During the last years, programs to enhance postoperative recovery and decrease morbidity after total knee arthroplasty, have been developed across a variety of surgical procedures and referred to as ..."Fast-Track Surgery". In this study we aimed to find some answers in the management of osteoarthritic patients subjected to total knee arthroplasty, by using the Fast-Track methodology. To this purpose we evaluated parameters such as early mobilization of patients, better pain management, bleeding, possible complications, reduced hospitalization time, an overall improved recovery and patient satisfaction.
132 patients were selected, of which, 95 treated with "Fast Track" method and 37 treated with traditional method (control group). All the patients were hospitalized and underwent the same rehabilitation program for the first three days after surgery.
In both groups, the parameters of pain and deformity demonstrated the most rapid improvement, while those of function and movement were normalized as gradual and progressive improvement over the next 2 months. The different functional test used (Barthel, MRC, VAS) showed that the mean values were significantly greater in Fast Track group when compared to the control.
The results of the study confirm that the application of the Fast Track protocol in orthopaedics after total knee replacement results in rapid post-surgery recovery.
IV. Case series, low-quality cohort or case-control studies.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
The purpose of this study was to determine the presence of ADAM10 in temporomandibular joint disk with internal derangement. Twenty-five paraffin blocks of displaced temporomandibular joint (TMJ) ...disk specimens from earlier investigations were retrieved from the archives of the University of Catania. Of these 16 had been removed from females and 9 from males; 11 with anterior disk displacement with reduction (ADDwR) and 14 with anterior disk displacement without reduction (ADDwoR). The sections were dehydrated, embedded in paraffin and cut. Then they were incubated in 0.3% H2O2/methanol and half of sections from each sample were incubated in diluted rabbit polyclonal anti-ADAM10 antibody. Then biotinylated anti-mouse/anti-rabbit IgG was applied to the sections, followed by avidin–biotin–perioxidase complex. The results were analyzed and the results were that ADAM10 was overexpressed in the posterior band of sections from patients with ADDwR compared to the other bands of both ADDwR and ADDwoR sections. Overexpression correlated with severe histopathological degeneration. We believe these results have the potential to provide insights into the pathogenesis of TMJ disk degeneration and to help design new therapeutic approaches targeting the proteolytic events that lead to tissue degeneration. Early therapeutic block of ADAM10 activity could succeed in limiting aggrecan-rich matrix breakdown without affecting normal physiology.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
We propose, implement, and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation service for residential users that allows to improve the upload throughput of the asymmetric digital subscriber line connection by ...leveraging the unused bandwidth of neighboring users. The residential access gateway adopts the 802.11 radio interface to simultaneously serve the local home users and to share the broadband connectivity with neighboring access gateways. Differently from previous works, our aggregation scheme is transparent both for local users, who are not required to modify their applications or device drivers, and for neighboring users, who do not experience any meaningful performance degradation. To evaluate the achievable performance and tune the parameters driving the traffic balancing, we developed a fluid model that was shown experimentally to be very accurate. Our proposed scheme is amenable to efficient implementation on Linux networking stack. Indeed, we implemented it and tested in some realistic scenarios, showing an efficient exploitation of the whole available bandwidth, also for legacy cloud storage applications.
We propose a cooperation scheme to share seamlessly the asymmetric digital subscriber line upload bandwidth among neighboring users in a residential scenario. We implement our scheme in the Linux networking stack, and we investigate its performance both in a real testbed and through an analytical approach on the basis of tailored fluid model. We show that our proposed scheme is able to exploit all the available bandwidth in the asymmetric digital subscriber line access network, improving the performance experienced by each user.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Cell-mediated immune events play a role in the pathogenesis of myocarditis provoked by Group B coxsackievirus (CVB). Studies indicated the synthetic derivative of androstene-3β,7β,17β-triol, HE3286 ...(17α-ethynyl-5-androstene-3β,7β,17β-triol), may ameliorate the course of immunoinflammatory and autoimmune diseases in rodents. The aim of this study was to evaluate effects of HE3286 on histological signs of CVB-induced myocarditis. BALB/c mice were infected with coxsackie B3 virus (CB3V) and treated by intraperitoneal administration of dexamethasone (Dex) or by oral gavage with HE3286 or with its vehicle, HERF405, for 18 days. Mice were sacrificed and hearts were explanted for histological and immunohistochemical analysis (TNF-α, IL-6, MMP9, ADAM10 and HSP-70). Heart tissues of Dex-treated mice showed a better histological structure compared with mice treated with HERF405. An almost complete resolution of myocarditis was observed in HE3286-treated mice as evidenced by lack of inflammatory infiltration. Immunohistochemical findings confirmed HE3286 had a more pronounced effect than Dex in reducing inflammatory response associated with in situ modulation of cytokine expression and tissue remodeling. Our data demonstrate HE3286 has better results in inhibiting establishment and progression of murine CVB-induced myocarditis than Dex, suggesting this drug may also have a therapeutic role in treatment of CVB-induced myocarditis.
Cloud computing and, in particular, cloud storage, has successfully boosted a variety of applications, in several domains; with proven acceptance and benefits by end users. While peculiar features of ...the cloud, e.g., redundancy, scalability and accessibility, are still highly desirable, several new scenarios are nowadays emerging, which call for additional features and/or different interpretations of the underlying paradigm. With the recent rising of the Internet of Everything, for example, some of the cloud principles should be partly reconsidered to better address scenarios involving a high number of devices, each carrying limited storage capacity, which can possibly operate in connection "islands" due to erratic or unreliable network connections. In this paper we start addressing these needs by presenting the Beekup system: a P2P storage framework, based on Tahoe-LAFS. Beekup enables cloud-like storage on edge devices supporting a variety of applications: from private secure file backup, to sensor-level distributed storage of raw data. Two main testbeds centered on private cloud storage and distributed sensor-data backup are analyzed in the paper, together with corresponding user applications. Initial outcomes from experiments and encouraging feedback from users involved in system trials, confirm the potential viability of the approach.
In this paper we propose, implement and evaluate a bandwidth aggregation service for residential users that enhances the throughput of their Internet broadband connection through the aggregation of ...available capacity at neighboring broadband links. Network resources are aggregated by the residential access gateway using the 802.11 radio interface to simultaneously serve home users and to share the broadband connectivity with neighboring access gateways. Differently from previous works, our aggregation scheme is transparent both for local users, who are not required to modify their applications or device drivers, and for neighboring users, who do not experience any meaningful performance degradation. The proposed approach aims at a commercial deployment, leveraging on existing access gateways and ADSL-based access networks.
31 in-patients with anxiety entered at random in a double-blind clinical trial of chlordiazepoxide and camazepam, a benzodiazepine derivative. They were assessed by three different rating scales. ...Statistical evaluation of the results showed similar psychopharmacological activity of both drugs. It is concluded that camazepam is suitable for treatment of mild and severe anxiety states.
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