Mechanical Orthosis with Rotation Induction to Lower Leg for Patients with Knee Osteoarthritis.

Knee osteoarthritis (Knee-OA) is a disease caused by age-related muscle weakness, obesity, or sports injury, and it has been estimated to occur in approximately half of all people by the age of 85. One of the characteristics of knee-OA is rotation dyskinesia of the knee joint due to the degeneration of the system around the knee. This rotation movement, a key element of walking, is crucial for impact absorption, balanced walking, and stabilization of the knee joint. In the present study, we focused on the rotation of the lower leg relative to the movement of the ankle joint during the walking stance phase, and we developed a mechanical orthosis that induces rotation of the lower leg in conjunction with the movement of the ankle joint mechanically. The mechanical induction of rotation movement uses the movement difference due to the angle change of the inside and outside bars in conjunction with the ankle angle. We verified the effectiveness of the developed orthosis by measuring the amount of rotation and by administering the Womac test in 5 subjects with knee osteoarthritis. The results confirmed the effectiveness of our orthosis.

Complete sequencing and characterization of 21,243 full-length human cDNAs.

As a base for human transcriptome and functional genomics, we created the "full-length long Japan" (FLJ) collection of sequenced human cDNAs. We determined the entire sequence of 21,243 selected clones and found that 14,490 cDNAs (10,897 clusters) were unique to the FLJ collection. About half of them (5,416) seemed to be protein-coding. Of those, 1,999 clusters had not been predicted by computational methods. The distribution of GC content of nonpredicted cDNAs had a peak at approximately 58% compared with a peak at approximately 42%for predicted cDNAs. Thus, there seems to be a slight bias against GC-rich transcripts in current gene prediction procedures. The rest of the cDNAs unique to the FLJ collection (5,481) contained no obvious open reading frames (ORFs) and thus are candidate noncoding RNAs. About one-fourth of them (1,378) showed a clear pattern of splicing. The distribution of GC content of noncoding cDNAs was narrow and had a peak at approximately 42%, relatively low compared with that of protein-coding cDNAs.