Background: Alterations in the neuromuscular control of the spine were found in patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP). Sudden loading of the spine is assumed to be the cause of approximately 12% of lower back injuries. However, some aspects of this problem, such as alterations in the sensory–motor control of the spine, remain questionable. This study investigated postural and neuro–motor...

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 ...

Background: Carum carvi L. (caraway), known as black zeera in Iran, has been indicated for the treatment of epilepsy in Iranian folk medicine. This study evaluated whether the aqueous extract and essential oil of caraway seeds have anticonvulsant effects in mice.Methods: The anticonvulsant effects of the aqueous extract (200, 400, 800, 1600, and 3200 mg/kg, i.p.) and essential oil (25, 50, 100,...

Acoustic Reflex Latency (ARL) is the time interval between onset of an intense auditory stimulus and onset of middle-ear muscle contraction. Unlike pure tone audiogram, the usual procedure to detect middle ear disorders and conductive hearing loss, ARL can differentiate between cochlear and retrocochlear pathologies, yields information about the nature of the conductive disorder, can detect mil...

This cross-sectional, exploratory study aimed to compare neuromuscular performance, balance and motor skills proficiencies of typically developing children and those with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and to determine associations of these neuromuscular factors with balance and motor skills performances in children with DCD.One hundred thirty children with DCD and 117 typically deve...

A core assumption underlying mental chronometry is that more complex tasks increase cortical processing, prolonging reaction times. In this study we show that increases in task complexity alter the magnitude, rather than the latency, of the output for a circuit that rapidly transforms visual information into motor actions. We quantified visual stimulus-locked responses (SLRs), which are changes...

Motor output capabilities of the forelimb representation of dorsal motor area (PMd) and ventral motor area (PMv) were compared with primary motor cortex (M1) in terms of latency, strength, sign, and distribution of effects. Stimulus-triggered averages (60 microA) of electromyographic activity collected from 24 forelimb muscles were computed at 314 tracks in 2 monkeys trained to perform a reach-...

Article history:Accepted 13 August 2007Available online 24 August 2007Neuronal response onset latency provides important data on the information processingwithin the central nervous system. In order to enhance the quality of the onset latencyestimation, we have developed a ‘double sliding-window’ technique, which combines theadvantages of mathematical methods with the re...

background: there have been some reports about the possible n-methyl-d-aspartate (nmda) antagonist activity of guaifenesin. as drugs with a similar structure to guaifenesin (i.e. felbamate) and those with nmda antagonist activity have been clinically used as anticonvulsants, the aim of this study was to determine whether guaifenesin has an anticonvulsant effect in an animal model of seizure. me...