In recent research the National Sleep Foundation has linked electronic device usage prior to going to bed with a decreased ability to fall asleep or even stay asleep.

How many times have we finished up that last email, school project or finished a quick texting session with a friend before going to bed. This last minute electronic frenzy could spell out our doom when it comes to a peaceful night of sleep. Read the full story

Another good read from one of my favorite professors Dr. Raynes.

Read the latest National Institute of Health (NIH) Consensus and State of the Science Statements on Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease and Cognitive Decline. Enjoy!

To view or download the PDF click here

Recently I have just finished reading a book entitled Body By Science which was written by Doug McGuff M.D. and John Little. All of the chapters within the book are backed by research and the research articles are listed at the end of the chapters.

This was a very interesting read for anyone interested in the fitness realm. We have all been taught the basic strategy of weight training a body part every other day and mix in some cross fitness cardio somewhere in between. Well these guys take the latest research and really put some theories to the test. Lets dive in and take a closer look to see what kind of gold nuggets we can dig up. Read the full story

Today our DPT class finished our Scorebuilders NPTE Exam prep course and I left with a feeling of wow I need to study. One of the many things I have forgotten or purged from my brain since the start of school is basically anything related to research… Oh my research professor is so disappointed in me right now!

Anyways, I decided to be proactive and start looking through some stuff as I slowly (very slowly) start to piece together a study plan. That is where I found the amazing website experiment-resources.com. It has just about anything and everything you could ever need when it comes to research.

The idea for the website came to life while trying to make sense of an enormous raw data collection, during the autumn of 2007.

The idea developed and Experiment-Resources.com was launched in February 2008. We have been adding new sections and articles ever since.

Check em out if you need to know anything related to research. experiment-resources.com

I came across this interesting article in the most recent Journal of Athletic Training. In this article they take a look at how athletes returning to competition after ACL reconstruction are able to maintain dynamic postural control during a jump landing.

Abstract

Context: Jump landing is a common activity in collegiate activities, such as women’s basketball, volleyball, and soccer, and is a common mechanism for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. It is important to better understand how athletes returning to competition after ACL reconstruction are able to maintain dynamic postural control during a jump landing.

Objective: To use time to stabilization (TTS) to measure differences in dynamic postural control during jump landing in ACL-reconstructed (ACLR) knees compared with healthy knees among National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I female athletes.

Design: Case-control study. Setting: University athletic training research laboratory.

Patients or Other Participants: Twenty-four Division I female basketball, volleyball, and soccer players volunteered and were assigned to the healthy control group (n = 12) or the ACLR knee group (n = 12). Participants with ACLR knees were matched to participants with healthy knees by sport and by similar age, height, and mass.

Intervention(s): At 1 session, participants performed a single-leg landing task for both limbs. They were instructed to stabilize as quickly as possible in a single-limb stance and remain as motionless as possible for 10 seconds. Main

Outcome Measure(s): The anterior-posterior TTS and medial-lateral TTS ground reaction force data were used to calculate resultant vector of the TTS (RVTTS) during a jump landing. A 1-way analysis of variance was used to determine group differences on RVTTS. The means and SDs from the participants’ 10 trials in each leg were used for the analyses.

Results: The ACLR group (2.01 ± 0.15 seconds, 95% confidence interval [CI] =1.91, 2.10) took longer to stabilize than the control group (1.90 ± 0.07 seconds, 95% CI = 1.86, 1.95) (F1,22 = 4.28, P = .05). This result was associated with a large effect size and a 95% CI that did not cross zero (Cohen d = 1.0, 95% CI =0.91, 1.09).

Conclusions: Although they were Division I female athletes at an average of 2.5 years after ACL reconstruction, participants with ACLR knees demonstrated dynamic postural-control deficits as evidenced by their difficulty in controlling ground reaction forces. This increased TTS measurement might contribute to the established literature reflecting differences in single-limb dynamic control. Clinicians might need to focus rehabilitation efforts on stabilization after jump landing. Further research is needed to determine if TTS is a contributing factor in future injury.

Link: Time to Stabilization of Anterior Cruciate Ligament–Reconstructed Versus Healthy Knees in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Female Athletes
Version:
Downloaded: 121 times
Description: Jump landing is a common activity in collegiate activities, such as women\'s basketball, volleyball, and soccer, and is a common mechanism for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. It is important to better understand how athletes returning to competition after ACL reconstruction are able to maintain dynamic postural control during a jump landing.

Citation:
Kathryn A. Webster, Phillip A. Gribble (2010) Time to Stabilization of Anterior Cruciate Ligament–Reconstructed Versus Healthy Knees in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Female Athletes. Journal of Athletic Training: November/December 2010, Vol. 45, No. 6, pp. 580-585.

Over the last few days I have seen a number of patients come in with tennis elbow or lateral epicondylalgia. It could be attributed to Arizona’s golf season starts right about now, but who knows! A CI of mine is getting her transitional DPT and is all about research right now so we have been looking up evidence based articles on this subject lately and I figured some others might find a few of these articles useful.

Lateral Epicondylalgia

1. Effectiveness of Manual Physical Therapy to the Cervical Spine in the Management of Lateral Epicondylalgia: A Retrospective Analysis
2. A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness of Manipulative Therapy in Treating Lateral Epicondylalgia
3. The Immediate Effect of Orthotic Management on Grip Strength of Patients With Lateral Epicondylosis
4. Initial Effects of Elbow Taping on Pain-Free Grip Strength and Pressure Pain Threshold

The team sawed the legs off donated bodies right above the knee. They then inserted a small metal strain gauge into the ACL fibers (shown at right), and mounted the leg in the machine, fixing it in place with screws and composite resin putty, the type used in auto-body repair.

At times, Drakos seems like a typical orthopedist: seeing patients, prescribing meds, performing surgery. But in the lab, Drakos — always drawing on his previous athletic experience — turns orthopedic research into a team sport. Though he works with a dedicated group of researchers, the stars of Drakos’ squad are his custom-built rig, dubbed the ACL Dominator, and the troves of cadaver legs that cycle through the lab for testing.

A four-year, varsity letter–winning wide receiver on Harvard’s football team, Drakos says his interest in orthopedics and sports medicine started early. “Football is the perfect petri dish for the orthopedist, because there are so many injuries,” he told Wired.com, “just because of the nature of the game.”

His results showed that AstroTurf creates 80 percent more strain in the ligaments than grass, while next-gen turf surfaces are 45 percent more stressful.

Drakos readily acknowledges the results from this pilot study only look at the static stabilizers of the knee joint. Clearly, when an athlete is in motion, muscles and tendons are also expanding and contracting, providing a secondary dynamic stability to the knee as well.

Full article can be read on wired

If your schools program is anything like ours then chances are you will have to write some form of research/capstone paper before you graduate. In our case we had to compile research article after research article and somehow try and keep them organized for 2+ years while we slowly wrote our paper.

At first we tried using folders on our desktops but after a while we had so many folders that became too much of a hassle. But luckily good ol Donald (me) came to the rescue! I showed my research group this life saving free program called Menedely.

Mendeley is a free reference manager andacademic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.

It’s pretty amazing! I think the most important feature is the ability to quickly create a reference page with all of the articles you select. You basically highlight the articles, choose your citation format and then you are ready to paste the information into a word doc. Easy peasy!

Features

Click here to check out everything Mendeley has to offer and download it today! You wont be sorry!

Here are 17 articles to peruse at your leisure. These are sorta all over the place in terms of topics, but they mostly focus on low back pain, work environment, and stuff like that. All in all these articles have some useful gems in them so enjoy!

Work related injuries, Environment, etc etc

1. Genetics and Environment.pdf
2. Home environment after Stroke Rehab.pdf
3. ICF – Steiner et al.pdf
4. Interventions for acute low back pain.pdf
5. Lifting for Return to Work.pdf
6. Low Back Pain Panel.pdf
7. Musculoskeletal.pdf
8. Older Adults.pdf
9. Physical Stress.pdf
10. Primary Prevention.pdf
11. PT and the ICF.pdf
12. Repetitive Movement.pdf
13. Successful Work Hardening.pdf
14. Video Display Terminals.pdf
15. Work Related Disorders in PTs.pdf
16. Work Related Low Back Pain.pdf
17. Work Station Exercises.pdf

ScienceDaily (May 19, 2010) — New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.

High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual pr bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.

“We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia,” says associate professor Fredrik Ullén from Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, co-author of the study that appears in the journal PLoS ONE.

Just which brain mechanisms are responsible for this correlation is still something of a mystery, but Dr Ullén conjectures that the function of systems in the brain that use dopamine is significant; for example, studies have shown that dopamine receptor genes are linked to ability for divergent thought. Dr Ullén’s study measured the creativity of healthy individuals using divergent psychological tests, in which the task was to find many different solutions to a problem.

“The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people,” says Dr Ullén. “Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity.”

The thalamus serves as a kind of relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.

“Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” says Dr Ullén, and explains that this could a possible mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally ill.

“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” says Dr Ullén about his new findings.

source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100518064610.htm

Reference

1. Örjan de Manzano, Simon Cervenka, Anke Karabanov, Lars Farde, Fredrik Ullén, Aldo Rustichini. Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals. PLoS ONE, 2010; 5 (5): e10670 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010670