Early Outcomes of Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest after Early Defibrillation: a 24 Months Retrospective Analysis

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease remains the most common cause of death in the United States and most other Western nations. Among these deaths, sudden, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest claims approximately 1000 lives each day in the United States alone. Most of these cardiac arrests are due to ventricular fibrillation. Though highly reversible with the rapid application of a defibrillator, ventricular fibrillation is otherwise fatal within minutes, even when cardiopulmonary resuscitation is provided immediately. The overall survival rate in the United States is estimated to be less than 5 percent. Recent developments in automated-external-defibrillator technology have provided a means of increasing the rate of prompt defibrillation after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. After minimal training, nonmedical personnel (e.g., flight attendants and casino workers) are also able to use defibrillators in the workplace, with lifesaving effects. Nonetheless, such programs have involved designated personnel whose job description includes assisting persons who have had sudden cardiac arrest. Data are still lacking on the success of programs in which automated external defibrillators have been installed in public places to be used by persons who have no specific training or duty to act. Materials and Methods: All patients who had an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest between January 2003 and December 2004 and who received early defibrillation for ventricular fibrillation were included. We conducted a 24 months retrospective population-based analysis of the outcome in our population. Results: Over a 24 month period, 446 people had non–traumatic cardiac arrest, and in all of them it was observed to be ventricular fibrillation. In a very few cases, the defibrillator operators were good Samaritans, acting voluntarily. Eighty-nine patients (about 19%) with ventricular fibrillation were successfully resuscitated, including eighteen who regained consciousness before hospital admission. Conclusion: Automated external defibrillators deployed in readily accessible, well-marked areas, are really very effective in assisting patients with cardiac arrest. However, it's quite true that, in the cases of survivors, most of our users had good prior training in the use of these devices

Psycholinguistics meets Continual Learning: Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Question Answering

We study the issue of catastrophic forgetting in the context of neural multimodal approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA). Motivated by evidence from psycholinguistics, we devise a set of linguistically-informed VQA tasks, which differ by the types of questions involved (Wh-questions and polar questions). We test what impact task difficulty has on continual learning, and whether the order in which a child acquires question types facilitates computational models. Our results show that dramatic forgetting is at play and that task difficulty and order matter. Two well-known current continual learning methods mitigate the problem only to a limiting degree

Infertility and assisted reproduction: legislative and cultural evolution in Italy. Infertilità e procreazione assistita: evoluzione legislativa e culturale in Italia

The social representation of the infertility coming out from the national newspapers has been explored in relation to the enactment of the Law 40/2004 and the 2005 referendum. All the articles (n=731), published in the last 15 years by the highest circulation Italian newspapers, have been collected in a corpus (token=360345) that underwent a multivariate analysis of textual data. Results show a difficulty in complementing together the mind and the body. The “biologic” is represented as the place of the technical and medical intervention while the “psycho-social” is conceived as the place of the family storytelling of the personal experiences of infertility and the public ethical debate on it. Before the law, newspapers deal with the theme of the family experience probably supporting the law enactment. After the referendum this thematic is dismissed and the theme of infertility as a pathology to treat emerges, bringing back infertility to the medical issu

Evaluation of Tomato Genetic Resources for Response to Water Deficit

Water deficit strongly affects plant yield and quality. However, plants can minimize drought injury by adaptation mechanisms that have evolved to escape harmful conditions. The response to water deprivation is a complex trait controlled by several genes. In order to gain a deeper understanding of drought response mechanisms in tomato, a collection of 27 genotypes was studied under different water deficit conditions. Since developmental stages might be differently influenced by drought, analyses were carried out on young plantlets during fruit setting. The only genotype that showed good performances both as water retention and fruit production was the ecotype Siccagno. All the genotypes were analysed at molecular level with the aim of detecting structural polymorphisms in selected stress-responsive genes. In addition, the expression level of a number of these genes was measured in the genotypes more tolerant to water deficit. Many polymorphisms were detected in six stress-responsive genes, and some could imply significant modifications in the protein structure. Furthermore, the expression analysis by RT-qPCR of three stress-responsive genes allowed arguing that a higher level of expression of the gene erd15 might be related to the better response to water deficit exhibited by Siccagno. Similarly, the lower expression of eight genes in the same genotype analysed through a microarray experiment confirmed the involvement of these stress-related genes in the tomato response to drought. Further investigations are required for a better comprehension of the mechanisms underlying response to water deficit in tomato by exploiting the genetic resource identified as more tolerant. The use of new technologies able to globally analyse structural polymorphism and expression level of genes will succeed to identify crucial genes involved in stress response in the ecotype Siccagno grown under different water regimes

Graphene oxide affects in vitro fertilization outcome by interacting with sperm membrane in an animal model

We realized the exposure of boar spermatozoa to graphene oxide (GO) at concentration of 0.5, 1, 5, 10 and 50 μg/mL in an in vitro system able to promote the capacitation, i.e. the process that allows sperm cells to became fertile. Interestingly, we found that the highest GO concentration (5, 10 and 50 μg/mL) are toxic for spermatozoa, while the lowest ones (0.5 and 1 μg/mL) seem to significantly increase the sperm cells fertilizing ability (p >.05) in an in vitro fertilization experiment. To explain this finding, we investigated the effect of GO on sperm membrane structure (atomic force microscopy) and function (confocal microscopy and flow cytometry, substrate adhesion). As a result, we found that GO is able to interact with spermatozoa membranes and, in particular, it seems to be able to extract the cholesterol, which is a key player in spermatozoa physiology, from plasma membrane of boar spermatozoa incubated under capacitation conditions. In our opinion, these results are very important because they allow identifying either a plausible mechanism of GO toxicity on spermatozoa and new strategies to manage sperm capacitation