PURPOSE A recent randomized clinical trial has demonstrated that direct decompressive surgery plus radiotherapy was superior to radiotherapy alone for the treatment of metastatic epidural spinal cord compression. The current study compared the cost-effectiveness of the two approaches. METHODS AND MATERIALS In the original clinical trial, clinical effectiveness was measured by ambulation and s...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Gait velocity is a powerful indicator of function and prognosis after stroke. Gait velocity can be stratified into clinically meaningful functional ambulation classes, such as household ambulation (<0.4 m/s), limited community ambulation (0.4 to 0.8 m/s), and full community ambulation (>0.8 m/s). The purpose of the current study was to determine whether changes in velocit...

An able-bodied subject used walking motor imagery to accurately operate a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) controlled robotic gait orthosis. This finding represents the first successful demonstration of a BCI-controlled lower extremity prosthesis for independent ambulation, with significant implications for restoring ambulation to individuals with spinal cord injury paraplegia.

After diagnostic and interventional cardiac catheterization, femoral artery closure devices offer quicker time to hemostasis, ambulation, and discharge than does manual compression. Nurses should understand how femoral artery closure devices work, the potential vascular complications that may occur with their use, and the recommended time to ambulation and discharge.

BACKGROUND Ambulatory epidural analgesia (AEA) is a popular choice for labor analgesia because ambulation reportedly increases maternal comfort, increases the intensity of uterine contractions, avoids inferior vena cava compression, facilitates fetal head descent, and relaxes the pelvic musculature, all of which can shorten labor. However, the preponderance of evidence suggests that ambulation ...

The Open Field Test situation is reported to produce autonomic nervous system re activity determined emotional freezing and defecation (1, 2), cortical excitation determined rearing activity (3), and corpus striatum activity determined stereotyped ambulation (4, 5). Thus autonomic depressant drugs reduce emotional freezing (6), cortical excitant drugs augment rearing (7, 8), and hallucinatory d...

In order to determine the influence of early ambulation and other factors on headaches occurring after lumbar myelography we randomised 207 patients (127 men and 80 women) into two groups. Following the investigation, we allowed the 101 patients (65 men and 36 women) in group A to sit or stand freely, while we confined the 106 patients (62 men and 44 women) in group B to bed for 20 hours. The n...

A program of early weight-bearing for full-thickness pedicle flaps over heel-pad defects is described. This successful program used simple shoe inserts and convalescent shoes, but more important, also utilized an inexpensive pressure gage which aided in the control and distribution of weight-bearing forces on the sole and heel flap. With proper support of the flap, the patient can return to nor...