7,036 research outputs found
Medical use of cannabis: italian and european legislation
This review illustrates some brief
considerations of the medical use of cannabis recently
issued in Italy. History and uses of cannabis
throughout centuries and different countries
are illustrated together with a description of botany
and active phytocannabinoids. Then, medical
use of cannabis anti-pain treatment for patients
resistant to conventional therapies is described
in case of chronic neuropathic pain, spasticity,
for anticinetosic and antiemetic effect in nausea
and vomiting caused by chemotherapy, for appetite
stimulating effect in cachexia, anorexia, loss
of appetite in cancer patients or patients with
AIDS and in anorexia nervosa, hypotensive effect
in glaucoma resistant to conventional therapies
and for reduction of involuntary body and facial
movements in Gilles de la Tourette syndrome.
Italian most recent legislation on medical cannabis
is detailed with some law proposals, also
showing the inconsistent legislation within European
Union. Some final considerations of future
studies are also reported
Aspects of symmetry breaking in SO(10) GUTs
I review some recent results on the Higgs sector of minimal SO(10) grand
unified theories both with and without supersymmetry. It is shown that
nonsupersymmetric SO(10) with just one adjoint triggering the first stage of
the symmetry breaking does provide a successful gauge unification when
radiative corrections are taken into account in the scalar potential, while in
the supersymmetric case it is argued that the troubles in achieving a
phenomenologically viable breaking with representations up to the adjoint are
overcome by considering the flipped SO(10) embedding of the hypercharge.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure; prepared for the proceedings of DISCRETE'10 -
Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetrie
Ethical and medico-legal remarks on uterus transplantation: may it solve uterine factor infertility?
Uterus transplantation was firstly tested with animal trials sixty-five years ago. Despite several successful attempts in human subjects, the different procedures still lay at the experimental stage, in need of further studies and investigations before they can be considered as standard clinical practices. Uterus transplant cannot be regarded as a life-saving procedure, but rather a method to restore woman ability to procreate, when lost, thus improving her quality of life. Uterus transplant is a complex surgical procedure and presents significant health threats. Medical staff should therefore always obtain informed consent from patients, emphasizing such risks. Before that, women undergoing uterine transplants should be thoroughly informed about the hazards inherent to the procedure and especially about the dangers of immunosuppressant drugs, administered after the surgery which may injure the fetus, eventually formed in the restored organ and even lead to its death, thus nullifying the purpose of the transplant itself. Therefore, the risk-benefit ratio of uterus transplantation needs to be carefully assessed and described
NonClassicality Criteria in Multiport Interferometry
Interference lies at the heart of the behavior of classical and quantum
light. It is thus crucial to understand the boundaries between which
interference patterns can be explained by a classical electromagnetic
description of light and which, on the other hand, can only be understood with
a proper quantum mechanical approach. While the case of two-mode interference
has received a lot of attention, the multimode case has not yet been fully
explored. Here we study a general scenario of intensity interferometry: we
derive a bound on the average correlations between pairs of output intensities
for the classical wavelike model of light, and we show how it can be violated
in a quantum framework. As a consequence, this violation acts as a
nonclassicality witness, able to detect the presence of sources with
sub-Poissonian photon-number statistics. We also develop a criterion that can
certify the impossibility of dividing a given interferometer into two
independent subblocks.Comment: 5 + 3 pages, published versio
Advancements in uterus transplant: new scenarios and future implications
Women suffering from Uterine Factor infertility (UFI) arising from congenital conditions (e.g., Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome) or hysterectomy can fulfill their wish to achieve motherhood only by resorting to surro gacy, which is, however, banned in most countries. Medical research has long been looking into uterus transplant (UTx), which may constitute a valuable alternative for such patients. Following decades of animal testing and clinical trials, several successful pregnancies have been car ried to term. Yet UTx is still to be considered as an experimental procedure. The report's authors believe UTx has the potential to become a main stream surgical practice, but for the time being, several ethical issues need to be weighed in be fore it does
Hepatotoxicity induced by greater celandine (Chelidonium majus L.): a review of the literature
The available literature assessing Chelidonium majus L. (CM) hepatotoxicity potential, and its risk to benefit assessment has been reviewed in this paper. Identification of significant scientific literature was performed via the following research databases: Cochrane Central, Google Scholar, EMBASE, Medline, Science Direct, Scopus, Web of Science, using the following keywords: "Chelidonium majus", "greater celandine", "Hepatotoxicity", "Liver" "Injury", "Toxicity" individually investigated and then again in association. CM named also greater celandine, swallow-wort, or bai-qu-cai (Chinese), has been used for a long time in traditional Chinese medicine and phytotherapy. Its extracts have been claimed to display a wide variety of biological activities: antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, spasmolytic, antineoplastic, hepatoprotective, and analgesic. Moreover, herbal medicine suggests this plant have numerous additional effects which have not yet been scientifically evaluated, such as antitussive, diuretic, and eye-regenerative. However, despite its claimed hepatoprotective effects, several hepatotoxicity cases have been reported to be probably or highly probably connected with CM exposure, after their evaluation through liver-targeted causality assessment methods. CM hepatotoxicity has been defined as a distinct form of herb-induced liver injury (HILI), due to an idiosyncratic reaction of the metabolic type. This evidence has to be considered in relationship with the absence of considerable benefits of CM therapy. Therefore, the risk to benefit ratio of the use of herbal products containing greater celandine can actually be considered as negative
Investigating and modelling the effects of information accuracy on travellers' compliance with ATIS approach
On the vacuum of the minimal nonsupersymmetric SO(10) unification
We study a class of nonsupersymmetric SO(10) grand unified scenarios where
the first stage of the symmetry breaking is driven by the vacuum expectation
values of the 45-dimensional adjoint representation. Three decade old results
claim that such a Higgs setting may lead exclusively to the flipped SU(5) x
U(1) intermediate stage. We show that this conclusion is actually an artifact
of the tree level potential. The study of the accidental global symmetries
emerging in various limits of the scalar potential offers a simple
understanding of the tree level result and a rationale for the drastic impact
of quantum corrections. We scrutinize in detail the simplest and paradigmatic
case of the 45_{H} + 16_{H} Higgs sector triggering the breaking of SO(10) to
the standard electroweak model. We show that the minimization of the one-loop
effective potential allows for intermediate SU(4)_C x SU(2)_L x U(1)_R and
SU(3)_c x SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R x U(1)_{B-L} symmetric stages as well. These are
the options favoured by gauge unification. Our results, that apply whenever the
SO(10) breaking is triggered by , open the path for hunting the simplest
realistic scenario of nonsupersymmetric SO(10) grand unification.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure. Refs added. To appear in Phys. Rev.
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