BACKGROUND Thumb sucking habits make up the majority of oral habits. While thumb sucking is considered normal during the first two years of life, if it is not controlled and persists beyond the preschool period it may cause deleterious effects on dentofacial structures. Reminder therapy using Bluegrass appliance has been proven successful to intercept thumb sucking habit. CASE REPORT We prese...

TRAUMATIC amputation of the thumb is a particularly severe hand injury, because of the unique functional role of the thumb, and several methods exist for reconstruction of the thumb, all of which have disadvantages. Microvascular technique allows the transfer of a block of tissue from one site to another, by anastomosis of vessels with a known vascular territory to the vessels in the recipient ...

The aim of this study is to establish whether the thumb is represented independently of the palm. An exogenous spatial cueing paradigm was used, where participants had to detect a tactile stimulus that could appear on the proximal and distal phalanges or metacarpus of the thumb (thenar area; Experiment 1) and the metacarpus of the thumb or hypothenar area of the palm (Experiment 2) of the left ...

Bowler's thumb is a rare perineural fibrosis involving the ulnar digital nerve of the thumb. Affected patients present with pain, neuropathy, and mass lesion. The condition is caused by chronic repetitive impaction of the ulnar soft tissues of the thumb against the thumbhole of a bowling ball. In our case, MRI showed decreased signal intensity on both T1- and T2-weighted images surrounding an e...

Deafferentation such as the amputation of a body part causes cortical reorganization in the primary motor cortex (M1). We investigated whether this reorganization is reversible after reconstruction of the lost body part. We tested two patients who had long-standing thumb amputations followed by thumb reconstruction with toe-to-thumb transfer 9 to 10 mo later and one patient who underwent thumb ...

OBJECTIVE Traumatic neuropathy of the ulnar digital nerve of the thumb occurs in patients who undergo chronic frictional irritation of the nerve. The condition is aptly termed bowler's thumb, as it commonly afflicts patients who bowl and keep their thumb in the ball for an extended period of time. It is a pathology that rarely appears in the literature and for which standard treatment is unclea...

Functional explanations of behaviour often propose optimal strategies for organisms to follow. These 'best' strategies could be difficult to perform given biological constraints such as neural architecture and physiological constraints. Instead, simple heuristics or 'rules-of-thumb' that approximate these optimal strategies may instead be performed. From a modelling perspective, rules-of-thumb ...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that a thumb and index finger grip might facilitate recovery from the manifestation of spatial disorientation known as the giant hand phenomenon. Sixteen pilots volunteered as subjects in an experiment that compared the effectiveness of the thumb and index finger versus the whole hand technique to overcome a visually-induced analogue of the giant hand phenomenon. Thu...

Reconstruction of thumb after traumatic or congenital loss in 17 cases is reported. Cases were divided into three groups according to the level of thumb loss. There were two cases in distal zone, seven in middle and eight in proximal zone. Thirteen cases were traumatic in origin and four had congenital loss. Different reconstruction procedures were used at each level. Osteoplastic reconstructio...

CONCLUSION: Thumb injuries from fireworks result from high-energy avulsion, hyperextension, and hyperabduction, frequently injuring the thumb, destabilizing the CMC joint, and seriously damaging the first webspace. The first webspace requires particular consideration as deep injury may result in adduction contracture and require secondary reconstruction with tissue outside the zone of injury if...