Institute of Bone and Joint Surgery

Background:

Background:
MRI has proven to be an extremely valuable tool in the assessment of normal and pathological spinal anatomy. Accordingly, it is commonly used to assess containment of discal material by the outer fibers of the anulus fibrosus and posterior longitudinal ligaments. Determination of such containment is important to determine candidacy for intradiscal techniques and has prognostic significance. The accuracy of MRI in detecting containment has been insufficiently documented.
Methods:

Background:
The effectiveness of thermal shrinkage on the medial parapatellar capsule for treating recurrent patellar dislocation is controversial. One of reasons why it is still controversial is that the effectiveness is still qualitatively measured. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively determine the immediate effectiveness of the medial parapatellar capsule shrinkage as in clinical setting.
Methods:

A recent prospective study showed that higher consumption of red meat and total protein was associated with an increased risk of inflammatory polyarthritis. We prospectively investigated the association of protein, iron and corresponding food sources with incident rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in the Nurses Health Study cohort.

Adoptive transfer of CD4+CD25+ regulatory T cells has been shown to have therapeutic effects in animal models of autoimmune diseases. Chemokines play an important role in the development of autoimmune diseases in animal models and humans. The present study was performed to investigate whether the progression of organ-specific autoimmune diseases could be reduced more markedly by accumulating chemokine receptor-expressing CD4+CD25+ regulatory T cells efficiently into target organs in MRL/lpr mice.

The etiology of osteoarthritis is multifactorial, with inflammatory, metabolic, and mechanical causes. Pain in osteoarthritis is initiated by mild intra-articular inflammation and degeneration of articular cartilage and subchondral bone. The principle of treatment with acetaminophen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs is to reduce pain and improve joint function. Recently animal models for osteoarthritic pain behavior have been established.

Pre-clinical osteoarthritis (OA) models are often employed in studies investigating disease-modifying OA drugs (DMOADs). In this study, we present a comprehensive, longitudinal evaluation of OA pathogenesis including histological and biochemical analyses of articular cartilage degradation and assessment of subchondral bone sclerosis in a rat model of OA. Male Sprague-Dawley rats underwent joint destabilization surgery by anterior cruciate ligament transection and partial medial meniscectomy.

Mdlinx article

Age and sex are sufficient for predicting fractures occurring within 1 year of hemodialysis treatment - Bone Christa Mitterbauer, et al. - This study sought to design and evaluate the utility of a simple prediction rule for fractures in dialysis patients using only standard demographical and biochemical information...Conclusion: A sufficient and parsimonious prediction rule for fractures in hemodialysis patients consists of the independent variables age and sex

Recent studies have implicated the dying cell as a potential reservoir of modified autoantigens that might initiate and drive systemic autoimmunity in susceptible hosts. A number of subunits of the exosome, a complex of 3' -to- 5' exoribonucleases which functions in a variety of cellular processes, are recognized by the so-called anti-PM/Scl autoantibodies, found predominantly in patients suffering from an overlap syndrome of myositis and scleroderma. Here we show that one of these subunits, PM/Scl-75, is cleaved during apoptosis.

Patient Acceptable Symptom State (PASS) is an absolute threshold proposed for symptomatic variables in osteoarthritis (OA) to determine the point beyond which patients consider themselves well and, as such, are satisfied with treatment. Two large previously reported studies of knee OA have shown that both lumiracoxib and celecoxib were superior to placebo in terms of conventional outcome measures. To assess the clinical relevance of these results from the patients perspective, the same data pooled from these two studies were analysed with respect to the PASS.