Associations of pain sensitisation with tender and painful joint counts in people with hand osteoarthritis: results from the Nor-Hand study

ObjectiveTo examine associations of pain sensitisation with tender and painful joint counts and presence of widespread pain in people with hand osteoarthritis (OA).MethodsPressure pain thresholds (PPT) at a painful finger joint and the tibialis anterior muscle, and temporal summation (TS) were measured in 291 persons with hand OA. We examined whether sex-standardised PPT and TS values were associated with assessor-reported tender hand joint count, self-reported painful hand and total body joint counts and presence of widespread pain using linear and logistic regression analyses adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, education and OA severity.ResultsPeople with lower PPTs at the painful finger joint (measure of peripheral and/or central sensitisation) had more tender and painful hand joints than people with higher PPTs. PPT at tibialis anterior (measure of central sensitisation) was associated with painful total body joint count (beta=−0.82, 95% CI −1.28 to –0.35) and presence of widespread pain (OR=0.57, 95% CI 0.43 to 0.77). The associations between TS (measure of central sensitisation) and joint counts in the hands and the total body were statistically non-significant.ConclusionThis cross-sectional study suggested that pain sensitisation (ie, lower PPTs) was associated with joint counts and widespread pain in hand OA. This knowledge may be used for improved pain phenotyping of people with hand OA, which may contribute to better pain management through more personalised medicine. Further studies are needed to assess whether a reduction of pain sensitisation leads to a decrease in tender and painful joint counts.

Uniqueness of gait kinematics in a cohort study

Gait, the style of human walking, has been studied as a behavioral characteristic of an individual. Several studies have utilized gait to identify individuals with the aid of machine learning and computer vision techniques. However, there is a lack of studies on the nature of gait, such as the identification power or the uniqueness. This study aims to quantify the uniqueness of gait in a cohort. Three-dimensional full-body joint kinematics were obtained during normal walking trials from 488 subjects using a motion capture system. The joint angles of the gait cycle were converted into gait vectors. Four gait vectors were obtained from each subject, and all the gait vectors were pooled together. Two gait vectors were randomly selected from the pool and tested if they could be accurately classified if they were from the same person or not. The gait from the cohort was classified with an accuracy of 99.71% using the support vector machine with a radial basis function kernel as a classifier. Gait of a person is as unique as his/her facial motion and finger impedance, but not as unique as fingerprints.

Cutibacterium acnes sternoclavicular joint osteomyelitis in an otherwise healthy 55-year-old man

Sternoclavicular joint osteomyelitis is extremely rare, with only 225 reported cases in the last 45 years. We present an unusual case in an otherwise healthy 55-year-old man with a history of well-controlled type 2 diabetes mellitus and hypertension. He presented to the emergency department after a week of left knee pain that worsened to full-body joint pain with left sternoclavicular swelling. He was started on antibiotics with multiple washouts of the left knee and treated for septic arthritis. By MRI and CT, he was found to have left sternoclavicular joint osteomyelitis and abscess and underwent debridement and resection. We believe that the initial joint injection resulted in haematogenous spread to the left sternoclavicular joint, stressing the importance of a sterile field for joint procedures.

Reproductive functions of sows under the influence of vitamin-mineral supplement in the diet

usage of feed additive with 35 mg/head per day folic acid and trace elements complex in a dose of 10-50 mg/100 kg of live weight, Hexavit multivitamin 196 mg/head per day and similar trace elements, as well as all studied supplements in the diets of three groups of enceinte sows showed that dietary supplements activate anabolic processes in the body aimed at fetuses development and the deposition of reserve nutrients in the mother’s body. As a result, sows receiving the studied supplements gave more piglets by 18.6%, more good piglets to weaning - by 4.3%, in the cost structure the total costs decreased by 9.7 -18.5%. The complex use of all biologically active additives was not effective during the entire physiological period of pregnancy. With this, the following application scheme proved to be the most acceptable for metabolic processes’ stimulation in body: joint in the first 84 days of pregnancy and in the last 30 days - only folic acid with trace elements.

Recognition of Non-Manual Content in Continuous Japanese Sign Language

The quality of recognition systems for continuous utterances in signed languages could be largely advanced within the last years. However, research efforts often do not address specific linguistic features of signed languages, as e.g., non-manual expressions. In this work, we evaluate the potential of a single video camera-based recognition system with respect to the latter. For this, we introduce a two-stage pipeline based on two-dimensional body joint positions extracted from RGB camera data. The system first separates the data flow of a signed expression into meaningful word segments on the base of a frame-wise binary Random Forest. Next, every segment is transformed into image-like shape and classified with a Convolutional Neural Network. The proposed system is then evaluated on a data set of continuous sentence expressions in Japanese Sign Language with a variation of non-manual expressions. Exploring multiple variations of data representations and network parameters, we are able to distinguish word segments of specific non-manual intonations with 86% accuracy from the underlying body joint movement data. Full sentence predictions achieve a total Word Error Rate of 15.75%. This marks an improvement of 13.22% as compared to ground truth predictions obtained from labeling insensitive towards non-manual content. Consequently, our analysis constitutes an important contribution for a better understanding of mixed manual and non-manual content in signed communication.