Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Is Associated with Altered Neuropsychological Performance in Young Adults

Subjects with ischemic lesions have an increased risk of dementia. In addition, Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular cognitive impairment share many risk factors. These observations suggest that different diseases that cause altered blood perfusion of the brain or hypoxia promote AD neurodegeneration. In this case-control, cross-sectional study, we sought to test the hypothesis that hypoxia facilitates cognitive decline. We looked for altered neuropsychological performance in subjects with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) without apparent cardio- or cerebrovascular diseases or risk factors for atherosclerosis. A selected, homogeneous group of workers from two ceramic factories in a small town of central Italy was enrolled in this study. The COPD patients had a slightly, but significantly worse performance than controls in a number of neuropsychological tests. The findings are consistent with the working hypothesis that chronic hypoxia facilitates cognitive decline

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

OKkIO alla SALUTE: promozione della salute e crescita sana nei bambini della scuola primaria [Promotion of healthy life style and growth in primary school children (OKkio alla SALUTE)]

In October 2007, the Italian Ministry of Health, the Centre for Disease Control and the Regions entrusted the National Institute of Health with the coordination of the initiative "Okkio alla Salute"--Promotion of healthy lifestyle and growth in primary school children. This programme is linked to the European programme "Gaining health" and the National Plan for Prevention. The objective of the project was to develop and maintain a monitoring system for both the health services and the schools that could also be used to better target public health interventions. The first national survey to estimate the prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and to collect information on diet and physical activity has been conducted in close collaboration with the individual regions. In the first nine months of the project, 1025 health workers and approximately 1500 school teachers have received training, and, using standardised methods, they have collected data and weighed and measured nearly 45000 third grade students (median age 8.8 years) in 2000 schools throughout the country. Participation rates have exceeded 95%. The results obtained to date indicate that the methodology is sustainable using existing health and educational resources and can be adopted as a national surveillance system