Trend of decreasing length of cervical cone excision during the last 20 years

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present investigation was to evaluate the cervical conizations performed in the last 20 years in a single institution, with a particular interest in analyzing the trend of the length of cone excisions.PATIENTS AND METHODS: A retrospective cohort study of women who underwent a CO2-laser cervical conization between January 1996 and December 2015. Cytological abnormalities on referral pap smear, colposcopic findings and pertinent clinical and socio-demographic characteristics of each woman were collected. In particular, the length of cone specimen was evaluated, taking into account all the factors potentially influencing the length of excision.RESULTS: A total of 1270 women who underwent cervical conization from January 1996 to December 2015 were included in the analysis. A mean cone length of 15.1 \ub1 5.7 mm was reported, and we observed a significant decrease in the length of cone excisions over the whole study period. Age (rpartial = 0.1543, p < 0.0001), see & treat procedure (rpartial = -0.1945, p < 0.0001) and grade II colposcopic findings (rpartial = 0.1540, p < 0.0001) were significantly associated with the length of cone excision on multivariate analysis.CONCLUSIONS: In the last 20 years, a significant decrease in the length of cone excision was observed. In our opinion, this can be due to the acquired awareness by the gynecologists of the potential disadvantages of wide cone excision in term of adverse obstetric outcomes in future pregnancies

The significance of trust in the political system and motivation for pupils' learning progress in politics lessons

Very little research has been conducted on the contribution of political education to learning progress in Germany. Hence, there is a need for intervention studies measuring performance against the theoretical background of a political competence model. This model comprises three constructs: subject knowledge, motivation and attitudes. According to this model, politics lessons should not only convey knowledge but also arouse subject interest, promote political attitudes and develop problem-solving skills. This study investigates how knowledge acquisition is influenced by intervention using theory-oriented teaching materials on the European Union, intervention using conventional textbooks on the European Union and politics lessons without any reference to the European Union. It further asks how the performance-related self-concept and subject interest in political issues impact political knowledge and whether civic virtue and trust in the system are related to it. The sample comprises 1071 pupils. Theory-oriented politics classes lead to greater growth of pupils’ knowledge than in the control group. As anticipated, this study proves that a positive subject-specific self-concept impacts knowledge. The examination of political attitudes reveals a positive correlation between civic virtue and knowledge. There is no connection between trust in the political system and knowledge

Genetic susceptibility variants for lung cancer: Replication study and assessment as expression quantitative trait loci

Many single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been associated with lung cancer but lack confirmation and functional characterization. We retested the association of 56 candidate SNPs with lung adenocarcinoma risk and overall survival in a cohort of 823 Italian patients and 779 healthy controls, and assessed their function as expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs). In the replication study, eight SNPs (rs401681, rs3019885, rs732765, rs2568494, rs16969968, rs6495309, rs11634351, and rs4105144) associated with lung adenocarcinoma risk and three (rs9557635, rs4105144, and rs735482) associated with survival. Five of these SNPs acted as cis-eQTLs, being associated with the transcription of IREB2 (rs2568494, rs16969968, rs11634351, rs6495309), PSMA4 (rs6495309) and ERCC1 (rs735482), out of 10,821 genes analyzed in lung. For these three genes, we obtained experimental evidence of differential allelic expression in lung tissue, pointing to the existence of in-cis genomic variants that regulate their transcription. These results suggest that these SNPs exert their effects on cancer risk/outcome through the modulation of mRNA levels of their target genes

The Generalizability of Personality Effects in Politics

A burgeoning line of research examining the relation between personality traits and political variables relies extensively on convenience samples. However, our understanding of the extent to which using convenience samples challenges the generalizability of these findings to target populations remains limited. We address this question by testing whether associations between personality and political characteristics observed in representative samples diverged from those observed in the sub-populations most commonly studied in convenience samples, namely students and internet users. We leverage ten high-quality representative datasets to compare the representative samples with the two sub- samples. We did not find any systematic differences in the relationship between personality traits and a broad range of political variables. Instead, results from the sub-samples generalized well to those observed in the broader and more diverse representative sample

How Might Reform of the Political System Appeal to Discontented Citizens?

In Britain, levels of political trust have declined, stimulating policy makers to explore ways of appealing to discontented citizens. One such initiative involves reform of the political system. Yet this raises the question of which types of political reform are likely to appeal to discontented citizens. Existing studies have examined how individuals respond to political reforms, yet these studies only consider a limited range of institutional changes. Scholars and policy makers thus know little about the popular appeal of a wider set of institutional reforms. Taking advantage of proposals for political reform in Britain, this article considers public reactions to a wide range of institutional changes. Using data from the 2011 British Social Attitudes survey, we find that direct democratic reforms are not the only changes that appeal to discontented citizens. Instead, policy-makers may also appeal to the distrustful via reforms that allow voters more control over their political representatives

The political economy of trade and migration: evidence from the U.S. Congress

We systematically examine the drivers of U.S. congressmen's votes on trade and migration reforms since the 1970's. Standard trade theory suggests that reforms that lower barriers to goods and migrants should have similar distributional effects, hurting low-skilled U.S. workers while benefiting high-skilled workers. In line with this prediction, we find that House members representing more skilled labor abundant districts are more likely to support both trade and migration liberalization. Still, important differences exist: Democrats favor trade reforms less than Republicans, while the opposite is true for immigration reforms; welfare state considerations and network effects shape support for immigration, but not for trade

Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network

Contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of ‘inverse infrastructure’ and ‘research in the wild’, we disclose the WCN’s peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures