Beliefs and Opinions of Health Care Workers and Students Regarding Influenza and Influenza Vaccination in Tuscany, Central Italy

Immunization of health care workers (HCWs) against influenza has been associated with improvements in patient safety. The aim of this study is to assess the beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge of HCWs and health profession students regarding influenza. An anonymous questionnaire was distributed to HCWs in three local Florentine healthcare units, at Careggi University Teaching Hospital, and to students in health profession degree programs. A total of 2576 questionnaires were fully completed. A total of 12.3% of subjects responded that they were “always vaccinated” in all three of the seasonal vaccination campaigns studied (2007–2008 to 2009–2010), 13.1% had been vaccinated once or twice, and 74.6% had not received vaccinations. Although the enrolled subjects tended to respond that they were “never vaccinated,” they considered influenza to be a serious illness and believed that the influenza vaccine is effective. The subjects who refused vaccination more frequently believed that the vaccine could cause influenza and that it could have serious side effects. More than 60% of the “always vaccinated” group completely agreed that HCWs should be vaccinated. Self-protection and protecting family members or other people close to the respondent from being infected and representing potential sources of influenza infection can be considered motivating factors for vaccination. The results highlight the importance of improving vaccination rates among all HCWs through multi-component interventions. Knowledge of influenza should be reinforced

Functional and physical cross-talk between PAR1 and PAR2 in human microvascular endothelial cells

Protease-activated receptors (PARs) are a novel family of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). Rather then being stimulated through ligand receptor occupancy, activation is initiated by cleavage of receptor N-terminus by a serine protease, resulting in the generation of a new tethered ligand, that interacts with the receptor within the extracellular loop-2. Both PAR1 and PAR2 are involved in several diseases, but any antagonist of them is still unavailable for therapy. The aim of this research project was to investigate whether functional and physical interactions occur between PAR1 and PAR2 and/or their signal transduction pathways in human microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC-1). Indeed, a wide knowledge of receptor biology constitutes the first step in the drug discovery process. For this purpose, immunoprecipitation studies were performed and the effects of PAR agonists on intracellular second messenger production (cAMP and calcium) were examined. Results indicated that in HMEC-1 PAR1 and PAR2 form hetero-oligomers but they also interact at the level of signal transduction pathways leading to functional cross-talks. Moreover, both PAR1 and PAR2 exhibit “functional selectivity” for G protein coupling. Our observation open new interesting strategies within the drug discovery process and help in the development of PAR selective antagonists useful for the treatment of several diseases

Process, structural, and outcome quality indicators of nutritional care in nursing homes: a systematic review

Abstract Background The quality of nursing homes (NHs) has attracted a lot of interest in recent years and is one of the most challenging issues for policy-makers. Nutritional care should be considered an important variable to be measured from the perspective of quality management. The aim of this systematic review is to describe the use of structural, process, and outcome indicators of nutritional care in NHs and the relationship among them. Methods The literature search was carried out in Pubmed, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science. A temporal filter was applied in order to select papers published in the last 10 years. All types of studies were included, with the exception of reviews, conference proceedings, editorials, and letters to the editor. Papers published in languages other than English, Italian, and Spanish were excluded. Results From the database search, 1063 potentially relevant studies were obtained. Of these, 19 full-text articles were considered eligible for the final synthesis. Most of the studies adopted an observational cross-sectional design. They generally assessed the quality of nutritional care using several indicators, usually including a mixture of many different structural, process, and outcome indicators. Only one of the 19 studies described the quality of care by comparing the results with the threshold values. Nine papers assessed the relationship between indicators and six of them described some significant associations—in the NHs that have a policy related to nutritional risk assessment or a suitable scale to weigh the residents, the prevalence or risk of malnutrition is lower. Finally, only four papers of these nine included risk adjustment. This could limit the comparability of the results. Conclusion Our findings show that a consensus must be reached for defining a set of indicators and standards to improve quality in NHs. Establishing the relationship between structural, process, and outcome indicators is a challenge. There are grounds for investigating this theme by means of prospective longitudinal studies that take the risk adjustment into account

Inhibition of [125] ET-1 binding to ETA receptors by salicilic acid dimers

Endothelin-1 (ET-1), a potent vasoconstrictor peptide, exerts its physiol. effects by binding and activating specific G protein-coupled receptors, named ETA and ETB. A unique property of ET-1 is its ability to bind almost irreversibly to its receptors. Aspirin and salicylic acid (SA) are allosteric inhibitors of ET-1 binding to ETA receptors. Dihalogenated derivs. of SA have been identified as more potent allosteric inhibitors than aspirin. In this study, dihalosalicylic acid dimers were synthesized and tested as inhibitors of [125I] ET-1 binding to ETA receptors in rat embryonic cardiomyocyte (H9c2 cell) membranes in aim to development of new potential allosteric inhibitors of ET-1. Some dihalosalicylic acid dimers synthesized in this study showed promising activity as inhibitor of [125I] ET-1 binding to ETA receptors in comparing with the dihalosalicylic acid reported in literature. The bromo substituted compd. b showed more remarkable activity than other halogen substituted dimers, it causes about 40% inhibition at 100mM and causes 100% inhibition at 500mM. We conclude that dihalosalicylic acid dimers can mediate good inhibition activity in comparison to sole dihalosalicylic acid mol

An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to screen for inhibitors of the oncogenic anaplastic lymphoma kinase

The discovery of novel anti-cancer drugs targeting anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK), an oncogenic tyrosine kinase, raises the need for in vitro assays suitable for screening compounds for ALK inhibition. To this aim we have developed and optimized an ALK-specific enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay that employs a novel ALK peptide substrate and purified ALK kinase domain

Predicting Healthcare-associated Infections: are Point of Prevalence Surveys data useful? A usefull pratical tool for detect Healthcare-associated Infections

Introduction Since 2012, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) promotes a point prevalence survey (PPS) of HAIs in European acute care hospitals. Through a retrospective analysis of 2012, 2015 and 2017 PPS of HAIs performed in a tertiary academic hospital in Italy, we developed a model to predict the risk of HAI. Methods Following ECDC protocol we surveyed 1382 patients across three years. Bivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between HAI and several variables. Those statistically significant were included in a stepwise multiple regression model. The goodness of fit of the latter model was assessed with the Hosmer-Lemeshow test, ultimately constructing a probability curve to estimate the risk of developing HAIs. Results Three variables resulted statistically significant in the stepwise logistic regression model: length of stay (OR 1.03; 95% C.I.: 1.02-1.05), devices breaking the skin (i.e. peripheral or central vascular catheter, OR 4.38; 95% C.I.: 1.52-12.63), urinary catheter (OR 4.71; 95% C.I.: 2.78-7.98). Conclusion PPSs are a convenient and reliable source of data to develop HAIs prediction models. The differences found between our results and previously published studies suggest the need of developing hospital-specific databases and predictive models for HAIs