BACKGROUND Similar types of trajectory patterns have been identified by Latent Class Analyses (LCA) across multiple low back pain (LBP) cohorts, but these patterns are impractical to apply to new cohorts or individual patients. It would be useful to be able to identify trajectory subgroups from descriptive definitions, as a way to apply the same definitions of mutually exclusive subgroups acros...

BACKGROUND Low back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of referral to occupational health clinics and of consequent work absenteeism. There is lack of data concerning ages 18-21. The objective of our study was to evaluate the occurrence of newly diagnosed LBP and the recurrence and worsening of preexisting LBP in young male military recruits. METHODS In this retrospective cohort study, we examined...

BACKGROUND It has been proposed that an episode of low back pain (LBP) be defined as: "a period of pain in the lower back lasting for more than 24 h preceded and followed by a period of at least 1 month without LBP". Previous studies have tested the definition in the general population and in secondary care populations with distinctly different results. The objectives of this study (in a primar...

OBJECTIVE The objective was to evaluate the efficacy of the Revised National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) lifting equation (RNLE) to predict risk of low-back pain (LBP). BACKGROUND In 1993, NIOSH published the RNLE as a risk assessment method for LBP associated with manual lifting. To date, there has been little research evaluating the RNLE as a predictor of the risk o...

STUDY DESIGN This was a cross-sectional study. PURPOSE The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of low back pain (LBP) and its association with individual factors and current job status among steel industry workers in Mashhad, Iran. OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE Several studies have been conducted on LBP and its related risk factors, some of which emphasized oc-cupational factors as t...

OBJECTIVE Evaluate the effectiveness of two active interventions, aimed at secondary prevention of low back pain (LBP), in occupational health. METHODS We performed a survey of LBP (n=2480; response rate 71%) and randomized 143 employees (66% males, 45 years) with LBP over 34 mm on VAS into Rehabilitation (n=43), Exercise (n=43) or self-care (n=40) groups. Primary outcomes were LBP, physical ...

BACKGROUND Few prospective cohort studies of workplace low back pain (LBP) with quantified job physical exposure have been performed. There are few prospective epidemiological studies for LBP occupational risk factors and reported data generally have few adjustments for many personal and psychosocial factors. METHODS/DESIGN A multi-center prospective cohort study has been incepted to quantify...

The lbp gene, which encodes a laminin-binding protein (Lbp) of Streptococcus pyogenes, was found in all S. pyogenes M types. An Lbp-deficient mutant showed a significantly lower efficiency of adhesion to HEp-2 cells than did the wild-type strain. These results indicate that Lbp is one of the important S. pyogenes adhesins.

We analyse the local stability of the high-temperature fixed point of the loopy belief propagation (LBP) algorithm and how this relates to the properties of the Bethe free energy which LBP tries to minimize. We focus on the case of binary networks with pairwise interactions. In particular, we state sufficient conditions for convergence of LBP to a unique fixed point and show that these are shar...

Recently, the orderless Bag-of-Words (BoW) approach has proven extremely popular and successful in texture classification tasks [1, 2, 3]. Due to its impressive computational efficiency and good texture discriminative property, the BoW-based approach LBP [1] has gained considerable attention. In order to employ the advantages of the method of Zhang et al. [3] in combining complementary local fe...