Preoperative fasting does not confer any benefit or advantage for surgical patients. In contrast, consumption of an appropriate potion composed of water, minerals and carbohydrates offers some protection against surgical trauma in terms of metabolic status, cardiac function and psychosomatic status. Peroral intake shortly before surgery did not increase gastric residual volume and was not associated with any risk.

No abstract

The ability to maintain the body's position over its base of support (BOS), whether this base is stationary or noviny, is called balance. Controlling postural sway while standing still is called static balance. However, it is impossible to stand absolutely motionless (21,25). Even when people stand still on both feet, the body sways over its base of support. Postural sway is determined by measuring the location and amount of changes that occurs in the position of the total vertical force vector projected onto a horizontal plane. These measurements determine where the average center of pressure (COP) is located and how much variability of this location occurs during the measurement.Generally, we may state that the way of loading both lower extremities, while standing on stabilometric platform (SP), is in each and every case very individual and influenced by anthropometric variables, such as i.e. height, weight, distribution of the liquids and fats in the body, sometimes also by asymmetric parameters of the body, and at last but not least by former therapeutic and surgery interventions (3).Postural stability (PS) of different subjects has been compared by means of body sway measurements. A common quantitative index of body sway is obtained by observing the subject standing still on a force plate and measuring the length of the trajectory of the COP over the surface of the plate during a specified period of time.The use of a force plate for the determination of COP is being accepted as a method to evaluate postural balance. Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted standard situation under which the tests are carried out, and this makes it difficult to compare our results with those published elsewhere.Lafond, Duarte and Prince (14) use besides their posturographic measurements also other biomechanical variables such as Center of Mass (COM) and Gravity Line Projection (GLP), while standing still projects the COM in the COP. In the present study we considered only the COP. Purposes of the studyThe purpose of this study was to extend experiences with practical issues, such as the reliability of stabilometric measurements, when using stabilometric platforms. For this reason it seems to be useful to treat the following points: 1. a) to estimate variance in error (because we suppose that the measurement error will remain the same during further measurements) in order to evaluate whether the first two tests of standing could be recognized as parallel. b) to estimate the variance in error and the intrasession reliability. 2. to see how many records can be taken per day with respect to healthy older adults and which measures should be taken regarding the surroundings. 139ORIGINAL ARTICLE Summary: Posture in a still stance has been quantified by changes in the center of pressure (COP), in both anterior-posterior (A/P) and medial-lateral (M/L) directions and measured on a single force platform (Bertec PRO VEC 5.0). The purpose of this study was to estimate the variance in error and the intrasession test-retest reliabilit...

We followed up a group of 43 patients suffering from cervical vertebropathy. Dynamic scintigraphy revealed a significant prolongation of oesophageal transit time of 10 ml of labelled liquid (mean transit time, MTT) in comparison with a control group. Patients treated with acupuncture showed a significant reduction in MTT in comparison with patients receiving a placebo needle application. The group of patients treated with manipulative techniques showed in addition to symptom alleviation a significant reduction in MTT. Dynamic scintigraphy facilitates verification of oesophageal dysmotility in patients suffering from vertebropathy and enables the success of therapy to be readily monitored.

No abstract