Background: Low back pain is a very common condition that affects most people at some point in their lives. It represents a burden on those affected, reducing their ability to participate in activities of normal life; at the same time, dealing with it increases the economic costs of healthcare.
Aim: The aim of this guideline was to contribute to WHO activities for reducing the impact of low back pain in adults and to support the WHO approach to integrated care for older people in primary care.
Objective: The training of dietitians emphasizes the development of strong communication skills. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) has been successfully employed for various healthcare scenarios; however, it is yet understudied in dietetics education. Therefore, we conducted a feasibility study to investigate the usefulness of IVR for the purpose of communication skills training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Clinicians and patients want to know the benefits and harms of outpatient treatment options for SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Purpose: To assess the benefits and harms of 12 different COVID-19 treatments in the outpatient setting.
Data Sources: Epistemonikos COVID-19 L·OVE Platform, searched on 4 April 2022.
Cycling is a sustainable transportation mode that provides many health, economic and environmental benefits to society. Cities with high rates of cycling are better placed to address modern challenges of densification, carbon-neutral and connected 20-min neighbourhood goals. Despite the known benefits of cycling, participation rates in Australian cities are critically low and declining.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBovine tuberculosis (bTB) caused by Mycobacterium (M.) bovis and M. caprae is a transmissible disease of livestock, notifiable to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTierarztl Prax Ausg K Kleintiere Heimtiere
October 2021
Atypical mycobacterial panniculitis was diagnosed in a cat. was identified as causative agent by 16 S rRNA gene sequence analysis. This a gram-positive rod-shaped acid-fast bacterium belonging to group was never reported before in diseased animals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContinuous delivery has gained increased popularity in industry as a development approach to develop, test, and deploy enhancements to software components in short development cycles. In order for continuous delivery to be effectively adopted, the services that a component depends upon must be readily available to software engineers in order to systematically apply quality assurance techniques. However, this may not always be possible as (i) these requisite services may have limited access and (ii) defects that are introduced in a component under development may cause ripple effects in real deployment environments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw
December 2020
Head-mounted displays enable social interactions in immersive virtual environments. However, it is yet unclear whether the technology is also suitable for collaborative work between remote group members. Previous research comparing group performance in nonimmersive computer-mediated communication and face-to-face (FtF) interaction yielded inconsistent results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFis the primary cause of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) and infects a wide range of domestic animal and wildlife species and humans. In Germany, bTB still emerges sporadically in cattle herds, free-ranging wildlife, diverse captive animal species, and humans. In order to understand the underlying population structure and estimate the population size fluctuation through time, we analyzed 131 strains from animals ( = 38) and humans ( = 93) in Germany from 1999 to 2017 by whole-genome sequencing (WGS), mycobacterial interspersed repetitive-unit-variable-number tandem-repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing, and spoligotyping.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing 894 phylogenetically diverse genomes of the complex (MTBC), we simulated the ability of the Hain Lifescience GenoType MTBC assay to differentiate the causative agents of tuberculosis. Here, we propose a revised interpretation of this assay to reflect its strengths (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Freshwater Pearl Mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera) is an endangered organism across its entire range. It has a complex life cycle and stringent habitat requirements and is therefore an indicator species for the general ecosystem health of host rivers. Whereas historical intensive pearl fishing contributed to population declines, excess nutrient and sediment loss associated with current land use pressures in host river catchments, including modern intensive farming practices, are now highlighted as primary contributory factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA label-free optical biosensor for the fast simultaneous determination of three mycotoxins, aflatoxin B (AFB), fumonisin B (FB) and deoxynivalenol (DON), in beer samples is presented. The biosensor is based on an array of ten Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) monolithically integrated along with their respective broad-band silicon light sources onto a single chip. Multi-analyte determination is accomplished by functionalizing the sensing arms of individual MZIs with mycotoxin-protein conjugates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA silicon-based miniaturized sensor chip combined with an advanced microfluidic module for the simultaneous, label-free immunochemical determination of four allergens, bovine milk protein, peanut protein, soy protein, and gliadin, is presented. The sensor chip consists of an array of 10 broad-band Mach-Zehnder interferometers (BB-MZIs) monolithically integrated on silicon, along with their respective broad-band light sources. The BB-MZIs were biofunctionalized with the targeted allergens and their responses during immunoreaction were monitored by multiplexing their transmission spectra through an external miniaturized spectrometer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBovine tuberculosis (bTB) caused by is a transmissible disease notifiable to the World Organization for Animal Health and to the European Union, with ongoing efforts of surveillance and eradication in every EU member state. In Germany, a country which has been declared officially free from bovine tuberculosis since 1997 by the EU, infections still occur sporadically in cattle and other mammals, including humans. Here, the transmission routes of a bTB outbreak in a wildlife park in Germany affecting different cervid species, bison, lynx, and pot-bellied pigs were followed by employing whole-genome sequencing (WGS) combined with spoligotyping and mycobacterial interspersed repetitive-unit-variable-number tandem-repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe notion and characterisation of fitness landscapes has helped us understand the performance of heuristic algorithms on complex optimisation problems. Many practical problems, however, are constrained, and when significant areas of the search space are infeasible, researchers have intuitively resorted to a variety of constraint-handling techniques intended to help the algorithm manoeuvre through infeasible areas and toward feasible regions of better fitness. It is clear that providing constraint-related feedback to the algorithm to influence its choice of solutions overlays the violation landscape with the fitness landscape in unpredictable ways whose effects on the algorithm cannot be directly measured.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEpidemiol Infect
March 2018
Tuberculosis (TB) has been known to affect elephants for thousands of years. It was put into spotlight when few circus elephants were diagnosed carrying Mycobacterium (M.) tuberculosis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychologia
December 2017
Broad cognitive difficulties have been reported in patients with peripheral vestibular deficit, especially in the domain of spatial cognition. Processing and manipulating numbers relies on the ability to use the inherent spatial features of numbers. It is thus conceivable that patients with acute peripheral vestibular deficit show impaired numerical cognition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Continuously measured glucose and lactate levels in interstitial fluid (ISF) may markedly differ from their respective blood levels.
Methods: Combining microdialysis with a bioanalytical microsystem, the interstitial glucose and lactate concentrations of eight male volunteers with different body mass index (BMI) were monitored during a 2-fold glucose tolerance test over the period of three hours.
Results: Significant correlations were found between abdominally measured sensor results and reference measurements ( R = .
Background: Pulmonary nocardiosis mimic pulmonary tuberculosis in most clinical and radiological manifestations. In Tanzania, where tuberculosis is one of the major public health threat clinical impact of nocardiosis as the cause of the human disease remains unknown. The objective of the present study was to isolate and identify Nocardia isolates recovered from TB suspects in Northeastern, Tanzania by using biochemical and molecular methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntimicrob Agents Chemother
May 2017
Lung infections with multiresistant pathogens are a major problem among patients suffering from cystic fibrosis (CF). -Chlorotaurine (NCT), a microbicidal active chlorine compound with no development of resistance, is well tolerated upon inhalation. The aim of this study was to investigate the bactericidal and fungicidal activity of NCT in artificial sputum medium (ASM), which mimics the composition of CF mucus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnilateral peripheral vestibular deficit leads to broad cognitive difficulties and biases in spatial orientation. More specifically, vestibular patients typically show a spatial bias toward their affected ear in the subjective visual vertical, head and trunk orientation, fall tendency, and walking trajectory. By means of a random number generation task, we set out to investigate how an acute peripheral vestibular deficit affects the mental representation of numbers in space.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 3-year-old, female chinchilla (Chinchilla lanigera f. dom.) suffered from prolonged vaginal discharge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA modified Baltz's in vitro cultivation system for the propagation of Trypanosoma equiperdum strain OVI was established to develop a replacement for the conventional production procedure of dourine diagnostic antigen in rats. To increase trypanosome yields we designed an optimized culture medium by addition of supplemental compounds. Trypanosomes were adapted to this medium by two succeeding cultivation steps which led to a substantial proliferation rate and an increased cell density tolerance, respectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF