Multimarker approach for heart failure management: perspectives and limitations

Heart failure (HF) is a major public health problem and the approach for an accurate individualization of HF risk and care should include a profile of laboratory data, in addition to clinical and imaging data. The possibility of identifying the most vulnerable patients is clinically important, especially considering that many therapeutic interventions are available today. This goal has not been yet reached although many novel biomarkers have been proposed and tested. The complexity of the biochemical network at the basis of HF pathophysiology clearly suggests that a single marker cannot reflect all the features of this syndrome, whereas the combined use of more indices would better characterize HF patients and create new options for their management, helping identify which patients to follow more closely. The multimarker approach, considering various biochemical pathways simultaneously, bases its robustness on a suitable choice of indices known to be individually associated with HF. The choice of biomarker combination is essential to the performance of the multimarker strategy. A major problem in selecting the biomarker profile is the proportional increase in economic burden; thus a "parsimonious" biomarker combination has to be used in a cost-effective evaluation. Statistical analysis and analytical performance of the different elements of the combination, in turn, may heavily influence results. This review summarizes the results obtained using a multimarker approach for HF risk stratification, for predicting HF incidence in a population, and evaluating the response to therapy. An insight into transcriptomic biomarkers, recently proposed for HF individual risk assessment, is also reported. A reliable selection of biomarkers for the careful management of HF patients is of pivotal importance in reducing healthcare costs without reducing patient care

Theoretical and Textual Approaches to Contemporary Humanitarian Narrative: The Cases of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra, Aung San Suu Kyi’s Letters from Burma, Jerry Piasecki’s Marie in the Shadow of the Lion and Nadine Gordimer’s The Ultimate Safari

The purpose of this thesis is to describe how some forms of fictional and non-fictional texts can be configured as and within the framework of humanitarian practices. In exploring the definitions and features of humanitarianism and humanitarian literature, the thesis attempts to answer the question of what purpose these texts try to serve. In examining the works Marie in the Shadow of the Lion (2000) by Jerry Piasecki, The Ultimate Safari (1989) by Nadine Gordimer, Gomorra (2006) by Roberto Saviano and Letters from Burma (1996) by Aung San Suu Kyi, we will argue that the scope of these books can be located by analogy to social and political humanitarian practices. Beyond their differences in genre, style and subject matter, these texts share a common feature: they are performative, namely they strive to do things with words. The humanitarian texts discussed in this thesis can be shown to act in the world in order to implement the values proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Chirped seeded free-electron lasers: self-standing light sources for two-colour pump-probe experiments

We demonstrate the possibility to run a single-pass free-electron laser in a new dynamical regime, which can be exploited to perform two-colour pump-probe experiments in the VUV/X-ray domain, using the free-electron laser emission both as a pump and as a probe. The studied regime is induced by triggering the free-electron laser process with a powerful laser pulse, carrying a significant and adjustable frequency chirp. As a result, the emitted light is eventually split in two sub-pulses, whose spectral and temporal separations can be independently controlled. We provide a theoretical description of this phenomenon, which is found in good agreement with experiments performed on the FERMI@Elettra free-electron laser

Novel biodegradable, biomimetic and functionalised polymer scaffolds to prevent expansion of post-infarct left ventricular remodelling.

Abstract Over the past decade, a large number of strategies and technologies have been developed to reduce heart failure progression. Among these, cardiac tissue engineering is one of the most promising. Aim of this study is to develop a 3D scaffold to treat cardiac failure. A new three-block copolymer, obtained from δ-valerolactone and polyoxyethylene, was synthesised under high vacuum without catalyst. Copolymer/gelatine blends were microfabricated to obtain a ECM-like geometry. Structures were studied under morphological, mechanical, degradation and biological aspects. To prevent left ventricular remodelling, constructs were biofunctionalises with molecularly imprinted nanoparticles towards the matrix metalloproteinase MMP-9. Results showed that materials are able to reproduce the ECM structure with high resolution, mechanical properties were in the order of MPa similar to those of the native myocardium and cell viability was verified. Nanoparticles showed the capability to rebind MMP-9 (specific rebinding 18.67) and to be permanently immobilised on the scaffold surface

Covariant self-fields regularization in dense electron beams

A critical issue in the development of coherent X-ray sources as FEL and SR facilities is the generation of high peak brilliance electron beams. Detailed simulations of such “dense” systems require self-interaction effects to be carefully accounted for in diverse dynamical conditions ranging from low energies where quasi-static space charge effects dominate, to the highly relativistic regimes of the kind encountered, e.g., in magnetic compressors, where acceleration fields prevail and retarded effects cannot be neglected. In principia prima Monte Carlo codes the electron beam is usually modelled as a collection of mutually interacting objects, whose number is bounded because of practical computer limitations. As a consequence suitable techniques must be devised to achieve stability and suppress numerical artifacts. In this paper a covariant approach to self-fields regularization is described, in the context of TREDI simulation code, a fully 3D Monte Carlo Accounting for electron beam self-interaction by means of Lienard-Wiechert retarded potentials

TREDI simulations for high-brilliance photoinjectors and magnetic chicanes

The TREDI Monte Carlo program is briefly described, devoting some emphasis to the Lienard-Wiechert potentials approach followed to account for self-field effects and the covariant technique devised to achieve regularization of electromagnetic fields. Some guidelines to the choice of the correct parameters to be used in the simulation are also sketched. The predictions obtained for the reference work point of the space-charge compensated SPARC photoinjector and a benchmark chicane designed to study coherent synchrotron radiation effects in a magnetic compressor are compared to those of other well-established simulation codes