Cardiovascular Responses to Static Assessments of Trunk Muscles

Objectives: To investigate the cardiovascular responses to standard static assessments of strength and endurance of trunk extensor muscles. Methods: Trunk extensor performances of ten healthy men, 48.2±5.6 years, and 10 healthy women, 49±5.7 years, were assessed by means of a maximum static strength test [consisting in maximal voluntary contractions [MVC] performed with a specific dynamometer], and two static endurance tests [the Sorensen test, and a 50 percent MVC test]. Heart rate [HR], auscultatory systolic [SBP], and diastolic blood pressure [DBP] were recorded throughout the tests. Results: The MVCs induced significant increases of HR and SBP [mean peak values averaging 90 [female] to 95 [male] beats per minute and 133 [female] to 141 [male] mmHg]. The HR, SBP, and DBP values increased significantly across time throughout both endurance static tests. At the end of these tests, mean HR, SBP, and DBP reached 114 to 122 beats per minute, 172 to 185 mmHg, and 112 to 120 mmHg. Genders differed significantly with regard to holding times [longer in females], but a gender effect was only found on SBP [higher in males]. Heart rate and SBP increases were significantly higher in males than in female subjects. Conclusions: The strength test seems less demanding than expected, though our results need to be confirmed. Standard static endurance tests yield sizeable functional stress on the cardiovascular system. Our study emphasizes the need to exclude subjects with cardiac trouble from such efforts and suggests the relevance of monitoring cardiovascular parameters if tests are performed until exhaustion

Archaeological Approaches to Human Remains: France

International audienceThe French scholarly landscape of human skeletal studies does not lend itself easily to general overviews due to separation of related disciplines, regionalism, and, most importantly, deep historical origins. Due to separate developmental trajectories, there is no unified discipline of "anthropology" in France, a situation that is similar to the academic organization of other European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom. When "anthropologists," either biological or sociocultural, interact in joint projects, a development that is encouraged but not formalized, this is considered part of an interdisciplinary approach. This situation is not unique to France, but is likely an outcome of colonization of, especially, parts of Africa, which fostered the development of ethnobiologie as part of ethnology (ethnologie) that includes ethnography, a subject that developed alongside but separately from physical anthropology in the early decades of the twentieth century in France (see Conklin 2013). Paul Broca, a medical specialist in neuroanatomy, is considered the "father of physical anthropology" in France (see below). Thus biological anthropology (also l'anthropologie biologique, bioanthropologie, or anthropobiologie), formerly physical anthropology (l'anthropologie physique), has a longer association with medicine and with paleontology and prehistory (i.e., Paleolithic to Neolithic periods)-stretching well back into the nineteenth century-than with archaeology (i.e., protohistoric and historic periods). In France, prehistory sprang from paleontology (contra Cleuziou et al. 1991, who cite an origin from physical anthropology); philosophy , with its inheritance from the siècle des lumières (the "Enlightenment"); and geology, a science that deals with the "natural history of mankind." With its diverse origins, the interdisciplinary ambition of such studies today is aptly summarized o