Comparison of a minimally invasive posterior approach and the standard posterior approach for total hip arthroplasty A prospective and comparative study

Abstract Background It is not clear whether total hip arthroplasty performed via a minimally invasive approach leads to less muscle trauma compared to the standard approach. Materials and methods To investigate whether a minimally invasive posterior approach for total hip arthroplasty results in lower levels of muscle-derived enzymes and better post-operative clinical results than those obtained with the standard posterolateral approach fifty patients in both groups were compared in a prospective and comparative study. The following parameters were examined: muscle-derived enzymes CPK, CK-MM and myoglobin pre-operatively, 24 and 48 hours post-operatively, CRP and hemoglobin on the third postoperative day, loss of blood, daily pain levels, the rate of recovery (time taken to attain predefined functional parameters), the Oxford Hip Score, the SF-36 score and the WOMAC score pre-operatively and six weeks post-surgery, the position of the implant and the cement coating by post-operative X-ray examination. Results and Conclusions The minimally invasive operated patients exhibited a significantly lower loss of blood, significantly less pain at rest and a faster rate of recovery but the clinical chemistry values and the other clinical parameters were comparable.</p

Tears Evoke the Intention to Offer Social Support: A Systematic Investigation of the Interpersonal Effects of Emotional Crying Across 41 Countries

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7,007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = .49 [.43, .55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one’s group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood