SECTION 1 A 47-year-old right-handed woman fell to the ground while dancing. She hit her head and neck. However, she did not lose consciousness and continued to dance. Three days later, she developed severe sharp and burning left shoulder pain radiating into her left arm. The pain was associated with weakness and numbness. She also noticed right facial numbness. On review of systems, she had no...

The recently extinct large-bodied New World monkey Protopithecus brasiliensis Lund 1836 was named based on a distal humerus and proximal femur found in the Lagoa Santa cave system in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. These bones are from an animal about twice the size of the largest extant platyrrhines. One hundred and seventy-five years later, a nearly complete skeleton was dis...

Although skeletal muscle fiber types are often defined as belonging to discrete categories, many muscles possess fibers with intermediate phenotypes. These hybrid fiber types can be identified by their expression of two or more myosin heavy chain (MHC) isoforms within the same single fiber. In mouse muscles, the most common hybrid fibers are those coexpressing the IIX and IIB MHC isoforms. In t...

The earliest neural response to a mechanical perturbation, the short-latency stretch response (R1: 20-45 ms), is known to exhibit "automatic gain-scaling" whereby its magnitude is proportional to preperturbation muscle activity. Because gain-scaling likely reflects an intrinsic property of the motoneuron pool (via the size-recruitment principle), counteracting this property poses a fundamental ...

The goal of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of using artificial neural network (ANN) models to estimate the elbow flexion forces from mechanomyography (MMG) under isometric muscle contraction and compare the performance of the ANN models with the performance from multiple linear regression (MLR) models. Five participants (mean±SD age=25.4±2.96 yrs) performed ten predefined and ten...

A 17‐year‐old male patient who was diagnosed with spastic cerebral palsy in his childhood came for seeking management of spasticity in his right upper limb. We found that he had typical presentations of MM in his right upper limb. Every time, when he was trying to extend his left wrist and fingers, his right wrist and fingers extended simultaneously. However, active motion of the right wrist an...

Seeing others performing an action induces the observers' motor cortex to "resonate" with the observed action. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies suggest that such motor resonance reflects the encoding of various motor features of the observed action, including the apparent motor effort. However, it is unclear whether such encoding requires direct observation or whether force requi...

This study determined whether age-related mechanisms can increase fatigue of arm muscles during maximal velocity dynamic contractions, as it occurs in the lower limb. We compared elbow flexor fatigue of young (n=10, 20.8±2.7 years) and old men (n=16, 73.8±6.1 years) during and in recovery from a dynamic and an isometric postural fatiguing task. Each task was maintained until failure while suppo...

Changes in muscle mass and strength across the adult age span are variable and related to the ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) genotype. In particular, a single CNTF haplotype (1357 G→A) is important for neuronal and muscular developments and may be associated with muscle strength response to resistance training. We examined whether CNTF genotype differentially influences the effect of resist...

AIMS Weight-loss after bariatric surgery improves insulin sensitivity, but the underlying molecular mechanism is not clear. To ascertain the effect of bariatric surgery on insulin signalling, we examined glucose disposal and Akt activation in morbidly obese volunteers before and after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery (RYGB), and compared this to lean volunteers. MATERIALS AND METHODS The hype...