Efficacy of a combined technique using the Trachlight™ together with direct laryngoscopy under simulated difficult airway conditions in 350 anesthetized patients

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Autism spectrum disorder in Italy: demand for an integrated epidemiological surveillance system.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental syndrome of emerging public health concern, according to a documented significant increase of diagnosed cases of ASD in Europe and USA. In Italy, actually, it is not possible to estimate at national level a reliable ASD occurrence by using existing health and scholastic data flows. The lack of information has implications on social and healthcare services dedicated to subjects affected by ADS. The database of the Italian institute in charge of social and security assistance was accessed at the provincial level to investigate the ASD cases occurred in the Palermo province. The official reports of all subjects visited in 2013 by INPS physicians were analyzed by using an automatic software and diagnosis consistent with ASD were ex- tracted and flagged. Our findings support the choice of alternative use of INPS administrative database in order to define a reliable ASD occurrence estimate as first step to develop an integrated epidemiological surveillance system on AS

Postictal Psychosis in Epilepsy: A Clinicogenetic Study

OBJECTIVE: Psychoses affecting people with epilepsy increase disease burden and diminish quality of life. We characterised post-ictal psychosis, which comprises about one-quarter of epilepsy-related psychoses, and has unknown causation. METHODS: We conducted a case-control cohort study including patients diagnosed with post-ictal psychosis, confirmed by psychiatric assessment, with available data regarding epilepsy, treatment, psychiatric history, psychosis profile and outcomes. After screening 3,288 epilepsy patients, we identified 83 with psychosis: 49 had post-ictal psychosis. Controls were 98 adults, matched by age and epilepsy type, with no history of psychosis. Logistic regression was used to investigate clinical factors associated with post-ictal psychosis; univariate associations with a P-value<0.20 were used to build a multivariate model. Polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia were calculated. RESULTS: Cases were more likely to have seizure clustering (OR 7.59, P<0.001), seizures with a recollected aura (OR 2.49, P=0.013) and a family history of psychiatric disease (OR 5.17, P=0.022). Cases showed predominance of right temporal epileptiform discharges (OR 4.87, P=0.007). There was no difference in epilepsy duration, neuroimaging findings or anti-seizure treatment between cases and controls. Polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia in an extended cohort of post-ictal psychosis cases (58) were significantly higher than in 1,366 epilepsy controls (R2 =3%, P=6x10-3 ), but not significantly different from 945 independent patients with schizophrenia (R2 =0.1%, P=0.775). INTERPRETATION: Post-ictal psychosis occurs under particular circumstances in people with epilepsy with a heightened genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, illustrating how disease biology (seizures) and trait susceptibility (schizophrenia) may interact to produce particular outcomes (post-ictal psychosis) in a common disease

Text Localization from Photos

In this paper a new text extraction algorithm is proposed. In real scenes the text is usually overlapped or is part of the background. To identify the text regions, in complex conditions, a method exploiting a “multi-resolution feature based method” for extracting text with undefined dimension has been developed. Once identified, the multi-resolution information are merged and skimmed through a set of Support Vector Machines (SVM). The tests and the comparisons with other techniques, performed on heterogeneous images, have shown the effectiveness of the proposed

Evidence for binding of NAD dimers to NAD-dependent dehydrogenases.

The binding of dimers of NAD, (NAD)2, to lactate, malate and alc. dehydrogenases was studied by the fluorescence quenching technique. Whereas alc. dehydrogenase shows a low binding ability, malate and lactate dehydrogenases bind (NAD)2 in a specific way with high affinity. Malate dehydrogenase binds (NAD)2 more than NADH. All 3 dehydrogenases are inhibited by (NAD)2, which behaves as a competitive inhibitor with respect to both NAD and NADH. These results show that (NAD)2 is bound to the nucleotide-specific binding site of the dehydrogenases. (NAD)2 stoichiometrically reacts with ferricyanide at variance with NADH. The specific interactions with the NAD-dependent dehydrogenases and the ability to enter in monoelectronic redox cycles suggest possible physiol. roles for (NAD)2