25,641 research outputs found
Contemporary splinting practice in the UK for adults with neurological dysfunction: A cross-sectional survey
This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Aim: To explore the contemporary splinting practice of UK occupational therapists and physiotherapists for adults with neurological dysfunction.
Method: Cross-sectional online survey of members of the Association of Chartered Physiotherapists in Neurology and College of Occupational Therapists Specialist Section Neurological Practice.
Results: Four hundred and twenty therapists completed the survey. Contracture management is the most common rationale for therapists splinting adults with neurological dysfunction. Other shared therapeutic goals of splinting include maintaining muscle and joint alignment, spasticity management, function, pain management and control of oedema. Considerable clinical uncertainty was uncovered in practice particularly around wearing regimens of splints. Most therapists have access to locally-derived splinting guidelines, which may contribute to this diversity of practice.
Conclusions: This study provides a unique insight into aspects of contemporary splinting practice among UK therapists, who belong to a specialist neurological professional network and work in a number of different health-care settings with adults who have a neurological condition. Study findings show a wide variation in splinting practice, thereby indicating a potential need for national guidance to assist therapists in this area of clinical uncertainty. Further research is required to establish best practice parameters for splinting in neurological rehabilitation
The type of adjuvant in whole inactivated influenza a virus vaccines impacts vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease
Influenza A virus (IAV) causes a disease burden in the swine industry in the US and is a challenge to prevent due to substantial genetic and antigenic diversity of IAV that circulate in pig populations. Whole inactivated virus (WIV) vaccines formulated with oil-in-water (OW) adjuvant are commonly used in swine. However, WIV-OW are associated with vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease (VAERD) when the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase of the vaccine strain are mismatched with the challenge virus. Here, we assessed if different types of adjuvant in WIV vaccine formulations impacted VAERD outcome. WIV vaccines with a swine δ1-H1N2 were formulated with different commercial adjuvants: OW1, OW2, nano-emulsion squalene-based (NE) and gel polymer (GP). Pigs were vaccinated twice by the intramuscular route, 3 weeks apart, then challenged with an H1N1pdm09 three weeks post-boost and necropsied at 5 days post infection. All WIV vaccines elicited antibodies detected using the hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assay against the homologous vaccine virus, but not against the heterologous challenge virus; in contrast, all vaccinated groups had cross-reactive IgG antibody and IFN-γ responses against H1N1pdm09, with a higher magnitude observed in OW groups. Both OW groups demonstrated robust homologous HI titers and cross-reactivity against heterologous H1 viruses in the same genetic lineage. However, both OW groups had severe immunopathology consistent with VAERD after challenge when compared to NE, GP, and non-vaccinated challenge controls. None of the WIV formulations protected pigs from heterologous virus replication in the lungs or nasal cavity. Thus, although the type of adjuvant in the WIV formulation played a significant role in the magnitude of immune response to homologous and antigenically similar H1, none tested here increased the breadth of protection against the antigenically-distinct challenge virus, and some impacted immunopathology after challenge
Active Galactic Nuclei with Starbursts: Sources for Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays
Ultra high energy cosmic ray events presently show a spectrum, which we
interpret here as galactic cosmic rays due to a starburst in the radio galaxy
Cen A pushed up in energy by the shock of a relativistic jet. The knee feature
and the particles with energy immediately higher in galactic cosmic rays then
turn into the bulk of ultra high energy cosmic rays. This entails that all
ultra high energy cosmic rays are heavy nuclei. This picture is viable if the
majority of the observed ultra high energy events come from the radio galaxy
Cen A, and are scattered by intergalactic magnetic fields across most of the
sky.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, proceedings of "High-Energy Gamma-rays and
Neutrinos from Extra-Galactic Sources", Heidelber
Catching the Bound States in the Continuum of a Phantom Atom in Graphene
We explore theoretically the formation of bound states in the continuum
(BICs) in graphene hosting two collinear adatoms situated at different sides of
the sheet and at the center of the hexagonal cell, where a phantom atom of a
fictitious lattice emulates the six carbons of the cell. We verify that in this
configuration the local density of states (LDOS) near the Dirac points exhibits
two characteristic features: i) the cubic dependence on energy instead of the
linear one for graphene as found in New J. Phys. 16, 013045 (2014) and ii)
formation of BICs as aftermath of a Fano destructive interference assisted by
the Coulomb correlations in the adatoms. For the geometry where adatoms are
collinear to carbon atoms, we report absence of BICs
Quantum phase transition triggering magnetic BICs in graphene
Graphene hosting a pair of collinear adatoms in the phantom atom
configuration has pseudogap with cubic scaling on energy,
which leads to the appearance of
spin-degenerate bound states in the continuum (BICs) [Phys. Rev. B 92, 045409
(2015)]. In the case when adatoms are locally coupled to a single carbon atom
the pseudogap scales linearly with energy, which prevents the formation of
BICs. In this Letter, we explore the effects of non-local coupling
characterized by the Fano factor of interference tunable by changing
the slope of the Dirac cones in the graphene band-structure. We demonstrate
that three distinct regimes can be identified: i) for (critical
point) a mixed pseudogap appears
yielding a phase with spin-degenerate BICs; ii) near when
the system undergoes a quantum phase
transition in which the new phase is characterized by magnetic BICs and iii) at
a second critical value the cubic scaling of the pseudogap with
energy characteristic to the phantom atom
configuration is restored and the phase with non-magnetic BICs is recovered.
The phase with magnetic BICs can be described in terms of an effective
intrinsic exchange field of ferromagnetic nature between the adatoms mediated
by graphene monolayer. We thus propose a new type of quantum phase transition
resulting from the competition between the states characterized by
spin-degenerate and magnetic BICs
Components of multifractality in the Central England Temperature anomaly series
We study the multifractal nature of the Central England Temperature (CET)
anomaly, a time series that spans more than 200 years. The series is analyzed
as a complete data set and considering a sliding window of 11 years. In both
cases, we quantify the broadness of the multifractal spectrum as well as its
components defined by the deviations from the Gaussian distribution and the
influence of the dependence between measurements. The results show that the
chief contribution to the multifractal structure comes from the dynamical
dependencies, mainly the weak ones, followed by a residual contribution of the
deviations from Gaussianity. However, using the sliding window, we verify that
the spikes in the non-Gaussian contribution occur at very close dates
associated with climate changes determined in previous works by component
analysis methods. Moreover, the strong non-Gaussian contribution found in the
multifractal measures from the 1960s onwards is in agreement with global
results very recently proposed in the literature.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure
Indução floral em plantas de sabiá (Mimosa caesalpiniifolia) com aplicação de paclobutrazol.
[Flowering induction in sabia plants (Mimosa caesalpiniifolia) with paclobutrazol]. Abstract: The presence of thorns dominant character in sabiá, makes it difficult their exploitation which makes it necessary to apply genetic improvement techniques, to select plants that do not show this trait. To expedite the improvement, the use of bioregulators may be an alternative, as the paclobutrazol (PBZ), to induce flowering, aiming to reduce the time for selection. Four doses It was tested four doses of PBZ applied for five months from the fourth month after sowing. The results of four early flowering plants at eleven months were obtained in seasons 5 and 6 with doses of 1 ml and 2 ml of PBZ. There was evidence that the PBZ contributed to the early flowering since the control treatment did not show similar results. We concluded that the absence of thorns on ?sabiá? is a recessive character because many plants exhibited the presence of thorns after germination, even collected from a population without thorns. The induction of flowering at eleven months of age was related to the use of PBZ
Morphogenetic and structural characteristics of Brachiaria brizantha cv. Marandu subjected to levels of shading.
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