal fold tissues in animal and human species undergo deformation processes at several types of loading rates: a slow strain involved in vocal fold posturing (on the order of 1 Hz or so), cyclic and faster posturing often found in speech tasks or vocal embellishment (1-10 Hz), and shear strain associated with vocal fold vibration during phonation (100 Hz and higher). Relevant to these deformat...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the efficacy of stretch-and-flow voice therapy as a primary physiological treatment for patients with hyperfunctional voice disorders. STUDY DESIGN Prospective case series. METHODS Participants with a diagnosis of primary muscle tension dysphonia or phonotraumatic lesions due to hyperfunctional vocal behaviors were included. Participants received stretch-and-flow v...

The same functional states that characterize the living anterior byssus retractor muscle (ABRM) from Mytilus edulis can be initiated in the saponin-treated (chemically skinned) muscle preparation under controlled biochemical conditions. A tonic contraction was induced if the concentration of free Ca2+ was above approximately 10(7) M in the presence of Mg2+ and ATP. Maximum tension development w...

• The sarcomere is the basic ultrastructural unit of contraction in striated muscle. Huxley and Hanson have shown that the alternating band patterns of the sarcomere in skeletal muscle derive from the longitudinal disposition of two sets of interdigitating contractile protein filaments. On the basis of these and other studies, the sliding filament hypothesis for muscle contraction was proposed....