Restorative Neurostimulation Therapy Compared to Optimal Medical Management: A Randomized Evaluation (RESTORE) for the Treatment of Chronic Mechanical Low Back Pain due to Multifidus Dysfunction.

Introduction: Many interventional strategies are commonly used to treat chronic low back pain (CLBP), though few are specifically intended to target the distinct underlying pathomechanisms causing low back pain. Restorative neurostimulation has been suggested as a specific treatment for mechanical CLBP resulting from multifidus dysfunction. In this randomized controlled trial, we report outcomes from a cohort of patients with CLBP associated with multifidus dysfunction treated with restorative neurostimulation compared to those randomized to a control group receiving optimal medical management (OMM) over 1 year.

Predicting the effect of landscape structure on epidemic invasion using an analytical estimate for infection rate.

The influence of landscape structure on epidemic invasion of agricultural crops is often underestimated in the construction and analysis of epidemiological models. Computer simulations of individual-based models (IBMs) are widely used to characterize disease spread under different management scenarios but can be slow in exploring large numbers of different landscape configurations. Here, we address the problem of finding an analytical measure of the impact of the spatial structure of a crop landscape on the invasion and spread of plant pathogens.