1,386 research outputs found
Tracing Spasmodic Dysphonia: the source of Ludwig Traube’s priority
Objectives: Since the mid-20th century, one citation is given historical priority as the first description of Spasmodic Dysphonia (SD): Ludwig Traube’s 1871 case of the “spastic form of nervous hoarseness”. Our objective is to understand how this case serves as the foundation of understanding laryngeal movement disorders.
Methods: The original German paper was located and translated. Bibliographical and bibliometric methods are used to determine the citation history of this original source over the past 140 years.
Results: Although secondary citations in contemporary publications typically credit Traube for establishing the clinical entity SD, his case does not conform to currently accepted diagnostic features. Citation patterns indicate the source of Traube’s priority is publications by Arnold and Luchsinger, mid-20th century ENT clinician, particularly their influential 1965 textbook used to train US and UK clinicians on voice disorders for several generations.
Conclusions: Sometimes secondary citations in medical literature lead to the inadvertent perpetuation of factual misrepresentation. The clinical picture of Traube’s original case does not represent what clinicians would recognize as SD today. The rich 19th century literature on voice disorders is a valuable resource for present day clinicians
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Speaking out about gender imbalance in invited speakers improves diversity.
Omissions of qualified women scientists from major meeting programs continue to occur despite a surge in articles indicating persistent gender-discriminatory practices in hiring and promotion, and calls for gender balance in conference organizing committees
Effects of Antihypertensive Medications on Quality of Life in Elderly Hypertensive Women
The impact of antihypertensive medications on the quality of life of elderly hypertensive women has rarely been systematically evaluated in large clinical trials using drugs from the new generations of pharmaceutic preparations. We carried out a multicenter, randomized double-blind clinical trial with 309 hypertensive women aged 60 to 80 years to assess effects of atenolol, enalapril, and isradipine on measures of quality of life over a 22-week period. The patients had mild to moderate hypertension. Hydrochlorothiazide was added to treatment if monotherapy was inadequate in lowering blood pressure. At the conclusion of the trial the three drug groups did not differ in degree of reduction of diastolic blood pressure or in supplementation with hydrochlorothiazide. Over the 22-week trial, linear trend analysis showed no differences between the treatment groups in change from baseline on quality of life measures of well-being, physical status, emotional status, cognitive functioning, and social role participation. Regarding each of 33 physical side effects over the 22 weeks, we found no general difference between atenolol, enalapril, and isradipine groups on measures of change in distress over symptoms except for enalapril patients who worsened in distress over cough (P = .001) and atenolol patients who worsened in distress over dry mouth (P = .014). Centering on three medications that are relatively new additions to the armamentarium for blood pressure control, the findings underline the increasing opportunities for the physician to select drugs that can control blood pressure while maintaining the quality of life of elderly hypertensive women
Solar cell efficiency enhancement via light trapping in printable resonant dielectric nanosphere arrays
Resonant dielectric structures are a promising platform for addressing the key challenge of light trapping in thin-film solar cells. We experimentally and theoretically demonstrate efficiency enhancements in solar cells from dielectric nanosphere arrays. Two distinct amorphous silicon photovoltaic architectures were improved using this versatile light-trapping platform. In one structure, the colloidal monolayer couples light into the absorber in the near-field acting as a photonic crystal light-trapping element. In the other, it acts in the far-field as a graded index antireflection coating to further improve a cell which already included a state-of-the-art random light-trapping texture to achieve a conversion efficiency over 11%. For the near-field flat cell architecture, we directly fabricated the colloidal monolayer on the device through Langmuir–Blodgett deposition in a scalable process that does not degrade the active material. In addition, we present a novel transfer printing method, which utilizes chemical crosslinking of an optically thin adhesion layer to tether sphere arrays to the device surface. The minimally invasive processing conditions of this transfer method enable the application to a wide range of solar cells and other optoelectronic devices.
False-color SEM image of an amorphous silicon solar cell with resonant spheres on top
Inverting the Sachs-Wolfe Formula: an Inverse Problem Arising in Early-Universe Cosmology
The (ordinary) Sachs-Wolfe effect relates primordial matter perturbations to
the temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background
radiation; can be observed in all directions around us. A standard
but idealised model of this effect leads to an infinite set of moment-like
equations: the integral of with respect to k ()
is equal to a given constant, , for . Here, P is the
power spectrum of the primordial density variations, is a spherical
Bessel function and y is a positive constant. It is shown how to solve these
equations exactly for ~. The same solution can be recovered, in
principle, if the first ~m equations are discarded. Comparisons with classical
moment problems (where is replaced by ) are made.Comment: In Press Inverse Problems 1999, 15 pages, 0 figures, Late
Improving numerical reasoning capabilities of inductive logic programming systems
Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) systems have been largely applied to classification problems with a considerable success. The use of ILP systems in problems requiring numerical reasoning capabilities has been far less successful. Current systems have very limited numerical reasoning capabilities, which limits the range of domains where the ILP paradigm may be applied. This paper proposes improvements in numerical reasoning capabilities of ILP systems. It proposes the use of statistical-based techniques like Model Validation and Model Selection to improve noise handling and it introduces a new search stopping criterium based on the PAG method to evaluate learning performance. We have found these extensions essential to improve on results mer statistical-based algorithms for time series forecasting used in the empirical evaluation study
Faster Approximate String Matching for Short Patterns
We study the classical approximate string matching problem, that is, given
strings and and an error threshold , find all ending positions of
substrings of whose edit distance to is at most . Let and
have lengths and , respectively. On a standard unit-cost word RAM with
word size we present an algorithm using time When is
short, namely, or this
improves the previously best known time bounds for the problem. The result is
achieved using a novel implementation of the Landau-Vishkin algorithm based on
tabulation and word-level parallelism.Comment: To appear in Theory of Computing System
S-wave Meson-Meson Scattering from Unitarized U(3) Chiral Lagrangians
An investigation of the s-wave channels in meson-meson scattering is
performed within a U(3) chiral unitary approach. Our calculations are based on
a chiral effective Lagrangian which includes the eta' as an explicit degree of
freedom and incorporates important features of the underlying QCD Lagrangian
such as the axial U(1) anomaly. We employ a coupled channel Bethe-Salpeter
equation to generate poles from composed states of two pseudoscalar mesons. Our
results are compared with experimental phase shifts up to 1.5 GeV and effects
of the eta' within this scheme are discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure
Hard Two-Photon Contribution to Elastic Lepton-Proton Scattering: Determined by the OLYMPUS Experiment
The OLYMPUS collaboration reports on a precision measurement of the
positron-proton to electron-proton elastic cross section ratio, ,
a direct measure of the contribution of hard two-photon exchange to the elastic
cross section. In the OLYMPUS measurement, 2.01~GeV electron and positron beams
were directed through a hydrogen gas target internal to the DORIS storage ring
at DESY. A toroidal magnetic spectrometer instrumented with drift chambers and
time-of-flight scintillators detected elastically scattered leptons in
coincidence with recoiling protons over a scattering angle range of to . The relative luminosity between the two beam species
was monitored using tracking telescopes of interleaved GEM and MWPC detectors
at , as well as symmetric M{\o}ller/Bhabha calorimeters at
. A total integrated luminosity of 4.5~fb was collected. In
the extraction of , radiative effects were taken into account
using a Monte Carlo generator to simulate the convolutions of internal
bremsstrahlung with experiment-specific conditions such as detector acceptance
and reconstruction efficiency. The resulting values of , presented
here for a wide range of virtual photon polarization ,
are smaller than some hadronic two-photon exchange calculations predict, but
are in reasonable agreement with a subtracted dispersion model and a
phenomenological fit to the form factor data.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 table
Inhibition of lipid oxidation increases glucose metabolism and enhances 2-deoxy-2-[¹⁸F]fluoro-D-glucose uptake in prostate cancer mouse xenografts
Includes bibliographic references.PURPOSE: Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second most common cause of cancer-related death among men in the United States. Due to the lipid-driven metabolic phenotype of Pca, imaging with 2-deoxy-2-[¹⁸F]fluoro-D-glucose ([¹⁸F]FDG) is suboptimal, since tumors tend to have low avidity for glucose. PROCEDURES: We have used the fat oxidation inhibitor etomoxir (2-[6-(4-chlorophenoxy)-hexyl]oxirane-2-carboxylate) that targets carnitine-palmitoyl-transferase-1 (CPT-1) to increase glucose uptake in PCa cell lines. Small hairpin RNA specific for CPT1A was used to confirm the glycolytic switch induced by etomoxir in vitro. Systemic etomoxir treatment was used to enhance [¹⁸F]FDG-positron emission tomography ([¹⁸F]FDG-PET) imaging in PCa xenograft mouse models in 24 h. RESULTS: PCa cells significantly oxidize more of circulating fatty acids than benign cells via CPT-1 enzyme, and blocking this lipid oxidation resulted in activation of the Warburg effect and enhanced [¹⁸F]FDG signal in PCa mouse models. CONCLUSIONS: Inhibition of lipid oxidation plays a major role in elevating glucose metabolism of PCa cells, with potential for imaging enhancement that could also be extended to other cancers
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