Plos One
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Manipulation of hand posture, such as crossing the hands, has been frequently used to study how the body and its immediately surrounding space are represented in the brain. Abundant data show that crossed arms posture impairs remapping of tactile stimuli from somatotopic to external space reference frame and deteriorates performance on several tactile processing tasks. Here we investigated how impaired tactile remapping affects the illusory self-touch, induced by the non-visual variant of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm. ⋯ Finally, in contrast to the illusion increase in the non-visual RHI, the crossed hand postures did not alter illusory ownership or proprioceptive drift in the classical, visuo-tactile version of RHI (Experiment 4). We argue that the increase in illusory self-touch is related to misalignment of somatotopic and external reference frames and consequently inadequate tactile-proprioceptive integration, leading to re-weighting of the tactile and proprioceptive signals. The present study not only shows that illusory self-touch can be induced by crossing the hands, but importantly, that this posture is associated with a stronger illusion.
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The financial accessibility of antimicrobial drugs to the outpatient community in Canada is governed at the provincial level through formularies. Each province may choose to list particular drugs or impose restriction criteria on products in order to guide prescribing and/or curtail costs. Although changes to formularies have been shown to change patterns in the use of individual products and alter costs, no comparison has been made among the provincial antimicrobial formularies with regards to flexibility/stringency, or an assessment of how these formularies impact overall antimicrobial use in the provinces. ⋯ Although antimicrobial formulary listings are used to guide prescribing rates within a province, our analysis of one year's data of the impact of the antimicrobial formulary structure did not correlate with antimicrobial prescribing rates, and other factors are likely to be at play.
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Dietary supplement use is increasing despite lack of evidence of benefits, or evidence of harm. Press releases issued by the supplements industry might contribute to this situation by using 'spin' (strategies to hype or denigrate findings) to distort the results of clinical studies. We assessed press releases issued in response to publication of clinical studies on dietary supplements. ⋯ Dietary supplements industry press releases issued in response to clinical research findings are characterized by 'spin' that hypes results that are favourable to supplement use and denigrates results that are not.
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To characterize the distribution of BMI in a population-based sample of COPD patients and to evaluate the impact of obesity on their health status, exercise tolerance, systemic inflammation and comorbidity. ⋯ In a population-based sample, obesity is more prevalent in COPD patients than in subjects without airflow limitation. Furthermore, obesity affects the clinical manifestations, quality of life and exercise tolerance of COPD patients, and it may contribute to a phenotype characterized by increased systemic inflammation and greater frequency of cardiovascular comorbidity.
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Primary defects in host immune responses have been hypothesised to contribute towards an inability of subjects with cystic fibrosis (CF) to effectively clear pulmonary infections. Innate T-lymphocytes provide rapid pathogen-specific responses prior to the development of classical MHC class I and II restricted T-cell responses and are essential to the initial control of pulmonary infection. We aimed to examine the relationship between peripheral blood lymphocyte phenotype and clinical outcomes in adults with CF. ⋯ Reduced numbers of MAIT cells in subjects with CF were associated with P. aeruginosa pulmonary infection, pulmonary exacerbations and more severe lung disease. These findings provide the impetus for future studies examining the utility of MAIT cells in immunotherapies and vaccine development. Longitudinal studies of MAIT cells as biomarkers of CF pulmonary infection are awaited.