Combination Therapy for Treatment of Spasticity in Stroke Patients: A Case Study.

Background And Purpose: Spasticity is a disorder of sensory-motor control that appears as an effect of a lesion in the upper motor neuron and demonstrates sustained or intermittent unintentional muscle activation. Many treatment interventions exist to treat spasticity, and in this study, three of them were combined: vibration, static positioning and transcutaneous nerve stimulation (TENS). Evidence exists regarding the application of each intervention per se, but not in combination.

Occult tethered cord syndrome: a reversible cause of paraparesis not to be missed.

A 15-year-old female former gymnast with a history of pectus excavatum was reviewed due to unexplained paraparesis and urinary incontinence since age 10. Symptoms were commenced with intolerable upper back pain and development of a soft mass at the sacrum that remitted spontaneously. Brain and whole spine MRI imaging and blood and CSF testing were normal.

Effect of exercise on key pharmacokinetic parameters related to metformin absorption in healthy humans: A pilot study.

Exercise is widely accepted as having therapeutic effects; thus, it is important to know whether it interacts with medications. The aim of the present pilot study was to examine the effect of high-intensity interval exercise (known to have antidiabetic action) on key pharmacokinetic parameters related to absorption of metformin (the first-line medication against type 2 diabetes). Ten healthy men participated in two sessions, spaced one to two weeks apart in random, counterbalanced order.

Morphosyntactic Production and Verbal Working Memory: Evidence From Greek Aphasia and Healthy Aging.

Purpose: The present work investigated whether verbal working memory (WM) affects morphosyntactic production in configurations that do not involve or favor similarity-based interference and whether WM interacts with verb-related morphosyntactic categories and/or cue-target distance (locality). It also explored whether the findings related to the questions above lend support to a recent account of agrammatic morphosyntactic production: Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis, Varlokosta, & Tsapkini, 2012).

Method: A sentence completion task testing production of subject-verb agreement, tense/time reference, and aspect in local and nonlocal conditions and two verbal WM tasks were administered to 8 Greek-speaking persons with agrammatic aphasia (PWA) and 103 healthy participants.

Mobilization and Stimulation of Neuromuscular Tissue (MASONT) for Stroke Survivors.

Mobilization and Stimulation of Neuromuscular Tissue (MASONT) is a newly invented somatosensory intervention used for the recovery of function in stroke patients. This paper aims to offer a more spherical view on the new technique. To that end, a basic manual of MASONT's application is provided, along with its rational of use.

Time reference in nonfluent and fluent aphasia: a cross-linguistic test of the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis.

Recent studies by Bastiaanse and colleagues found that time reference is selectively impaired in people with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia, with reference to the past being more difficult to process than reference to the present or to the future. To account for this dissociation, they formulated the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH), which posits that past reference is more demanding than present/future reference because it involves discourse linking. There is some evidence that this hypothesis can be applied to people with fluent aphasia as well.