Pericardial-diaphragmatic rupture is a rare condition which occurs after blunt trauma and involves the herniation of abdominal organs into the pericardium. A 77-year-old female patient presenting with complaints of palpitation and difficulty in breathing was admitted to the emergency room. Left lateral thoracotomy revealed the herniation of abdominal organs into the thorax. A pericardial-diaphr...

A 60-year-old man was admitted with a 48-hour history of left-sided abdominal pain. He was receiving anticoagulation therapy with warfarin for a prosthetic aortic valve. His INR on admission was 4.1. Initial full blood count, urine microscopy and plain abdominal radiographs were normal. He underwent an abdominal computed tomography (CT) scan (figure 1). Within 24 hours the patient developed ecc...

Transversus abdominis (TA), obliquus internus (OI), and obliquus externus (OE) are involved in multiple functions: breathing, control of trunk orientation, and stabilization of the pelvis and spine. How these functions are coordinated has received limited attention. We studied electromyographic (EMG) activity of right-sided muscles and 3-dimensional moments during treadmill walking at six diffe...

Pregnancy with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is rare and generally considered dangerous. Riluzole is the only drug approved for use in ALS, but the effect on maternal and fetal health is unknown. We describe the case of an ALS patient taking riluzole throughout pregnancy. A 34-year old Japanese woman, who had been diagnosed with probable ALS 4 years earlier, visited our hospital for abdom...

Ten neurosecretory cells can be found in each of the first 5 abdominal ganglia of the larva of L. caesar L. These are arranged as two lateral pairs and a single ventral cell in each half of a ganglion. Half the lateral cells go through a cycle of secretory activity before pupation in developing larvae. In diapause larvae while half the lateral cells are in a resting phase the remainder are in v...

Five female egg-laying pigeons presented with painless, reducible, ventral abdominal swellings located between the keel and the pubis, or close to the cloaca. Based on clinical, radiographic, and ultrasonographic examination, these pigeons were diagnosed with ventral abdominal hernia requiring surgical interference. Reduction was successfully performed under general anesthesia. Radiographic and...

Understanding rhythmic behavior at the developmental and genetic levels has important implications for neurobiology, medicine, evolution, and robotics. We studied rhythmic behavior--larval crawling--in the genetically and developmentally tractable organism, Drosophila melanogaster. We used narrow-diameter channels to constrain behavior to simple, rhythmic crawling. We quantified crawling at the...