The results of qualitative and quantitative research of food safety knowledge and practices among the elderly in Slovenia are presented and discussed. Data were collected via observation and ...anonymous questionnaires. The study was conducted in 2009 with 100 elderly people, who were attending training for maintaining their balance at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia at the time of the investigation. The aim of the study was to investigate the food safety knowledge and practices of the elderly in urban and rural environments. For this study, an observation sheet and a questionnaire were designed. Observations about good hygiene practice at home were performed with six elderly people living in the city and ten living in villages. During observation, ten different surfaces in the homes of six volunteers in town were swabbed and examined for microbiological quality. Fifty randomly selected elderly people living in town and the same number living in villages were included in the questionnaire. The results gained via the observations and the questionnaire show a certain amount of inappropriateness during food preparation processes between groups, especially in terms of poor hygiene, incorrect sequences of food preparation, incorrect temperature and distribution of food in the refrigerator. The results show that most working surfaces and kitchen tools are contaminated with non-pathogenic and potentially pathogenic microorganisms. The hands of the volunteers are the most contaminated by microorganisms among all selected surfaces, followed by kitchen counters and chopping boards. The elderly are not sufficiently aware of how important their role in the food supply chain is. Their behaviour is not always in accordance with good hygiene practice and may lead to food-borne diseases at home.
► We analyse food safety knowledge and practices among 100 elderly in Slovenia. ► Data were collected via observation and anonymous questionnaires. ► The results show some critical violation during food preparation at home. ► Target media information about good housekeeping practice is needed.
A method to determine the shapes of a thermally fluctuating phospholipid vesicle is described. The vesicle that was attached at one point to a glass plate was submitted to a flow. It was observed by ...an inverted optical microscope using phase contrast technique. A large number of consecutive video images were digitised at different flow velocities and stored on computer disk. They were off-line binarised using the global average value as a threshold. The vesicle outlines were determined by a contour following procedure based on the maze walking algorithm. They were described in terms of Fourier coefficients, which were calculated by the least square fitting of the contour points using normal equations and LU matrix decomposition. This method, which was the basis for the determination of the membrane bending modulus, was thoroughly tested and it proved to be robust and efficient.
Measurement of the human body centre of pressure (COP) movement (postural sway) with a force platform is a standard procedure for the assessment of postural stability. Recently we proposed a method ...where the outline of the sway region is expressed in terms of Fourier coefficients determined by asymmetric fitting and minimal outline bending. The index of sudden excursions (ISE) is defined as the ratio of this sway area to the one obtained by the standard principal component analysis. The meaning and the discriminative power of this index is still an open question, which is addressed in present work.
Stabilometric data were simulated by considering movements of COP in a potential that consisted of a flat central ellipsoidal region and increased quadratically outside it. Using random walk procedure, combined with the Metropolis algorithm, positions of COP were simulated. The parameter called temperature was defined so that it was related to the probability of COP movements against the potential.
A large number of data were calculated for a set of different values of the temperature and the ISE values were determined. For the series of 3000 points the average values of ISE were found at first to increase with temperature from 1.3 to 1.85 as the temperature increased from 0 to 0.195 and then started to decrease towards 1.2 with temperature.
It was shown that ISE is sensitive to the actual shape of the measured postural sway area. It increases if there is a small number of large excursions of the COP outside the central region, which are mostly missed by the conventional analysis.
School children, recreational backpackers, soldiers, fire-fighters carry a range of loads from 8 to 40 kg. Little is known about the extent to which carrying an external load on the body affects ...postural sway. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of increasing load on postural sway in two different carrying positions: backpack and waist jacket.
31 subjects (age 21.7 ±1.9; 8 male and 22 female) in backpack group and 20 subjects (age 22.5 ±1.9; 4 male and 16 female) in the waist jacket group participated in the study. The increment of additional load in both groups was 12, 21 and 30 kg. Stabilometry was used to assess the amount of postural sway. Data were collected by a force platform Kistler 9286 AA. The outlines of the measured data were determined by Fourier coefficients. The sway area, total path length, medio-lateral and antero-posterior path length of the centre of pressure were calculated.
In the backpack group the ratio between no load and additional load of 12 kg, 21 kg and 30 kg for total path length was 1.3, 1.6 and 1.7 respectively, for medio-lateral sway it was 1.3, 1.5 and 1.7 and for the antero-posterior sway 1.3, 1.6 and 1.8. The ratio for sway area was 1.8 at 12 kg, 2.5 at 21 kg, and 2.9 at the load 30kg. However, no significant change of the analyzed parameters was found while subjects carried additional load in the waist jacket.
Our results indicate that the participants’ ability to maintain steady position while standing was altered by the external load carried in the backpack. The sway linearly increased for all of the measured parameters. Carrying weight in a backpack increases postural sway with increasing weight whereas carrying weight in the waist jacket does not influence the postural sway. The position of load is thus of significant importance for the postural sway.
The aim of this study was to assess the activation of primary motor cortex, prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex during simple and complex motor tasks performed with the hemiparetic and ...non-hemiparetic hand.
Seven patients after stroke in the left brain hemisphere were included in the study. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed in the first and third week, and in three patients also three months after the stroke.
Performance of both the simple and the complex tasks with the hemiparetic or non-hemiparetic hand resulted in activations of the motor cortex, prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex in majority of the consecutive fMRI sessions. Three months after the stroke fMRI data reveled reduced activation of primary motor cortex and parietal cortex in the contralesional hemisphere during the performance of the simple task by the hemiparetic hand. During the complex task, the reduction of activation was less prominent.
Results of the present study suggest that in mildly impaired stroke patients a bilateral activation of prefrontal and parietal cortex may participate in the recovery process from stroke. The potential for measurement of cortical rehabilitation is discussed.
The shapes of phospholipid vesicles in a liquid flow with a low Reynolds number were calculated within the nearly spherical approximation. The effective tension model was used in the case of large ...tension values.
A new quantitative geometrical method to analyse heart rate variability is presented. The standard image analysis techniques were applied to the grey scale images of Lorenz plots, and the outlines of ...the attractor areas were determined via a contour following procedure based on a maze walking algorithm. For graphs of simple compact shape, the attractor region contours were described in terms of Fourier coefficients.
