This review discusses the basic knowledge and recent innovation of surgical treatment for scoliosis. Surgical treatment for scoliosis is indicated, in general, for a curve exceeding 45 to 50 degrees by the Cobb's method on the basis that: Curves larger than 50 degrees progress even after skeletal maturity.Curves larger than 60 degrees cause loss of pulmonary function, and much larger curves cau...

THE INFLUENZA VIRUS Antigenic Changes To maintain its virulence within a population, the influenza virus continuously evolves. Two types of antigenic changes can occur. Antigenic drift results from the accumulation of point mutations in the HA and NA genes. When drift occurs, seasonal epidemics can arise; this is why the influenza vaccine is updated on an annual basis. Antigenic shift is the ap...

Mirror neurons were discovered over twenty years ago in the ventral premotor region F5 of the macaque monkey. Since their discovery much has been written about these neurons, both in the scientific literature and in the popular press. They have been proposed to be the neuronal substrate underlying a vast array of different functions. Indeed so much has been written about mirror neurons that las...

Recent developments in the disease situation surrounding Schmallenberg virus (SBV) in northern Europe are discussed in the latest outbreak assessment from the International Disease Monitoring (IDM) team at Defra. In the assessment, which was published on 23 Apr 2012, the IDM team says that AHVLA laboratories are currently validating a serological ELISA that has become commercially available in ...

Ancient Greek physicians already knew that the smell of human breath could provide a clue to the pathology. Nowadays, volatile breath biomarkers are known to be released in a broad range of diseases. However, their identification, isolation, and quantification as indicative of relevant alterations in clinical status have required the development of new techniques and analytical methods. Breath ...

1 Rev Esp Quimioter 2012;25 (1):1-3 post-treatment, which was deemed to reflect the effectiveness of the treatment to clear parasites better than serology. Moreover, PCR allowed treatment failure to be ratified – in our case in 6.9% of the patients, who shifted to positive at the end of the follow-up period. Although PCR is a sensitive and specific tool for the early detection of the parasite’s...

Oxygen is recognized as a structuring factor of metazoan communities in marine sediments. The importance of oxygen as a controlling factor on meiofauna (32 µm-1 mm in size) respiration rates is however less clear. Typically, respiration rates are measured under oxic conditions, after which these rates are used in food web studies to quantify the role of meiofauna in sediment carbon turnover. Se...