Effect on osteoarthritis of spa therapy at Bourbonne-les-Bains.

OBJECTIVES: Several studies suggest a beneficial overall effect of spa therapy in chronic musculoskeletal diseases. The present open controlled study investigated the effects of spa therapy at Bourbonne-Les-Bains, France, in patients with hip or knee osteoarthritis or low back pain. PATIENTS AND METHODS: In 1998, 102 men and women older than 50 years were included in the study. All had low back pain or lower limb osteoarthritis, and none had contraindications to spa therapy. Quality of life was assessed three times at intervals of 4 weeks, twice before and once immediately after 3 weeks of spa therapy, using the Duke Health Profile (five dimensions and five dysfunctions). RESULTS: Mean age was 66.4 years, and 67% of the patients were women. Quality of life was markedly decreased as compared to the population at large (1996, CFES). The two pretreatment evaluations produced similar quality-of-life scores. Spa therapy was associated with significant improvements in overall quality of life (P=0.004), self-esteem (P=0.009), and pain (P=0.01). CONCLUSION: These findings support those of other studies conducted in France and in other European countries. They indicate that patients report meaningful improvements in their quality of life after spa therapy.

Complementarity and synergy in bimodal speech: auditory, visual, and audio-visual identification of French oral vowels in noise.

The efficacy of audio-visual interactions in speech perception comes from two kinds of factors. First, at the information level, there is some "complementarity" of audition and vision: It seems that some speech features, mainly concerned with manner of articulation, are best transmitted by the audio channel, while some other features, mostly describing place of articulation, are best transmitted by the video channel. Second, at the information processing level, there is some "synergy" between audition and vision: The audio-visual global identification scores in a number of different tasks involving acoustic noise are generally greater than both the auditory-alone and the visual-alone scores. However, these two properties have been generally demonstrated until now in rather global terms. In the present work, audio-visual interactions at the feature level are studied for French oral vowels which contrast three series, namely front unrounded, front rounded, and back rounded vowels. A set of experiments on the auditory, visual, and audio-visual identification of vowels embedded in various amounts of noise demonstrate that complementarity and synergy in bimodal speech appear to hold for a bundle of individual phonetic features describing place contrasts in oral vowels. At the information level (complementarity), in the audio channel the height feature is the most robust, backness the second most robust one, and rounding the least, while in the video channel rounding is better than height, and backness is almost invisible. At the information processing (synergy) level, transmitted information scores show that all individual features are better transmitted with the ear and the eye together than with each sensor individually.

Masking-period patterns: presentation of a model compatible with an enlarged set of psychophysical and physiological results.

Masking-period patterns (MPP) have been regarded by Zwicker [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 59, 166-175 (1976)] as psychoacoustic equivalents of period histograms (PH) measured in auditory neurons. Various models have been proposed in the literature to account for his results. We present here a set of results on the MPP produced by a 40-Hz triangular masker that cannot be reproduced by any of these models. This leads to the elaboration of a new model for predicting MPP assuming the existence of nonlinearities in the basilar membrane, and based on neural fast adaptation and rectification, and a simple detection device. This model is shown to be able to account for the whole set of available results, and thus to provide a good basis for the use of MPP as a psychoacoustic tool for the study of PH.

[Effect of several parameters of an acoustic signal on the shape of the iso-S contour]. / Issledovanie vliianiia nekotorykh parametrov zvukovogo signala formu izo-S kontura.

Masking of amplitude irregularity in the two--component stimulus produced by step--like intensity increment (2, 3 and 6 dB) of the 800 Hz component, was studied. Variable frequency component of the stimulus served as a masker. The relationship between just masking level and the frequency of the masker (iso-S contour) was measured. The shape of iso-S contour appeared to be closely related to the value of the intensity increment of the 800 Hz component and only slightly dependent on the intensity level of this component.