Search Results (5,122)

Background: Pneumothorax (PNX) represents a common clinical condition in emergency departments (EDs), requiring prompt recognition and treatment. The role of transthoracic ultrasounds (TUSs) in the diagnosis of PNX is still debated. We aimed to prospectively evaluate the accuracy of TUSs in the detection of spontaneous PNX in EDs. Methods: A total of 637 consecutive adult patients who presented to the EDs of four Italian hospitals complaining of acutely onset chest pain and dyspnoea were included in the study. Exclusion criteria were previous traumatic events, cardiogenic causes of pain/dyspnoea and suspected tension PNX. The absence of “lung sliding” (B-mode) and the “bar-code” sign (M-mode) were considered indicative of PNX in a TUS. Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values (PPVs, NPVs) were calculated using a chest CT scan as reference. Results: Spontaneous PNX occurred in 93 patients: of those, 83 (89.2%) were correctly identified by TUSs. However, 306 patients with suspected PNX at TUS were not confirmed by chest CTs. The diagnostic accuracy of both the absence of “lung sliding” and “bar-code” sign during TUS was 50.4% (95% CI: 46.4–54.3), sensitivity was 89.2% (95% CI: 81.1–94.7), specificity was 43.8% (95% CI: 39.5–48.0), the PPV was 21.3% (95% CI: 19.7–23.1) and the NPV was 96.0% (95% CI: 92.9–97.7). Conclusions: TUS showed high sensitivity but low specificity in the identification of PNX in EDs. Relying exclusively on TUSs results for patients’ management in ED settings is neither suitable nor recommendable. TUS examination can be useful to strengthen the clinical suspicion of PNX, but its results should be confirmed by a chest X-ray or CT scan. Full article

Bisphosphonates are widely used for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis; however, they cause several long-term side effects, necessitating the investigation of local ways to improve osseointegration in compromised bone tissue. The purpose of this study was to evaluate peri-implant bone repair using implants functionalized with zoledronic acid alone (OVX ZOL group, n = 11), zoledronic acid + teriparatide (OVX ZOL + TERI group, n = 11), and zoledronic acid + ruterpy (OVX ZOL + TERPY group, n = 11) compared to the control group (OVX CONV, n = 11). Analyses included computer-assisted microtomography, qualitative histologic analysis, and real-time PCR analysis. Histologically, all functionalized surfaces improved peri-implant repair, with the OVX ZOL + TERI group standing out. Similar results were found in computerized microtomography analysis. In real-time PCR analysis, however, the OVX ZOL and OVX ZOL + TERPY groups showed better results for bone formation, with the OVX ZOL + TERPY group standing out, while there were no statistical differences between the OVX CONV and OVX ZOL + TERI groups for the genes studied at 28 postoperative days. Nevertheless, all functionalized groups showed a reduced rate of bone resorption. In short, all surface functionalization groups outperformed the control group, with overall better results for the OVX ZOL + TERI group. Full article

Lung neuroendocrine neoplasms (L-NEN) are heterogeneous tumors. While bone metastases (BM) have been associated with worse prognosis in other NEN, their role in L-NEN deserves in-depth analysis. This study analyzes the clinical presentation, treatment and survival outcomes of L-NEN, focusing on patients with BM compared with patients without metastases or with metastases in other sites (OtherMtx). The clinicopathological and survival data of L-NEN admitted to the Federico II University were retrospectively evaluated. Fifty L-NEN were included. Among 27 metastatic patients (54%), 13 (26%) had BM, more commonly occurring in males than females and in primary bilateral L-NEN or L-NEN > 26 mm, with higher Ki67. Atypical carcinoid and hypovitaminosis D were associated with BM. The number of metastatic sites was higher in patients with BM than OtherMtx. Synchronous metastases were associated with shorter overall survival (OS). The median progression-free survival (PFS) and OS in patients with BM were similar to OtherMtx, but a two-times increased risk of shorter OS was detected. BM do not impact PFS or OS more than OtherMtx, but the increased risk of shorter OS in patients with BM should be considered. Periodic bone evaluation in L-NEN should be recommended. Full article

Bioactive glasses in the CaO–MgO–Na₂O–P₂O₅–SiO₂–CaF₂ system are highly promising materials for bone and dental restorative applications. Furthermore, if thermally treated, they can crystallize into diopside–fluorapatite–wollastonite glass-ceramics (GCs), which exhibit appealing properties in terms of mechanical behaviour and overall bone-regenerative potential. In this review, we describe and critically discuss the genesis, development, properties and applications of bioactive glass “1d” and its relevant GC derivative products, which can be considered a good example of success cases in this class of SiO₂/CaO-based biocompatible materials. Bioactive glass 1d can be produced by melt-quenching in the form of powder or monolithic pieces, and was also used to prepare injectable pastes and three-dimensional porous scaffolds. Over the past 15 years, it was investigated by the authors of this article in a number of in vitro, in vivo (with animals) and clinical studies, proving to be a great option for hard tissue engineering applications. Full article

Emotion recognition plays an increasingly important role in today’s society and has a high social value. However, current emotion recognition technology faces the problems of insufficient feature extraction and imbalanced samples when processing speech and text information, which limits the performance of existing models. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-modal emotion recognition method based on speech and text. The model is divided into two channels. In the first channel, the extended Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set (eGeMAPS) feature set is extracted from OpenSmile, and the original eGeMAPS feature set is merged with the wavelet transformed eGeMAPS feature set. Then, speech features are extracted through a sparse autoencoder. The second channel extracts text features through the BERT-RoBERTa model. Then, deeper text features are extracted through a gated recurrent unit (GRU), and the deeper text features are fused with the text features. Emotions are identified by the attention layer, the dual-layer Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model, and the loss function, combined with cross-entropy loss and focus loss. Experiments show that, compared with the existing model, the WA and UA of this model are 73.95% and 74.27%, respectively, on the imbalanced IEMOCAP dataset, which is superior to other models. This research result effectively solves the problem of feature insufficiency and sample imbalance in traditional sentiment recognition methods, and provides a new way of thinking for sentiment analysis application. Full article

Since 2012, the University of Udine has been directly involved in research to study the Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) solidarity-economy sector, even collaborating to develop the first regional law on the solidarity economy (ESol). Recently, the university has implemented a project to profoundly investigate the practices that can be part of the Regional ESol tissue, based on the indications provided by the Regional Law 4/2017, to delimit and characterise them, know their distribution over the regional territory, and divide them by territorial areas (thinking about the activation of future economic-solidarity communities) and sectors (thinking about the activation of future economic-solidarity chains). After an initial qualitative analysis at the conceptual and values levels, and after building a database of regional ESol realities—useful for further qualitative–quantitative in-depth analysis in the future, too—we mapped and georeferenced the FVG ESol framework, obtaining indications on where to intervene to enhance ESol local supply chains as active laboratories for future bioregional territorial development, and to understand where the activation of local solidarity-based community assemblies is possible, to support local solidarity initiatives as the Regional Law states. The results show a regional picture rich in economic-solidarity realities spread throughout the territory with a wide variety of proposals but still struggling to concretely apply the tools provided by the Regional Law even though they are acting in the microsphere as cells of sustainable and solidarity-based “re-appropriation” and “re-inhabiting” of the territory. In this paper, we want to present the project results by discussing the size and characteristics of the regional solidarity-economic sector and the opportunity inherent in developing a different logic of “doing enterprise”, combining the need to produce wealth with maintaining, preserving, and enhancing our environment, cultivating an economical and productive culture distinct from the one still prevailing today, and making our territories “places of life”. Full article

Recent scientific results indicate that diet is the primary source of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) due to their use in food processing, pesticides, fertilizers, and migration from packaging to food, particularly in plastic or canned foods. Although EDCs are not listed on nutrition labels, their migration from packaging to food could inadvertently lead to food contamination, affecting individuals by inhalation, ingestion, and direct contact. The aim of our narrative review is to investigate the role of phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA) in foods, assessing their risks for precocious puberty (PP) and early-onset obesity, which are two clinical entities that are often associated and that share common pathogenetic mechanisms. The diverse outcomes observed across different studies highlight the complexity of phthalates and BPA effects on the human body, both in terms of early puberty, particularly in girls, and obesity with its metabolic disruptions. Moreover, obesity, which is independently linked to early puberty, might confound the relationship between exposure to these EDCs and pubertal timing. Given the potential public health implications, it is crucial to adopt a precautionary approach, minimizing exposure to these EDCs, especially in vulnerable populations such as children. Full article

Social support is the gratification of basic social needs (affection, belonging, esteem or approval, security, identity) through interaction with others. Social support at school allows students to perceive themselves as competent during learning and to enjoy school in general. Little is known about social support at school for students with sensory disabilities. This review aims to synthesize findings from studies examining social support at school for students with hearing and visual impairments. A search of computerized databases was supplemented by a manual search of the bibliographies of the main publications. The synthesis of the literature suggests that all students need adequate support devices in class and properly trained support teachers. However, visually impaired students are more likely to have access to resources compared to those with hearing impairments. Students with visual impairments attending regular schools are more positive about the availability of resources than those with hearing impairments attending special schools. Overall, senior secondary school students indicate higher resource availability than junior secondary school ones. Still, very few studies have investigated social support for students with sensory disabilities. Thus, further research is needed to confirm these results. Full article

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infection characterized by the dysregulation of systemic cytokine levels. The measurement of serum levels of inflammatory cyto-/chemokines has been suggested as a tool in the management of COVID-19. The aim of this study is to highlight the significance of measured levels of interleukin (IL)-1α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, IL-12(p70), IL-27, interferon (IFN)γ, interferon gamma-induced protein (IP)-10, monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α in serum samples from infected and recovered subjects, possibly predictive of severity and/or duration of the disease. Serum samples from healthy (HD), positive at hospital admittance (T0), and recovered subjects (T1, 31–60, or 70–200 days post-negativization) were collected and tested through a bead-based cytometric assay and confirmed through ELISA. IL-10 levels were increased in the T0 group compared to both HD and T1. IL-27 significantly decreased in the 31–60 group. IL-1β significantly increased in the 70–200 day group. TNF-α significantly decreased in T0 compared to HD and in the 31–60 group versus HD. IP-10 significantly increased in T0 compared to HD. These results suggest that IP-10 could represent an early marker of clinical worsening, whereas IL-10 might be indicative of the possible onset of post-COVID-19 long syndrome. Full article

Text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP). Deep-learning-based text classification methods usually have two stages: training and inference. However, the training dataset is only used in the training stage. To make full use of the training dataset in the inference stage in order to improve model performance, we propose a k-nearest neighbors retrieval augmented method (KRA) for deep-learning-based text classification models. KRA works by first constructing a storage system that stores the embeddings of the training samples during the training stage. During the inference stage, the model retrieves the top k-nearest neighbors of the testing text from the storage. Then, we use text augmentation methods to expand the retrieved neighbors, including traditional augmentation methods and a large language model (LLM)-based method. Next, the method weights the augmented neighbors based on their distances from the target text and incorporates their labels into the inference of the final results accordingly. We evaluate our KRA method on six benchmark datasets using four commonly used deep learning models: CNN, LSTM, BERT, and RoBERTa. The results demonstrate that KRA significantly improves the classification performance of these models, with an average accuracy improvement of 0.3% for BERT and up to 0.4% for RoBERTa. These improvements highlight the effectiveness and generalizability of KRA across different models and datasets, making it a valuable enhancement for a wide range of text classification tasks. Full article

FoxO is a member of the evolutionary conserved family of transcription factors containing a Forkhead box, involved in many signaling pathways of physiological and pathological processes. In mammals, mutations or dysfunctions of the FoxO gene have been implicated in diverse diseases. FoxO homologs have been found in some invertebrates, including echinoderms. We have isolated the FoxO cDNA from the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus (Pl-foxo) and characterized the corresponding gene and mRNA. In silico studies showed that secondary and tertiary structures of Pl-foxo protein corresponded to the vertebrate FoxO3 isoform, with highly conserved regions, especially in the DNA-binding domain. A phylogenetic analysis compared the Pl-foxo deduced protein with proteins from different animal species and confirmed its evolutionary conservation between vertebrates and invertebrates. The increased expression of Pl-foxo mRNA following the inhibition of the PI3K signaling pathway paralleled the upregulation of Pl-foxo target genes involved in apoptosis or cell-cycle arrest events (BI-1, Bax, MnSod). In silico studies comparing molecular data from sea urchins and other organisms predicted a network of Pl-foxo protein–protein interactions, as well as identified potential miRNAs involved in Pl-foxo gene regulation. Our data may provide new perspectives on the knowledge of the signaling pathways underlying sea urchin development. Full article

Research suggests that sedentary behavior (SB) and obesity are associated with disabilities in basic activities (BADL) and instrumental (IADL) activities of daily living. However, there is a lack of studies investigating this association in community-dwelling older adults. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the association between different SB typologies, isolated and in conjunction with obesity, and their associations with BADL and IADL disabilities in community-dwelling Brazilian older adults. This was a cross-sectional study using data from older adults (≥60 years) who participated in the Brazilian National Health Survey (2019). The exposures were obesity (BMI > 27 kg/m²) and the amount of time spent daily on SB watching television (SB TV < 3 and ≥3 h/day) and engaging in leisure activities (SB leisure < 3 and ≥3 h/day), analyzed both separately and jointly. The outcomes were BADL and IADL disabilities. The main results showed that isolated SB TV ≥ 3 h/day (OR: 1.26; 95% CI: 1.14; 1.39) and SB TV ≥ 3 h/day combined with obesity (OR: 1.55; 95% CI: 1.37; 1.75) increased the odds of BADL and IADL disabilities. Obesity alone (OR: 1.21; 95% CI: 1.07; 1.36) increased only the odds of BADL disabilities. Moreover, SB leisure ≥ 3 h/day without obesity reduced the odds of IADL disabilities (OR: 0.56; 95% CI: 0.41; 0.76). Ideally, older adults should be encouraged to prevent obesity, reduce excessive periods spent in SB watching TV, and increase the daily periods spent in leisure activities, thus minimizing the likelihood of disabilities in functional activities. Full article

Introduction: The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the psychological well-being of millions of people around the world, and even more so among children. Contracting SARS-CoV-2, resulting in home confinement and restrictions on daily and school activities, led to negative effects on the mental health of the paediatric population. Although children suffering from COVID-19 had milder general symptoms compared to adults, impairments in cognitive, neuropsychological, and emotional-behavioural development were noted. Objective: The main aim of the present study was to detect possible changes in the neuropsychological and emotional-behavioural development of children after infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The second aim was to investigate possible relationships between cognitive abilities and psychosocial characteristics. Methods: A total of 40 patients aged 8–9 years were recruited and divided into two groups: children who contracted (CG) and did not contract (NCG) SARS-CoV-2. The BVN 5–11 (Neuropsychological evaluation battery for developmental age from 5 to 11 years) instrument was administered to assess attention, memory, verbal recall, planning, phonemics, and categorical fluency domains in the paediatric population. Data on changes in emotional-behavioural profile and daily activities were collected through a questionnaire to parents. Results: The Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed a significant change in mood after the COVID-19 period only in the CG participants (p = 0.019). However, the neuropsychological performance of the two identified groups on BVN 5–11 sub-items was below the cutoff of clinical significance. Correlations were found between sub-items of the BVN 5–11 battery, extracurricular activities, and children’s psycho-motor development. Significant positive correlations were observed between Naming on visual presentation and Reading time (p = 0.006), backward digit span and time of motor activity (p = 0.009), Visual attention and Reading time (p = 0.048), and Phonemic fluency and time observed using devices (p = 0.030). Positive statistically significant correlations were also found between Mood and Free behaviour (p = 0.000), between Mood and Structured behaviour (p = 0.005), and between Mood and peer Interaction (p = 0.013). Conclusions: SARS-CoV-2 infection negatively affected the emotional development of children contracting the virus. The neuropsychological functioning of the paediatric population was influenced by psychosocial variables and time spent on daily activities, which played a protective role in children’s cognitive development. Full article

Several natural compounds have been found to act as PPARγ agonists, thus regulating numerous biological processes, including the metabolism of carbohydrates and lipids, cell proliferation and differentiation, angiogenesis, and inflammation. Recently, Cladosporols, secondary metabolites purified from the fungus Cladosporium tenuissimum, have been demonstrated to display an efficient ability to control cell proliferation in human colorectal and prostate cancer cells through a PPARγ-mediated modulation of gene expression. In addition, Cladosporols exhibited a strong anti-adipogenetic activity in 3T3-L1 murine preadipocytes, preventing their in vitro differentiation into mature adipocytes. These data interestingly point out that the interaction between Cladosporols and PPARγ, in the milieu of different cells or tissues, might generate a wide range of beneficial effects for the entire organism affected by diabetes, obesity, inflammation, and cancer. This review explores the molecular mechanisms by which the Cladosporol/PPARγ complex may simultaneously interfere with a dysregulated lipid metabolism and cancer promotion and progression, highlighting the potential therapeutic benefits of Cladosporols for human health. Full article

This is the first study that investigates the effect of kefir with an emphasis on the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) during the fermentation process in food products. The products developed and characterized were an artisanal cream cheese without cream and one with added cream, and for the analysis of the fatty acid profile, both cream cheeses were compared with commercial cream cheese. The artisanal cream cheese had a high amount of lactic acid bacteria characterizing the product formed by Lactobacilli and a low concentration of lactose due to the fermentation process. Compared to commercial cream cheese, our products without and with added cream had a higher concentration of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), especially butyric acid, which is important for the health of the gastrointestinal tract, omega 3, and oleic fatty acid, which has been associated with the prevention and control of some diseases. Overall, the artisanal cream cheese cream with fermented cream with kefir grains is a functional product with an innovative character compared to current products on the market and was well accepted by the younger public. This new product comes as an option for those who need to change their eating habits and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Full article