Four patients had a chronic progressive disorder beginning in middle age and involving stiffness and painful spasms of the lower limbs. Spasms were spontaneous, reflex, and induced by voluntary movement. Patients had rigidity and abnormal postures of one or both legs. There was no truncal rigidity or exaggerated lumbar lordosis. Despite the presence of symptoms for up to 16 years, symptoms and ...

A female patient had permanent axial muscular rigidity similar to the "stiff-man syndrome", together with axial myoclonus triggered by stretch reflexes and by supramaximal stimulation of the supraorbital nerve. The disorder responded to treatment with diazepam and baclofen. This disorder bore a marked similarity to the so-called "jerking stiff-man syndrome".

PURPOSE To evaluate the impact of a change in the manufacturing of the AneuRx stent-graft on the long-term results of endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair. METHODS The first 70 AAA patients treated with the AneuRx stent-graft between October 1996 and December 1998 were reviewed. The early stiff bifurcated design (STIFF) was used in 23 patients (mean age 71.7 +/- 9.3 years, rang...

I propose that stiffness may be defined and quantified for nonlinear systems using Lyapunov exponents, and demonstrate the relationship that exists between stiffness and the fractal dimension of a strange attractor: that stiff chaos is thin chaos. What constitutes a stiff dynamical system? Stiffness is closely related to numerical methods [1]: the signature of stiffness in a problem is that, up...

We point out that the existence of post-inflationary phases stiffer than radiation leads to the production of stochastic gravitational waves (GW) backgrounds whose logarithmic energy spectra (in critical units) are typically “blue” at high frequencies. The maximal spectral slope (for present frequencies larger than 10 Hz) is of order one and it is related to the maximal sound velocity of the st...

Stiff-knee gait is characterized by diminished and delayed knee flexion during swing. Rectus femoris transfer surgery, a common treatment for stiff-knee gait, is often recommended when a patient exhibits prolonged activity of the rectus femoris muscle during swing. Treatment outcomes are inconsistent, in part, due to limited understanding of the biomechanical factors contributing to stiff-knee ...

It is well known that psychological stress affects health status. Stiff neck and shoulder in a broad sense is one of the major somatic complaints among Japanese. The objective was to determine how much perceived stress and stiff neck/shoulder are associated with health-related quality of life (HRQoL) by gender. Participants (n = 512) completed the Japanese version of Perceived Stress Scale, the...

Paraneoplastic Encephalomyelitis, Stiff Person Syndrome and Breast Carcinoma Paraneoplastic syndromes (PNS) are the rarest non-metastatic neurological complications of cancers in which no specific etiology can be identified. Among PNS, stiff person syndrome is characterized by “rock-hard” rigidity and painful spasms in distal limbs, most frequently legs, and abnormal foot and/or hand posture. G...

We first derive necessary and sufficient stiff order conditions, up to order four, for exponential splitting schemes applied to semilinear evolution equations. The main idea is to identify the local splitting error as a sum of quadrature errors. The order conditions of the quadrature rules then yield the stiff order conditions in an explicit fashion, similarly to that of Runge–Kutta schemes. Fu...