Five patients were identified by medical records and fluorescein angiography as having developed central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) during corticosteroid treatment. These five and 28 previously reported corticosteroid-induced CSC occurrences were studied to clarify the differences between idiopathic CSC and corticosteroid-induced CSC. Nine previously reported occurrences of corticosteroid-i...

PURPOSE This study investigated the influence of long-term wearing of unstable shoes (WUS) on compensatory postural adjustments (CPA) to an external perturbation. METHODS Participants were divided into two groups: one wore unstable shoes while the other wore conventional shoes for 8 weeks. The ground reaction force signal was used to calculate the anterior-posterior (AP) displacement of the c...

Background Insomnia is a major public health problem in western countries. Previous small pilot studies showed that the administration of constant white noise can improve sleep quality, increase acoustic arousal threshold, and reduce sleep onset latency. In this randomized controlled trial, we tested the effect of surrounding broadband sound administration on sleep onset latency, sleep architec...

Freeman et al. demonstrated that detection sensitivity for a low contrast Gabor stimulus improved in the presence of flanking, collinearly oriented grating stimuli, but only when observers attended to them. By recording visual event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by a Gabor stimulus, we investigated whether this contextual cueing effect involves changes in the short-latency afferent visual ...

In contrast to limb muscles, the usual response of human inspiratory muscles to sudden loading consists of an initial marked reduction of electromyographic activity (EMG) followed by a subsequent increase in EMG. To determine definitively whether pulmonary receptors are necessary for this short-latency reflex inhibition produced by airway occlusion, we studied five subjects with complete pulmon...

This study explored in humans the role of the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in saccades, vergence, and combined saccade-vergence movements by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). TMS was applied to the right PPC at 80 ms, 90 ms, or 100 ms after target onset in experiment 1, and to the left PPC in experiment 2. Control experiments were also run in which TMS was applied over the pr...

Stretching a muscle of the upper limb elicits short (M1) and long-latency (M2) reflexes. When the participant is instructed to actively compensate for a perturbation, M1 is usually unaffected and M2 increases in size and is followed by the voluntary response. It remains unclear if the observed increase in M2 is due to instruction-dependent gain modulation of the contributing reflex mechanism(s)...

The goal of this study was to assess the motor output capabilities of the forelimb representation of the supplementary motor area (SMA) in terms of the sign, latency and strength of effects on electromyographic (EMG) activity. Stimulus triggered averages of EMG activity from 24 muscles of the forelimb were computed in SMA during a reach-to-grasp task. Poststimulus facilitation (PStF) from SMA h...