Stati d’animo in persone con malattie croniche

ItNell’ambito della psicologia della salute è di rilievo la rappresentazione della propria malattia per le persone affette da disturbi invalidanti, cronici che, per effetto di un continuo trauma, comportano una ridefinizione del proprio Sé. Questo trauma nell’esperienza della persona è cumulativo (Khann, 1963) ed anche il tempo cronologico diviene permeato di micro traumi,che sono collegati a perdite che riguardano la propria autostima e la capacità di fronteggiare le difficoltà e la propria identità corporea Per questi motivi l’indagine ha teso ad esplorare la rappresentazione della malattia degenerativa cronica in persone con malattia di Parkinson ed Artrite Reumatoide, disturbi che investono non solo lo psicofisico, ma anche la realtà psicosociale della persona. La ricerca ha avuto l’obiettivo di conoscere quanto le due malattie si differenziano, pur avendo in comune cronicità, invalidità e degenerazione, ipotizzando che vi siano espressioni linguistiche comuni e tipiche di ciascuna malattia. Con la somministrazione di tre strumenti (M.M.S.E., Beck Depression Inventory, Scala di Hoehn&Yahr e Scala di Hockberg) abbiamo selezionato e caratterizzato i due gruppi di soggetti a cui abbiamo successivamente applicato un Questionario Anamnestico ed un aggregato di 35 parole stimolo, per descrivere il proprio stato d’animo. Dai risultati è emerso che le persone (adulti-anziani), con un’età media di 54 anni, considerano il proprio stato soprattutto in termini negativi. Per quanto riguarda i sintomi il tremore è quello più citato dai parkinsoniani, seguito dalle le problematiche motorie, mentre le persone con Artrite puntualizzano soprattutto il dolore e le difficoltà psicologiche. La percezione della malattia è legata all’entità del sintomo e le parole scelte (10 su 35) sono simili per i due gruppi , ma la distribuzione del grado di importanza attribuita è risultata diversa in modo significativo La conoscenza della diversa distribuzione delle parole permette all’altro di facilitare il rapporto con coloro che sono spesso sopraffatti dal disagio e dalla sofferenza.EnIn the area of health psychology, the way in which a disorder is represented is important, especially by people suffering from two incapacitating and chronic disorders, as these lead to self-redefinition because of constant trauma. People experience this suffering as being cumulative (Khann M.M.R.1963) and over time it becomes permeated with micro-traumas that are associated with the loss of self-esteem and the ability to cope with difficulties, and identifying with their own body. For these reasons, the research aimed at exploring the way in which chronic degenerative disorders are represented by people with Parkinson’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis: disorders that affect not only psychophysical aspects, but also the person’s psychosocial circumstances. The research also aimed at finding out the extent to which the two disorders differ. Although they are both chronic, incapacitating and degenerative, we investigated whether there may be linguistic expressions that are common to, and typical of, the two pathologies that would describe a state of mind and contribute to representing the two chronic, degenerative disorders. We administrated three tools (M.M.S.E., Beck. Depression Inventory, Hoehn &Yahr Scale, Hockberg Scale) to select and describe two groups of people to whom we then gave the following tests: an Anamnestic Questionnaire and a list of 35 suggested words to be used to describe their state of mind. The results showed that those (adultselderly) with an average age of 54 were primarily negative about their condition. In terms of symptoms, trembling is the most frequent in Parkinson’s sufferers, followed by impeded movement and, in particular, pain and psychological problems for those with arthritis. The perception of the disorder is linked to the extent of the symptoms and the words chosen (10 out of 35) were similar in both groups, but the distribution of the importance ascribed was significantly different. Knowing about the different distribution of the words also facilitates the relationship with those who are frequently overwhelmed by discomfort and suffering.FrDans le cadre de la psychologie de la santé un rôle important est donné à la représentation de la pathologie, en particulier chez les patients souffrant de deux affections invalidantes et chroniques, qui, en raison du caractère constant du traumatisme, entraînent une redéfinition de Soi. Dans l’expérience personnelle ce traumatisme est cumulatif (Khann M.M.R.1963) et le temps chronologique s’imprègne de microtraumatismes associés à la perte de l’auto estime, de la capacité de faire face aux difficultés et de l’identité corporelle. Pour ces raisons, l’étude explore la représentation de la maladie dégénérative chronique chez les personnes atteintes de la maladie de Parkinson et d’Arthrite Rhumatoïde: des troubles qui affectent non seulement la dimension psychophysique, mais aussi la réalité psychosociale de la personne. La recherche vise à explorer la manière dont ces deux pathologies – qui ont des traits communs, comme la chronicité, l’invalidité et le caractère dégénératif – peuvent donner lieu à des expressions linguistiques communes et typiques de deux maladies, en rapport avec le tableau pathologique, permettant d’établir des descriptions de l’état d’âme qui contribuent à une représentation des deux pathologies chroniques dégénératives. Par l’administration de trois protocoles (M.M.S.E., Beck. Depression Inventory Echelle Hoehn &Yahr- Echelle Hockberg) nous avons sélectionné les deux groupes de patients auxquels ont été par la suite administrés les tests suivants: le Questionnaire Anamnestique et une liste de 35 mots les incitant à décrire leur état d’âme. Les résultats ont mis en évidence que les patients (adultes – personnes âgées) dont l’âge moyen était de 54 ans, décrivent leur état surtout en termes négatifs. En ce qui concerne les symptômes, la Trémulation apparaît comme le plus répandu, suivi par l’Empêchement de la capacité motrice et surtout par la Douleur et les Difficultés psychologiques. Pour les personnes souffrant d’Arthrite Rhumatoïde, la perception de la maladie est liée à la gravité du symptôme. Les mots choisis (10 sur 35) sont pareills pour les deux groupes, mais l’attribution de l’importance diffère de manière significative. La connaissance de l’attribution différente contribue à faciliter la relation avec ces patients, souvent accablés par l’angoisse et la souffrance

Vivere in Casa di Riposo: un contesto comunitario con valenze psicosociali

ItIntroduzione È un evento difficile entrare in una istituzione, perché comporta novità ambientali e modificazioni dei rapporti sociali e familiari, che possono incidere sulla percezione di sé con rischi di isolamento e solitudine (Krohn, Bergman-Evans, 2000). Obiettivi Si indaga come gli anziani autosufficienti istituzionalizzati percepiscono e considerano la propria vita sociale e quella dei coetanei. Si ipotizzano diversità per genere, luogo, età e per l’importanza di una relazione d’amore. Metodi Il campione è di 296 anziani autosufficienti, con un’età media di 83 anni, di due città toscane. Sono stati somministrati il Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE), una Scala per la percezione di solitudine e dei rapporti sociali (UCLA Loneliness Scale-Russell. et alii, 1980; Solano, Coda, 1994), ed un Questionario sulle opinioni degli anziani verso la solitudine e l’essere soli (Cavallero et. Alii, 2004), I dati sono stati elaborati con la statistica non parametrica e confrontati con test t di Student. Risultati-conclusioni Dai risultati abbiamo anziani autonomi che, pur sentendosi soli, non si ritengono isolati e sono abbastanza soddisfatti della loro vita sociale. Non riconoscono una solitudine dovuta a caratteristiche di personalità e in parte affermano che questa possa influenzare la qualità di vita. Risultano differenze sia rispetto alla percezione della propria solitudine,sia rispetto alle opinioni verso gli anziani, riguardo al genere, all’età e al territorio di appartenenza. È da sottolineare l’importanza nella terza età di una relazione d’amore.EnIntroduction Entering a residential institution is a difficult event because it involves a new environment and changes to social and family relationships, which could influence self-perception with the risk of isolation and loneliness. (Krohn, Bergman-Evans, 2000). Objectives To investigate how institutionalised self-sufficient elderly people perceive and consider their own social life and that of their contemporaries. Different genders, places, ages and the importance of a loving relationship were taken into account. Methods The sample comprises 296 self-sufficient elderly people, with an average age of 83, in two cities in Tuscany. They were given the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), a scale for measuring the perception of loneliness and social relationships (UCLA Loneliness Scale–Russell D. et alii, 1980; Solano, Coda, 1994), and a questionnaire about their opinions of loneliness and being alone. (Cavallero et. alii, 2004). Nonparametric statistics were applied to the processing of the data, which were then compared with Student’s T test. Results–conclusions We found autonomous elderly people who, despite feeling alone, did not consider themselves to be isolated and were fairly satisifed with their social life. They do not consider loneliness to be due to personality and, in part, state that it can influence the quality of life. Differences were noted in the perception of personal loneliness and opinions about the elderly depending on gender, age and the area of origin. It should be stressed that a loving relationship is very important for senior citizens.FrIntroduction L’entrée dans une institution est une épreuve difficile, car elle compor- te des changements dans l’environnement et dans les rapports sociaux et familiers pouvant avoir une incidence sur la perception de soi avec des risques d’isolation et de solitude (Krohn, Bergman-Evans, 2000). Objectifs On a interviewé des personnes âgées autosuffisantes institutionnalisées pour savoir comment elles percevaient et considéraient leur propre vie sociale et celle des personnes du même âge. On admet des diversités par genre, lieu, âge et par l’importance d’une relation sentimentale. Méthodes L’échantillon est constitué de 296 personnes âgées, d’un âge moyen de 83 ans, de deux villes toscanes. On les a soumises au Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE), un barème pour la perception de solitude et des rapports sociaux (UCLA Loneliness Scale-Russell D. et alii, 1980; Solano et Coda, 1994), et à un Questionnaire sur les opinions des personnes âgées sur la solitude et le fait d’être seules (Cavallero et. alii, 2004). Les données ont été élaborées selon la statistique non paramétrique et comparées avec le test de Student. Résultats–conclusions Des résultats, il émerge que nous avons des personnes âgées autonomes qui, bien que se sentant seules, ne se considèrent pas isolées et sont assez satisfaites de leur vie sociale. Elles ne reconnaissent pas une solitude due à des caractéristiques de personnalité et, en part, elles affirment que cette dernière peut avoir une influence sur la qualité de vie. On note des différences au niveau de la perception de la propre solitude et des opinions sur les personnes âgées, à propos du genre, de l’âge et du territoire d’appartenance. Il faut souligner l’importance, âge, d’une relation sentimentale

The place of Fasda'il Al-Quds (merits of Jerusalem) : literature and religious poetry in the Muslim effort to recapture Jerusalem during The Crusades

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Joyce's open city : colonialism, style, and the politics of impurity

Although much has been written about the politics of Joyce's style, critics often fail to do justice to the style of Joyce's politics, and this thesis re-visits this complex topic in order to articulate an optimistic reading of Joyce's response to colonialism, and the idiosyncratic 'cosmopolitan' or 'transnational' style of his mature work. In particular, this thesis engages with recent political accounts of Joyce's texts, especially the work of Andrew Gibson and Len Platt, and, while saluting their emphasis on a precise historical and intertextual contextualization of Joyce's writing, it objects to their reading of Joyce's style as an aggressive satire undertaken against class and cultural enemies within the colonial situation of modern Ireland. Instead, drawing on the recent work of Joseph Valente and Finn Fordham, this thesis attempts to emphasize the ethical subtlety and enabling optimism with which Joyce's work responds to the cultural antagonism of modern Irish politics through its cosmopolitan style. A key aspect of this argument is a revaluation of Joyce's attitude to the English language and its literature, and I argue that Joyce's 'babelian' version of the language in 'Finnegans Wake', although rooted in a response to colonialism, does not represent a destructive revenge upon the colonial power, as some critics argue. My central metaphor, the 'open city', aims to underline the ways in which the critique of authority that occurs in Joyce's texts, all of which are set in the city of Dublin, allows the emergence of an heterogeneous, decentralized textual community, the ethics and creative effects of which Joyce celebrates. Working chronologically through Joyce's mature work, from 'The Dead' and 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' to 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake', this thesis aims to highlight some of the continuities within the trajectory of Joyce's writing, in conscious opposition to the understandable critical tendency to bracket off 'Finnegans Wake' from the other texts in Joyce's oeuvre. Methodologically, I use a technique of close reading and an extremely detailed attention to a wide range of literary, cultural and historical intertexts to carry out my revisionary account of Joyce's politics. I also bring together two approaches to Joyce which have been distinct and often opposed in critical history, namely a post-structuralist analysis of Joyce's sophisticated play with philosophical ideas, and a scholarly attention to historical and intertextual material. While offering original interpretations of all the major works, this thesis also contributes to knowledge about Joyce's engagement with an eclectic range of contexts and intertexts; these include the use of the Irish novelist George Moore in 'Dubliners' and 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (which has been consistently and seriously underestimated by criticism), the presence of Flaubert in 'Dubliners', the influence of eighteenth-century theories of the comic on the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode of 'Ulysses', the use of nineteenth-century historical linguistics in the later work, Joyce's response to the development of radio technology in 'Finnegans Wake', and his reaction to right-wing political theory and oratory of the 1920s and '30s, in particular his attitude to his contemporary, Éamon de Valera, and the Irish Free State.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Nonoverlapping functions of DNA polymerases mu, lambda, and terminal deoxynucleotidyltransferase during immunoglobulin V(D)J recombination in vivo.

International audienceDNA polymerases mu (pol mu), lambda (pol lambda), and terminal deoxynucleotidyltransferase (TdT) are enzymes of the pol X family that share homology in sequence and functional domain organization. We showed previously that pol mu participates in light chain but surprisingly not heavy chain gene rearrangement. We show here that immunoglobulin heavy chain junctions from pol lambda-deficient animals have shorter length with normal N-additions, thus indicating that pol lambda is recruited during heavy chain rearrangement at a step that precedes the action of TdT. In contrast to previous in vitro studies, analysis of animals with combined inactivation of these enzymes revealed no overlapping or compensatory activities for V(D)J recombination between pol mu, pol lambda, and TdT. This complex usage of polymerases with distinct catalytic specificities may correspond to the specific function that the third hypervariable region assumes for each immunoglobulin chain, with pol lambda maintaining a large heavy chain junctional heterogeneity and pol mu ensuring a restricted light chain junctional variability

DNA polymerases beta and lambda do not directly affect Ig variable region somatic hypermutation although their absence reduces the frequency of mutations

During somatic hypermutation (SHM) of antibody variable (V) region genes, activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) converts dC to dU, and dUs can either be excised by uracil DNA glycosylase (UNG), by mismatch repair, or replicated over. If UNG excises the dU, the abasic site could be cleaved by AP-endonuclease (APE), introducing the single-strand DNA breaks (SSBs) required for generating mutations at A:T bp, which are known to depend upon mismatch repair and DNA Pol eta. DNA Pol beta or lambda could instead repair the lesion correctly. To assess the involvement of Pols beta and lambda in SHM of antibody genes, we analyzed mutations in the VDJh4 3\u27 flanking region in Peyer\u27s patch germinal center (GC) B cells from polbeta(-/-)pollambda(-/-), pollambda(-/-), and polbeta(-/-) mice. We find that deficiency of either or both polymerases results in a modest but significant decrease in V region SHM, with Pol beta having a greater effect, but there is no effect on mutation specificity, suggesting they have no direct role in SHM. Instead, the effect on SHM appears to be due to a role for these enzymes in GC B cell proliferation or viability. The results suggest that the BER pathway is not important during V region SHM for generating mutations at A:T bp. Furthermore, this implies that most of the SSBs required for Pol eta to enter and create A:T mutations are likely generated during replication instead. These results contrast with the inhibitory effect of Pol beta on mutations at the Ig Smu locus, Smu DSBs and class switch recombination (CSR) reported previously. We show here that B cells deficient in Pol lambda or both Pol beta and lambda proliferate normally in culture and undergo slightly elevated CSR, as shown previously for Pol beta-deficient B cells

Silencing of human DNA polymerase λ causes replication stress and is synthetically lethal with an impaired S phase checkpoint

Human DNA polymerase (pol) λ functions in base excision repair and non-homologous end joining. We have previously shown that DNA pol λ is involved in accurate bypass of the two frequent oxidative lesions, 7,8-dihydro-8-oxoguanine and 1,2-dihydro-2-oxoadenine during the S phase. However, nothing is known so far about the relationship of DNA pol λ with the S phase DNA damage response checkpoint. Here, we show that a knockdown of DNA pol λ, but not of its close homologue DNA pol β, results in replication fork stress and activates the S phase checkpoint, slowing S phase progression in different human cancer cell lines. We furthermore show that DNA pol λ protects cells from oxidative DNA damage and also functions in rescuing stalled replication forks. Its absence becomes lethal for a cell when a functional checkpoint is missing, suggesting a DNA synthesis deficiency. Our results provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, that DNA pol λ is required for cell cycle progression and is functionally connected to the S phase DNA damage response machinery in cancer cells

DNA polymerases beta and lambda mediate overlapping and independent roles in base excision repair in mouse embryonic fibroblasts

Base excision repair (BER) is a DNA repair pathway designed to correct small base lesions in genomic DNA. While DNA polymerase beta (pol β) is known to be the main polymerase in the BER pathway, various studies have implicated other DNA polymerases in back-up roles. One such polymerase, DNA polymerase lambda (pol λ), was shown to be important in BER of oxidative DNA damage. To further explore roles of the X-family DNA polymerases λ and β in BER, we prepared a mouse embryonic fibroblast cell line with deletions in the genes for both pol β and pol λ. Neutral red viability assays demonstrated that pol λ and pol β double null cells were hypersensitive to alkylating and oxidizing DNA damaging agents. In vitro BER assays revealed a modest contribution of pol λ to single-nucleotide BER of base lesions. Additionally, using co-immunoprecipitation experiments with purified enzymes and whole cell extracts, we found that both pol λ and pol β interact with the upstream DNA glycosylases for repair of alkylated and oxidized DNA bases. Such interactions could be important in coordinating roles of these polymerases during BER.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (grant ES050158)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (grant ES050159)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (grant CA055042)National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (delivery order HHSN273200700046U