Manual Therapy Effects on Nonspecific Neck Pain Are Not Mediated by Mechanisms Related to Conditioned Pain Modulation: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Background. Manual therapy (MT) is a treatment recommended by clinical practice guidelines in the management of patients with neck pain. However, the mechanisms through which MT works remain unknown. The aim of the present study is to investigate if MT is mediated by mechanisms related to conditioned pain modulation (CPM), comparing the effects of painful with a pain-free MT treatment. Methods. A two-arm, parallel, randomized controlled clinical trial with concealed allocation and blinding of the outcome assessor was conducted in university students with chronic or recurrent nonspecific neck pain (NSNP). Participants received either a painful or pain-free MT session. Psychophysical variables including pressure pain thresholds, CPM, temporal summation of pain and cold pain intensity were assessed before and immediately after treatment. In addition, changes in neck pain intensity over the following 7 days and self-perceived improvement immediately and 7 days after treatment were assessed. Results: No significant differences were found between groups in any of the psychophysical variables or in patients’ self-perceived improvement. Only a significantly greater decrease in neck pain intensity immediately after treatment was found in the pain-free MT group compared to the painful MT group. Conclusion: The results suggest that the immediate and short-term effects of MT on NSNP are not mediated by CPM-related mechanisms.A.A.-R was supported with a university teacher training contract (FPU) in the early stages of this work by the Spanish Ministry of Universitie

Upper-limb muscular electrical stimulation driven by EEG-based detections of the intentions to move: a proposed intervention for patients with stroke

Note: As originally published there ares errors in this document. The author names were presented as "J. Ibanez, J.I. Serrano, M.D. del Castillo, E. Monge, F. Molina, F.M. Rivas, I. Alguacil, J.C. Miangolarra and J.L. Pons" but were instead intended to be: "E. Monge-Pereira, F. Molina-Rueda, F. Rivas-Montero, I. Alguacil-Diego, and J.C. Miangolarra-Page" as noted here. The article PDF remains as originally published.This study proposes an intervention for stroke patients in which electrical stimulation of muscles in the affected arm is supplied when movement intention is detected from the electroencephalographic signal. The detection relies on the combined analysis of two movement related cortical patterns: the event-related desynchronization and the bereitschaftspotential. Results with two healthy subjects and three chronic stroke patients show that reliable EEG-based estimations of the movement onsets can be generated (on average, 66.9 % (std: 26.4) of the movements are detected with 0.42 (std: 0.17) false activations per minute) which in turn give rise to electrical stimuli providing sensory feedback tightly associated to the movement planning (average detection latency of the onsets of the movements was 54.4 (std: 287.9 ms)).Peer Reviewe

The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity