153 research outputs found
Screening for developmental disorders in 3- and 4-year-old italian children: a preliminary study
BACKGROUND:
The "Osserviamo" project, coordinated by the Municipality of Rome and the Department of Pediatrics and Child Neuropsychiatry of Sapienza University, aimed to validate an Italian version of the Ages and Stages Questionnaire-3 and to collect, for the first time in Italy, data on developmental disorders in a sample of 4,000 children aged 3 and 4 years. The present paper presents the preliminary results of the "Osserviamo" project.
METHODS:
600 parents of children between 39 and 50 months of age (divided in two age stages: 42 and 48 months) were contacted from 15 kindergarden schools.
RESULTS:
23.35% of the whole sample scored in the risk range of at least one developmental area of the Ages and Stages Questionnaire-3rd Edition (ASQ-3) and 7.78% scored in the clinical range. Specifically, 23.97% of the children in the 42-month age stage scored in the risk range and 5.79% scored in the clinical range. Males scored lower than females in the fine motor skills and personal-social development domains. Moreover, 22.79% of the children in the 48-month age stage scored in the risk range, while 9.55% scored in the clinical range. Males scored lower than females in fine motor skills.
CONCLUSION:
Italian validation of the ASQ-3 and recruitment of all 4,000 participants will allow these data on the distribution of developmental disorders to be extended to the general Italian pediatric population. One main limitation of the study is the lack of clinical confirmation of the data yielded by the screening programme, which the authors aim to obtain in later stages of the study
Aportes para la construcción de identidad en contextos de encierro
El desafío al que nos enfrentamos es el de co-gestionar una propuesta de extensión con grupos de personas que se encuentran en una especial situación de vulnerabilidad. Este desafío es aún mayor si, como en nuestro caso, tratamos de hacer confluir y no de yuxtaponer el aporte de cada una de nuestras disciplinas específicas (arte y derecho) en contextos no formales de educación (instituciones cerradas de personas privadas de libertad, internos hospitalizados y jóvenes de centros convivenciales abiertos y cerrados). El objetivo es ambicioso: la expresión artística en distintas modalidades de talleres interdisciplinarios como ejercicio de un derecho humano en sí misma (incluyendo las facetas de trasferencia y replicabilidad) y a su vez, como espacio de empoderamiento (rescate de la subjetividad avasallada por el disciplinamiento institucional). La posibilidad de autofortalecimiento de la identidad individual y colectiva, de cada destinatario del proyecto, como campo de poder en disputa. En lo antedicho se inscribe la meta de adquisición y desarrollo de herramientas que puedan facilitar su incorporación (más o menos próxima en el tiempo) al medio libre con una alternativa laboral mediante formas asociativas/cooperativas de producción. Están en juego aquí la elaboración de una alternativa sustentable en la construcción del conocimiento y objeto de vinculación, atravesada por un discurso jurídico-artístico-político de sostenimiento de la autovaloración individual y grupal, apuntalando los propios proyectos de vida y con acceso a la información útil a través de la práctica solidaria
Large spin expansion of the long-range Baxter equation in the sl(2) sector of N=4 SYM
Recently, several multi-loop conjectures have been proposed for the spin
dependence of anomalous dimensions of twist-2 and 3 operators in the sl(2)
sector of N=4 SYM. Currently, these conjectures are not proven, although
several consistency checks have been performed on their large spin expansion.
In this paper, we show how these expansions can be efficiently computed without
resorting to any conjecture. To this aim we present in full details a method to
expand at large spin the solution of the long-range Baxter equation. We treat
the twist-2 and 3 cases at two loops and the twist-3 case at three loops.
Several subtleties arise whose resolution leads to a simple algorithm computing
the expansion.Comment: 26 page
Interleukin-10 inhibits tumor metastasis through an NK-cell dependent mechanism
Interleukin-10 (IL-10) is a recently described pleiotropic cytokine secreted mainly by type 2 helper T cells. Previous studies have shown that IL-10 suppresses cytokine expression by natural killer (NK) and type 1 T cells, thus down-regulating cell-mediated immunity and stimulating humoral responses. We here report that injected IL-10 protein is an efficient inhibitor of tumor metastasis in experimental (B16-F10) and spontaneous (M27 and Lox human melanoma) metastasis models in vivo at doses that do not have toxic effects on normal or cancer cells. Histological characterization after IL-10 treatment confirmed the absence of CD8+ and CD4+ T cells and macrophages at the sites of tumor growth, but abundant NK cells were localized at these sites. This unexpected finding was confirmed by showing that IL-10 inhibits most B16-F10 and Lox metastases in mice deficient in T or B cells (SCID and nu/nu mice), but not in those deficient in NK cells (beige mice or NK cell-depleted mice). However, IL-10 downregulation of pro-inflammatory cytokine production and/or recruitment of additional effector cells may also be involved in the anti-tumor effect at higher local concentrations of IL-10, since transfected B16 tumor cells expressing high amounts of IL-10 were rejected by normal, nu/nu, or SCID mice at the primary tumor stage, and there was still a 33% inhibition of tumor metastasis in beige mice
Metastable de Sitter vacua in N=2 to N=1 truncated supergravity
We study the possibility of achieving metastable de Sitter vacua in general
N=2 to N=1 truncated supergravities without vector multiplets, and compare with
the situations arising in N=2 theories with only hypermultiplets and N=1
theories with only chiral multiplets. In N=2 theories based on a quaternionic
manifold and a graviphoton gauging, de Sitter vacua are necessarily unstable,
as a result of the peculiar properties of the geometry. In N=1 theories based
on a Kahler manifold and a superpotential, de Sitter vacua can instead be
metastable provided the geometry satisfies some constraint and the
superpotential can be freely adjusted. In N=2 to N=1 truncations, the crucial
requirement is then that the tachyon of the mother theory be projected out from
the daughter theory, so that the original unstable vacuum is projected to a
metastable vacuum. We study the circumstances under which this may happen and
derive general constraints for metastability on the geometry and the gauging.
We then study in full detail the simplest case of quaternionic manifolds of
dimension four with at least one isometry, for which there exists a general
parametrization, and study two types of truncations defining Kahler
submanifolds of dimension two. As an application, we finally discuss the case
of the universal hypermultiplet of N=2 superstrings and its truncations to the
dilaton chiral multiplet of N=1 superstrings. We argue that de Sitter vacua in
such theories are necessarily unstable in weakly coupled situations, while they
can in principle be metastable in strongly coupled regimes.Comment: 40 pages, no figure
A longitudinal, multi-level comparative study of quality and safety in European hospitals: the QUASER study protocol
although there is a wealth of information available about quality improvement tools and techniques in healthcare there is little understanding about overcoming the challenges of day-to-day implementation in complex organisations like hospitals. The 'Quality and Safety in Europe by Research' (QUASER) study will investigate how hospitals implement, spread and sustain quality improvement, including the difficulties they face and how they overcome them. The overall aim of the study is to explore relationships between the organisational and cultural characteristics of hospitals and how these impact on the quality of health care; the findings will be designed to help policy makers, payers and hospital managers understand the factors and processes that enable hospitals in Europe to achieve-and sustain-high quality services for their patients
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