2,231 research outputs found
395 OSTEOPHYTES AND JOINT SPACE NARROWING ARE INDEPENDENTLY ASSOCIATED WITH PAIN IN FINGER JOINTS IN HAND OSTEOARTHRITIS
Objective To study the associations between structural abnormalities on ultrasound (US) or conventional x-rays (CR) and pain in hand osteoarthritis (HOA). Methods In 55 consecutive patients with HOA (mean age 61 years, 86% women) fulfilling the American College of Rheumatology criteria, pain in 30 separate hand joints was assessed upon palpation; osteophytes were assessed by US and CR and joint space narrowing (JSN) by CR. Associations between structural abnormalities and pain per joint were analysed using generalised estimated equations to account for patient effects and adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, US inflammatory features and other remaining structural abnormalities. Results In 1649 joints, 69% and 46% had osteophytes on US and CR, respectively and 47% had JSN. Osteophytes and JSN showed independent associations with pain per joint adjusted: OR for osteophytes: 4.8 (95% CI 3.1 to 7.5) for US and 4.1 (95% CI 2.4 to 7.1) for CR; for JSN: 4.2 (95% CI 2.0 to 9.0). Conclusions Osteophytes and JSN are independently associated with pain in individual HOA joints, taking into account patient effects
The problem of shot selection in basketball
In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player
with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this paper, I
explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up
the shot by considering a simple theoretical model of the shot selection
process, in which the quality of shot opportunities generated by the offense is
assumed to fall randomly within a uniform distribution. I derive an answer to
the question "how likely must the shot be to go in before the player should
take it?", and show that this "lower cutoff" for shot quality depends
crucially on the number of shot opportunities remaining (say, before the
shot clock expires), with larger demanding that only higher-quality shots
should be taken. The function is also derived in the presence of a
finite turnover rate and used to predict the shooting rate of an
optimal-shooting team as a function of time. This prediction is compared to
observed shooting rates from the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the
comparison suggests that NBA players tend to wait too long before shooting and
undervalue the probability of committing a turnover.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; comparison to NBA data adde
Anomalous Spin Dynamics observed by High Frequency ESR in Honeycomb Lattice Antiferromagnet InCu2/3V1/3O3
High-frequency ESR results on the S=1/2 Heisenberg hexagonal antiferromagnet
InCu2/3V1/3O3 are reported. This compound appears to be a rare model substance
for the honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet with very weak interlayer couplings.
The high-temperature magnetic susceptibility can be interpreted by the S=1/2
honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet, and it shows a magnetic-order-like anomaly
at TN=38 K. Although, the resonance field of our high-frequency ESR shows the
typical behavior of the antiferromagnetic resonance, the linewidth of our
high-frequency ESR continues to increase below TN, while it tends to decrease
as the temperature in a conventional three-dimensional antiferromagnet
decreases. In general, a honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet is expected to show
a simple antiferromagnetic order similar to that of a square lattice
antiferromagnet theoretically because both antiferromagnets are bipartite
lattices. However, we suggest that the observed anomalous spin dynamics below
TN is the peculiar feature of the honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet that is not
observed in the square lattice antiferromagnet.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Spin-Peierls transition in an anisotropic two-dimensional XY model
The two-dimensional Jordan-Wigner transformation is used to investigate the
zero temperature spin-Peierls transition for an anisotropic two-dimensional XY
model in adiabatic limit. The phase diagram between the dimerized (D) state and
uniform (U) state is shown in the parameter space of dimensionless interchain
coupling and spin-lattice coupling . It is found
that the spin-lattice coupling must exceed some critical value
in order to reach the D phase for any finite . The dependence of on
is given by for and the transition between U and D
phase is of first-order for at least .Comment: 2 eps figures, considerable revisions were mad
Predicting risk for radiographic damage in rheumatoid arthritis:comparative analysis of the multi-biomarker disease activity score and conventional measures of disease activity in multiple studies
Pathophysiology and treatment of rheumatic disease
The opposites task: Using general rules to test cognitive flexibility in preschoolers
A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. Executive functions play an important role in cognitive development, and during the preschool years especially, children's performance is limited in tasks that demand flexibility in their behavior. We asked whether preschoolers would exhibit limitations when they are required to apply a general rule in the context of novel stimuli on every trial (the "opposites" task). Two types of inhibitory processing were measured: response interference (resistance to interference from a competing response) and proactive interference (resistance to interference from a previously relevant rule). Group data show 3-year-olds have difficulty inhibiting prepotent tendencies under these conditions, whereas 5-year-olds' accuracy is near ceiling in the task. (Contains 4 footnotes and 1 table.
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