The Use of Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation in the Gait Training of Children with Cerebral Palsy: A Literature Review

Cerebral palsy is a common developmental disorder that causes a wide array of problems in the population. The manifestations of cerebral palsy commonly interfere with the child\u27s activities of daily living, including the important function of gait. It is therefore important that physical therapists be knowledgeable about the various treatment options used in gait training of children with cerebral palsy, as well as their effectiveness. Neurodevelopmental techniques (NDT), neurosurgical interventions, and orthotics are just a few of the numerous treatment options available for the gait training of children with cerebral palsy. Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) has recently become a popular method used to improve the child with cerebral palsy\u27s gait pattern, however the use of NMES, and more specifically its effectiveness, is controversial. The purpose of this literature review is to discuss the theoretical foundations supporting NMES, the mechanism behind NMES, and the various forms and effects of NMES, and its use in the gait training of children with cerebral palsy. Through the review of current literature, NMES was found to be an effective method of improving gait function in children with cerebral palsy

VC-dimension of short Presburger formulas

We study VC-dimension of short formulas in Presburger Arithmetic, defined to have a bounded number of variables, quantifiers and atoms. We give both lower and upper bounds, which are tight up to a polynomial factor in the bit length of the formula

Mothers’ Attributions in Reminiscing Conversations About Children’s Successes and Failures: Connections With Children’s Self-Evaluations

Effects of feedback on children’s self-evaluations are well established, yet little is known about how parents talk with children about everyday successes and failures, despite the importance of parent–child reminiscing in children’s psychological understanding. We examine mothers’ attributions and performance evaluations in conversations about their 5-year-olds’ (N = 80) success and failure experiences, and connections between conversations and children’s self-evaluations. Conversations differed for success and failure: Mothers were equally likely to make internal-person, internal-process, or external attributions for successes, but were most likely to make an evaluation. For failures, mothers were equally likely to make internal-process or external attributions, or evaluations. Internal-person attributions for success and external attributions were associated with negative self-evaluations. However, children expressed fewer negative self-evaluations when mothers made internal-process attributions for failure, or positively evaluated the success. Results support the experimental literature and extend it to external attributions, which were common in mothers’ framing and linked to negative self-evaluations

Defining an International Standard Set of Outcome Measures for Patients With Hip or Knee Osteoarthritis: Consensus of the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis Working Group

OBJECTIVE: To define a minimum Standard Set of outcome measures and case-mix factors for monitoring, comparing, and improving health care for patients with clinically diagnosed hip or knee osteoarthritis (OA), with a focus on defining the outcomes that matter most to patients. METHODS: An international working group of patients, arthroplasty register experts, orthopedic surgeons, primary care physicians, rheumatologists, and physiotherapists representing 10 countries was assembled to review existing literature and practices for assessing outcomes of pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic OA therapies, including surgery. A series of 8 teleconferences, incorporating a modified Delphi process, were held to reach consensus. RESULTS: The working group reached consensus on a concise set of outcome measures to evaluate patients\u27 joint pain, physical functioning, health-related quality of life, work status, mortality, reoperations, readmissions, and overall satisfaction with treatment result. To support analysis of these outcome measures, pertinent baseline characteristics and risk factor metrics were defined. Annual outcome measurement is recommended for all patients. CONCLUSION: We have defined a Standard Set of outcome measures for monitoring the care of people with clinically diagnosed hip or knee OA that is appropriate for use across all treatment and care settings. We believe this Standard Set provides meaningful, comparable, and easy to interpret measures ready to implement in clinics and/or registries globally. We view this set as an initial step that, when combined with cost data, will facilitate value-based health care improvements in the treatment of hip and knee OA

En tvärdisciplinär studie om barns utsagor vid sexuella övergrepp – Har barn förmågan att leva upp till domstolars krav?

Sexuella övergrepp mot barn tillhör de mål som är allra svårast att hantera i svenska domstolar. Ofta består bevisningen i målet endast av barnets utsaga, vilket medför svåra bevisvärderingsproblem. Högsta domstolen har i NJA 2010 s. 671 fastslagit ett antal kriterier som kan vara behjälpliga vid bevisvärdering av muntliga utsagor. Vad som bland annat kan beaktas är om utsagan är lång, sammanhängande och detaljrik. Någon distinktion mellan utsagor från vuxna och barn görs emellertid inte. Prejudikatet har varit föremål för kritik i den juridiska litteraturen. Det har bland annat anförts att kriterierna inte tar hänsyn till barns svårigheter med att berätta om sexuella övergrepp. Med intentionen att studera rätten ur ett annat perspektiv antar denna uppsats en tvärdisciplinär ansats. Syftet med uppsatsen är således att, utifrån den rättsanalytiska metoden, undersöka huruvida svenska domstolars bevisvärdering av barns utsagor i mål om sexualbrott har stöd i rättspsykologisk forskning. Rättspsykologisk forskning visar att barn har stora svårigheter med att berätta om sexuella övergrepp. Barnens utsagor tenderar att vara detaljfattiga och fragmentariska – vilket närmast står i konstrast till Högsta domstolens kriterier. I april 2017 kom Högsta domstolen emellertid med ett nytt prejudikat: NJA 2017 s. 316 II. I prejudikatet uttalas – med hänvisning till rättspsykologisk forskning i SOU 2017:7 – att kriterierna kan vara svåra att tillämpa på personer som av olika skäl har en nedsatt förmåga att uttrycka sig verbalt. Uppsatsen visar emellertid att innebörden av det nya prejudikatet förefaller vag. Svenska domstolars bevisvärdering av barns utsagor tycks sakna stöd i rättspsykologisk forskning kring hur barn berättar om sexuella övergrepp. Det är därför av vikt att kunskapen kring rättspsykologi ökar i rättsväsendet samt att innebörden av det nya prejudikatet förtydligas.Cases involving child sexual abuse are among the most complex cases for Swedish courts to handle. Evidence often only consists of the child’s statement, which complicates the process of evaluating the evidence. In order to facilitate the evaluation of oral statements the Supreme Court of Sweden established a number of different criteria in its ruling in NJA 2010 s. 671. The statements should for instance be coherent, comprehensive and detailed. However, no distinction is made between children and adults, when applying the different criteria. The precedent has therefore been criticized. Legal scholars have for instance argued that the criteria do not take into account the difficulties children may experience when testifying about sexual abuse. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach and combining legal analysis with a traditional legal dogmatic method the purpose of this thesis is to review how Swedish courts evaluate statements from children in cases of sexual abuse and whether or not the evaluation of evidence is supported by studies within the field of forensic psychology. Forensic psychology research shows that children, who have experienced sexual abuse, may have great difficulties sharing their experiences with others. Furthermore, research shows that – in contrast to the criteria established by the Supreme Court of Sweden – children's abuse disclosures are often fragmentary and tend to lack detailed descriptions. In April 2017 the Supreme Court of Sweden gave judgment in a new precedent in its ruling in NJA 2017 s. 316 II. In its judgement, the court stated – with reference to the forensic psychology research cited in SOU 2017:7 – that the criteria may be difficult to apply on individuals who have trouble or lack the ability to express themselves verbally. However, this thesis shows that the role and importance of the new judicial precedent is vague. The way Swedish courts evaluate statements from children in cases of sexual abuse do, in other words, not seem consistent with forensic psychology research and how children normally express themselves verbally. It is therefore important that both the knowledge and application of forensic psychology increases within the judicial system. In addition, the new precedent needs to be not only more emphasized, but also better clarified

Lobowings: A Pilot Study of Interprofessional Patient Safety Training

UNMHSC has endorsed Interprofessional Education (IPE) and is committed to developing meaningful curriculum and IPE experiences that will allow students to learn with and from each other about interprofessional collaborative practices. LoboWings training (developed by UNM Hospital) is designed to promote a culture of patient safety and teamwork through application of Crew Resource Management (CRM) techniques similar to those used in airline safety programs.https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hsc_ipe_posters/1000/thumbnail.jp

Review of Risk Assessment Tools to Predict Morbidity and Mortality in Elderly Surgical Patients Brief title: Review of surgical risk assessment tools

Background Informed surgical consent requires accurate estimation of risks and benefits. Multiple risk assessment tools are available; however, most are not widely used or are specific to certain interventions. Assessing surgical risk is especially challenging in elderly patients because of their range of comorbidities, level of frailty, or severity of illness and a number of available surgical interventions. Data sources We searched MEDLINE from January 2014 to July 2017 for studies that used risk assessment tools in studies on elderly surgical patients. We then sought the original articles describing each assessment tool and subsequent validation studies. Conclusions We identified risk assessment tools that can improve surgical risk assessment in elderly surgical patients. The majority of the identified tools are not commonly used for pre-operative risk assessment. NSQIP-PMP, mFI and SURPAS are promising tools. Age is commonly used to predict risk, but frailty may be a more appropriate measure

Phase-Variation of Pyelonephritis-Associated Pili in \u3ci\u3eEscherichia coli\u3c/i\u3e: Evidence for Transcriptional Regulation

The regulation of pyelonephritis-associated pill (pap) pflin gene transcription has been examined using two operons (pap-17 and pap-21) isolated from the pyelonephritogenic Escherichia coli strain C1212. DNA sequence analysis and E.coli minicell analysis were used to map two genes (papB and papl) within the pilin regulatory regions of both pap-17 and pap-21, and the protein products of these genes were identified. Pilin transcription, initiated at the papBA promoter, was monitored by constructing single copy operon fusions with lacZYA in E.coli K-12. Inocula- tion of E.coli (pap\u27-lac) strains onto solid M9 minimal medium containing glycerol and the Lac indicator X-gal (M9-Glycerol) yielded both Lac\u27 and Lac- colony phenotypes. The Lac\u27 (\u27phase on\u27) and Lac- (\u27phase off\u27) phenotypes were heritable since reinoculation of M9-Glycerol with bacteria picked from Lac\u27 colonies gave rise to a much higher fraction of Lac\u27 colonies than reinoculation of M9-Glycerol with bacteria picked from Lac- colonies. Measurement of phase transition rates for E.coli (pap17\u27-lac) inoculated onto M9-Gly- cerol showed that the Lac - -Lac+ transition frequency (1.57 x 10-4/cell/generation) was reduced 35-fold when cells were inoculated onto minimal medium containing glucose (M9-Glucose). However, the Lac+-Lac- transition frequency obtained using M9-Glycerol (2.60 x 10-2/cell/generation) was 1.4-fold lower compared to results obtained with M9-Glucose. In contrast, lowering the incubation temperature of E.coli (pap17\u27-lac) cultures from 37°C to 23\u27C caused all cells to shift to the Lac- state. Together, our results strongly indicate that pap pfli phase-variation is transcriptionally regulated and show that phase-variation is responsive to changes in the bacterial environment

Quantum Gravity and Equivariant Cohomology

A procedure for obtaining correlation function densities and wavefunctionals for quantum gravity from the Donaldson polynomial invariants of topological quantum field theories, is given. We illustrate how our procedure may be applied to three and four dimensional quantum gravity. Detailed expressions, derived from \sbft{}, are given in the three dimensional case. A procedure for normalizing these wavefunctionals is proposed.Comment: CTP-2340, 30 pgs., LaTeX Certain points are further elaborated on, typo's are corrected and one reference and acknowledgment adde