Background: Impairment of cervical sensory input in patients with neck pain may disturb postural stability. The purpose of present study was to assess the dynamic postural stability of subjects with chronic neck pain compared to a matched control group.    Methods: In this case-control study, 22 chronic non-specific neck pain and 22 healthy individuals participated. Postural stabilit...

PURPOSE Graves ophthalmopathy and Graves disease may be caused by the same autoimmune process. An explanation for this may be the presence of autoantibodies reacting with an autoantigen in the orbit and the thyroid gland, like the thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) receptor. The purpose of this study was to see if initial levels of TSH receptor antibodies, known as thyroid-stimulating immunoglob...

PURPOSE To investigate associations between serum thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) receptor antibody (TRAb) levels and Graves' orbitopathy (GO) activity/severity in chronic-stage GO and compare the performance of two newly-developed TRAb assays (third-generation TSH-binding inhibition immunoglobulin [TBII] assay versus Mc4 thyroid-stimulating immunoglobulin [TSI] bioassay). METHODS This stud...

Temporal changes in the power of the longwave radiation of the system Earth-atmosphere emitted to space always lag behind changes in the power of absorbed solar radiation due to slow change of its enthalpy. That is why the debit and credit parts of the average annual energy budget of the terrestrial globe with its air and water envelope are practically always in an unbalanced state. Average ann...

Exploited ecosystems are characterised by exports of secondary production from each fished trophic level that reduce the energy available for upper levels at the ecosystem scale, thus impinging on overall secondary production. Depletion in secondary production is proposed here as a proxy for quantifying the ecosystem effects of fishing. Theoretical analysis of trophic web interactions permits t...

Models of biomass size spectra assume that organisms with higher body mass feed at higher trophic levels, but explicit empirical tests of this pattern are rare. We used nitrogen stable isotopes (δ15N) as an index of the trophic level in a benthic fish and invertebrate size-spectrum, and demonstrated that body mass was positively and significantly related to trophic level. This pattern was consi...

PURPOSE To answer the question whether the TSI (tissue strain imaging) sonoelastography technique can contribute to the diagnosis of chronic renal allograft damage. MATERIAL AND METHODS A prospective study of 112 patients between June 2010 and April 2011 was conducted to compare elastography data with biopsy results and laboratory parameters in order to determine whether any correlations exis...