RESUMEN
Background: Work-related musculoskeletal disorders [WMSDs] may involve all parts of the body, and have been a worldwide problem. Employed women are two to five times more likely to report such problems, and assembly lines suspected to induce more WMSDs because of high rate of repetitive motions
Methods: The aim of this study to determine the prevalence of WMSDs in women workers of an automobile manufacturing assembly line. In this cross-sectional survey, 50 women workers in an automobile manufacturing assembly line were studied. Data was collected based on Nordic questionnaire. The statistical analysis was performed by the SPSS 11 software
Results: The MSDs prevalence rate was 98%. The most reported complaint was related to the back [68%] and there was a significant relationship between prevalence and pain severity with age and working years. Moreover, the duration of feeling pain per day, and pain severity had a significant relationship with the capability of the person to continue working
Conclusion: Workstations ergonomically improvement and employing men instead of women would be effective to reduce the problems
RESUMEN
Patellar bracing is a common component of treatment in patellofemoral pain syndrome [PFPS]. Most of the currently used braces act based on re-aligning the patella; however, a new brace was designed by the researchers, which acts via external vacuum system. This preliminary study aimed to determine whether the new vacuum brace is able to pull up the patella into the vacuumic cup and create a suitable patello-femoral joint distraction. Seventeen knees from ten patients with PFPS were undertaken for the computerized tomography scan study at 0° and 30° knee flexion immediately before and after the bracing. The outcome measurements included the patello-femoral joint area [PFJA], and the average patellofemoral joint space width [APFJSW]. The results of this study demonstrated a significant increase in PFJA and APFJSW parameters following the vacuum bracing [P<0.001] at both knee angles. The results showed that applying a vacuum brace can create an appropriate patellofemoral joint distraction
RESUMEN
Computed tomography [CT] has numerous applications in clinical procedures but its main problem is its high radiation dose to the patients compared to other imaging modalities using x-ray. CT delivers approximately high doses to the nearby tissues due to the scattering effect, fan beam [beam divergence] and Limited collimator efficiency. The radiation dose from multi-slice scanners is greater than the single-slice scanners and since multi-slice scanners increasingly employ a wide beam, 100 mm ion chambers currently used in measuring the CTDI[100], are not capable of accurately measuring the total dose profile of the slice width. Therefore, the CT dose is underestimated by using them. The purpose of this study is to measure the Computed Tomography Dose Index [CCDI] of a GE multi-slice CT scanner [64- slice] using polymer gel dosimetry based on MRI imaging [MRPD]. CTDI is the sum of point doses along the central axis and estimates the average patient dose during CT scanning. For measuring CTDI, after designing and fabricating the phantom and preparing the MAGIC gel, MRI imaging using a 1.5 T Siemens MRI scanner was performed with the imaging parameters of ST = 2 mm, NEX = 1, TE = 20-640 ms and TR = 2000 ms. CTDI was measured with a 100 mm ion chamber [CTDI[100]] and also the MAGIC gel with MRPD method for 10 mm and 40 mm CT scan nominal widths. Following the measurement of the CTDI[100] for 10 mm and 40 mm nominal slice widths of the multi-slice scanner using both ion chamber and MAGIC gel, the results showed that the ion chamber underestimates CTDI[100] by 28.71% and 14.03% compared to gel for 10 mm and 40 mm respectively. It was concluded from this study that gel dosimeters have the capability to measure CTDI in wide beams of multi-slice CT scanners whereas 100 mm standard ion chamber due to its limited length is not reliable even for a 10 mm beam width. In addition, due to the 3 dimensional nature of gel dosimetry, by using a MAGIC polymer gel, it is possible to obtain a lot of important information from the mentioned profiles such as the actual slice thickness and z-axis geometric efficiency. In addition to the stated parameters, the percentages of the total and partial homogeneities in the slice plane can be obtained only from gel dosimetry. The results of this study show that MAGIC polymer gel dosimetry based on MRI can be used as a supplementary method to using conventional ion chamber dosimetry especially in measurements for slice widths greater than 2 mm