Comparison of the effects of forefoot joint-preserving arthroplasty and resection-replacement arthroplasty on walking plantar pressure distribution and patient-based outcomes in patients with rheumatoid arthritis

Purpose: The purpose of this retrospective study is to clarify the difference in plantar pressure distribution during walking and related patient-based outcomes between forefoot joint-preserving arthroplasty and resection-replacement arthroplasty in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Methods: Four groups of patients were recruited. Group1 included 22 feet of 11 healthy controls (age 48.6 years), Group2 included 36 feet of 28 RA patients with deformed non-operated feet (age 64.8 years, Disease activity score assessing 28 joints with CRP [DAS28-CRP] 2.3), Group3 included 27 feet of 20 RA patients with metatarsal head resection-replacement arthroplasty (age 60.7 years, post-operative duration 5.6 years, DAS28-CRP 2.4), and Group4 included 34 feet of 29 RA patients with metatarsophalangeal (MTP) joint-preserving arthroplasty (age 64.6 years, post-operative duration 3.2 years, DAS28-CRP 2.3). Patients were cross-sectionally examined by F-SCAN II to evaluate walking plantar pressure, and the self-administered foot evaluation questionnaire (SAFE-Q). Twenty joint-preserving arthroplasty feet were longitudinally examined at both pre- and post-operation. Results: In the 1st MTP joint, Group4 showed higher pressure distribution (13.7%) than Group2 (8.0%) and Group3 (6.7%) (P<0.001). In the 2nd-3rd MTP joint, Group4 showed lower pressure distribution (9.0%) than Group2 (14.5%) (P<0.001) and Group3 (11.5%) (P<0.05). On longitudinal analysis, Group4 showed increased 1st MTP joint pressure (8.5% vs. 14.7%; P<0.001) and decreased 2nd-3rd MTP joint pressure (15.2% vs. 10.7%; P<0.01) distribution. In the SAFE-Q subscale scores, Group4 showed higher scores than Group3 in pain and pain-related scores (84.1 vs. 71.7; P<0.01) and in shoe-related scores (62.5 vs. 43.1; P<0.01). Conclusions: Joint-preserving arthroplasty resulted in higher 1st MTP joint and lower 2nd-3rd MTP joint pressures than resection-replacement arthroplasty, which were associated with better patient-based outcomes.Ebina K., Hirao M., Takagi K., et al. (2017) Comparison of the effects of forefoot joint-preserving arthroplasty and resection-replacement arthroplasty on walking plantar pressure distribution and patient-based outcomes in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. PLoS ONE 12(8): e0183805. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183805

The College News, 1949-11-16, Vol. 36, No. 07

Bryn Mawr College student newspaper. Merged with The Haverford News in 1968 to form the Bi-college News (with various titles from 1968 on). Published weekly (except holidays) during the academic year

The College News, 1949-11-16, Vol. 36, No. 07

Bryn Mawr College student newspaper. Merged with The Haverford News in 1968 to form the Bi-college News (with various titles from 1968 on). Published weekly (except holidays) during the academic year

Measuring Enrichment Of Word Embeddings With Subword And Dictionary Information

Word embedding models have been an important contribution to natural language processing; following the distributional hypothesis, words used in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings , these models are trained on large corpora of natural text and use the contexts where words are used to learn the mapping of a word to a vector. Some later models have tried to incorporate external information to enhance the vectors. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate three models of word embeddings and measure how these enhancements improve the word embeddings. These models, along with a hybrid variant, are evaluated on several tasks of word similarity and a task of word analogy. Results show that fine-tuning the vectors with semantic information improves performance in word similarity dramatically; conversely, enriching word vectors with syntactic information increases performance in word analogy tasks, with the hybrid approach finding a solid middle ground

November 25, 1991

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

Hydrolysis inhibition of complex biowaste

The increasing demand of renewable energy sources and reuse of wastes, challenges our society for better technological solutions for energy production. Co-digestion of agricultural biowaste, such as animal manure and plant residues, offers an interesting contribution to the renewable energy strategies. The biogas plants, where the complex substrates, such as agricultural biowaste, get converted into biogas, are then able to produce electricity and heat, which can be used in the farm and delivered to the main electricity grid. Moreover, due to its decentralised nature, the implementation of small-scale biogas plants can supply renewable energy to people without the need for large-scale infrastructural networks such as electricity grids, thereby solving part of the populations’ energy demands. The production of biogas from complex biowaste is rate-limited by the hydrolysis step of the anaerobic digestion process. However the hydrolysis step has been poorly described and not very well understood, resulting in non-optimized anaerobic digester volumes. Due to that, a review on the anaerobic hydrolysis step is in this thesis presented, together with ways to accelerate the hydrolysis, either by mitigating the revealed inhibiting compounds, by pre-treating difficultly hydrolysable substrates, or as is nowadays also applied, by adding hydrolytic enzymes to full scale biogas co-digestion plants. In this thesis two compounds were studied in terms of its inhibiting effect on hydrolysis: ammonia nitrogen and Humic Matter (HM). Ammonia nitrogen did not show an inhibiting effect on anaerobic hydrolysis. On the other hand Humic acids-like (HAL) and Fulvic acids-like (FAL) extracted from fesh cow manure and silage maize, and in this thesis extensively described in terms of its chemical characteristics, showed a strong inhibiting effect on the hydrolysis step. Plant matter is high in lignocellulosic biomass. Lignocellulosic biomass consists of lignin, which is resistant to anaerobic degradation, cellulose and hemicelluloses. Pre-treatment of plant material, is particularly important in order to increase biogas production during co-digestion of manure. Calcium hydroxide pre-treatment was shown, in this thesis, to improve the biodegradability of lignocellulosic biomass, especially for high lignin content substrates. Maleic acid generated the highest percentage of dissolved COD during pre-treatment, however its high market price makes it not so attractive as calcium hydroxyde. Enzyme addition has recently gained the attention of biogas plants’ operators in order to accelerate hydrolysis, however further research is needed. <br/

Three Essays on the Economics of Public Libraries

This dissertation explores empirical issues concerning public libraries in the United States. In particular, it analyzes the direct and indirect effects to and from public libraries, on different issues such as charitable donations, labor market outcomes, institutions and technical efficiency. Chapter 1 discusses the economics of public libraries and its relevance. In addition, it provides an outline of the dissertation and its main contribution to the literature. Chapter 2, analyzes the determinants of donations to public libraries testing the crowding effect from government funding of public libraries. I find suggestive results of a crowd in effect with an inverted U shape in all levels of government. In other words, additional government dollars increase private donations to public libraries at a decreasing rate. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of public library programs and participation on unemployment and labor force participation in Appalachia. Using an instrumental variable approach, I show that neither adult nor children’s programs and participation affect local labor market outcomes. These results are robust across different specifications. Chapter 4 explores the institutional determinants of public library technical efficiency in West Virginia. The analysis is carried out in two steps. First, I document considerable cross-district variation in library efficiency. Then, I estimate the effect of institutional characteristics on the technical efficiency measures. I find consistent evidence that urban libraries are more inefficient than county and multi-jurisdictional libraries. In addition, I find revenue from local sources is associated with reduced efficiency, contrary to what would be predicted by local public goods producer theory. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by summarizing its main findings and discussing possible implications