The Art Of Dying Every Second: On The Representations, Publishing Legacy, And Posthumous Writings Of Roberto Bazlen

My dissertation aims to describe and investigate the influence and legacy of the intellectual and cultural work of Roberto Bazlen. Interlocutor and consultant of many of the major writers and intellectuals of his time, highly valued publishing adviser, and author of few posthumously published writings, Bazlen, as Eugenio Montale recalled, “spent his life with the desire of leaving no tangible traces of his own transit”. He is nevertheless regarded today as a key figure of twentieth-century Italian literature. Still, because of the very nature of his intellectual activity, his figure and work have been studied only recently, and partially. In the first part of my dissertation I analyze the critical and novelistic representations of Bazlen, whose persona, in spite of his notorious discretion about his life, rose to a legendary status while he was still alive. In the second part of my study I focus on Bazlen’s collaborations with writers such as Italo Svevo, Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, and Eugenio Montale, and I analyze the nature of his work and interventions in their writings. I subsequently address Bazlen’s publishing activity and the criteria and praxis behind his editorial opinions. In the third and final section of my dissertation I finally examine Bazlen’s writings as posthumously collected fragments of a post-humanistic thought deliberately and necessarily articulated in a non-organic fashion. Through the study of the traces collected in the partial and inevitably unfaithful realizations of Bazlen’s legacy, I aim to better comprehend the reasons behind his refusal of literary production and the characteristics of his primarily maieutic intellectual activity

Uncovering the potential of blockchain in the agri-food supply chain. An interdisciplinary case study

This paper explores how Blockchain technology (BCT) can be integrated in the agri-food supply chain (ASC) and how BCT-based networks are formed. To do this, the paper describes a BCT solution, designed to enhance traceability, and analyses its adoption in two small firms. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the findings have revealed that BCT improves how data is collected and has changed how firms interact with stakeholders and customers. Firms have enhanced their reputations and started targeting new domestic and international markets. Technical and economic challenges were found when persuading actors to participate in the BCT-based network

Clostridium difficile outbreak: epidemiological surveillance, infection prevention and control

INTRODUCTION: Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is currently considered the most common cause of health care-associated infections. The aim is to describe the trend of CDI in an Italian hospital and to assess the efficacy of the measures adopted to manage the burden. METHODS: we looked at CDI from 2016 to 2018. The incidence rate of CDIs was calculated as the number of new infected persons per month by the overall length of stay (incidence per 10,000 patient-days). Changes in the CDI rate during the period considered were analysed using a joinpoint regression model. RESULTS: thanks to the monitoring activity it was possible to adopt a new protocol, in order to manage CDI: the CDI episodes decreased from 85 in 2017 to 31 in 2018 (63% decrease). The joinpoint regression model was a useful tool to identify an important decrement during 2017, statistically significant (slope=-15.84; p= 0.012). CONCLUSIONS: reports based on routine laboratory data can accurately measure population burden of CDI with limited surveillance resources. This acitivity can help target prevention programs and evaluate their effect

Neuromuscular magnetic stimulation counteracts muscle decline in ALS patients: results of a randomized, double-blind, controlled study

The aim of the study was to verify whether neuromuscular magnetic stimulation (NMMS) improves muscle function in spinal-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients. Twenty-two ALS patients were randomized in two groups to receive, daily for two weeks, NMMS in right or left arm (referred to as real-NMMS, rNMMS), and sham NMMS (sNMMS) in the opposite arm. All the patients underwent a median nerve conduction (compound muscle action potential, CMAP) study and a clinical examination that included a handgrip strength test and an evaluation of upper limb muscle strength by means of the Medical Research Council Muscle Scale (MRC). Muscle biopsy was then performed bilaterally on the flexor carpi radialis muscle to monitor morpho-functional parameters and molecular changes. Patients and physicians who performed examinations were blinded to the side of real intervention. The primary outcome was the change in the muscle strength in upper arms. The secondary outcomes were the change from baseline in the CMAP amplitudes, in the nicotinic ACh currents, in the expression levels of a selected panel of genes involved in muscle growth and atrophy, and in histomorphometric parameters of ALS muscle fibers. The Repeated Measures (RM) ANOVA with a Greenhouse-Geisser correction (sphericity not assumed) showed a significant effect [F(3, 63) = 5.907, p < 0.01] of rNMMS on MRC scale at the flexor carpi radialis muscle, thus demonstrating that the rNMMS significantly improves muscle strength in flexor muscles in the forearm. Secondary outcomes showed that the improvement observed in rNMMS-treated muscles was associated to counteracting muscle atrophy, down-modulating the proteolysis, and increasing the efficacy of nicotinic ACh receptors (AChRs). We did not observe any significant difference in pre- and post-stimulation CMAP amplitudes, evoked by median nerve stimulation. This suggests that the improvement in muscle strength observed in the stimulated arm is unlikely related to reinnervation. The real and sham treatments were well tolerated without evident side effects. Although promising, this is a proof of concept study, without an immediate clinical translation, that requires further clinical validation

Autophagic processes increase during senescence in cultured sheep neurons and astrocytes

A possible response to aging is autophagy, a self-digestion process in which portions of cytoplasm are encapsulated by double-membrane-bound structures and delivered to lysosome for degradation. A previous work of our group showed that astrocytes under starving conditions are characterized by a higher upregulation of the marker of autophagy LC3 II than neurons. Aim of the present work was to evaluate LC3 II expression in an aging model consisting in fetal sheep neurons and astrocytes at 10, 20 and 30 days of culture. Such model has been validated by a remarkable activity of β-galactosidase, commonly used to reveal cell aging. LC3 II immunoreactivity in neurons and astrocytes progressively increased with time but differences were observed on the basis of cell density. Indeed, LC3 II immunoreactivity is higher in clusters of neurons and astrocytes and this may be due to the fact that cell-cell contact would represent a second stress in addition to aging itself. Both cell types displayed a reduction in LC3 II signal in nuclei, and a corresponding strengthening in the cytoplasm with time. This may be due to the need of aged cells to remove damaged cytoplasmic components through autophagic processes. Such variation in LC3 II localization could be caused by migration from the nucleus to cytoplasm as well as possible de novo intracytoplasmic production. The present work based on sheep neural cells in vitro may represent a helpful tool in the studies on aging processes in which autophagy plays a remarkable role

Apc splicing mutations leading to in-frame exon 12 or exon 13 skipping are rare events in fap pathogenesis and define the clinical outcome

Familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) is caused by germline mutations in the tumor suppressor gene APC. To date, nearly 2000 APC mutations have been described in FAP, most of which are predicted to result in truncated protein products. Mutations leading to aberrant APC splicing have rarely been reported. Here, we characterized a novel germline heterozygous splice donor site mutation in APC exon 12 (NM_000038.5: c.1621_1626+7del) leading to exon 12 skipping in an Italian family with the attenuated FAP (AFAP) phenotype. Moreover, we performed a literature meta-analysis of APC splicing mutations. We found that 119 unique APC splicing mutations, including the one described here, have been reported in FAP patients, 69 of which have been characterized at the mRNA level. Among these, only a small proportion (9/69) results in an in-frame protein, with four mutations causing skipping of exon 12 or 13 with loss of armadillo repeat 2 (ARM2) and 3 (ARM3), and five mutations leading to skipping of exon 5, 7, 8, or (partially) 9 with loss of regions not encompassing known functional domains. The APC splicing mutations causing skipping of exon 12 or 13 considered in this study cluster with the AFAP phenotype and reveal a potential molecular mechanism of pathogenesis in FAP disease

Identification and Somatic Characterization of the Germline PTEN Promoter Variant rs34149102 in a Family with Gastrointestinal and Breast Tumors

Genetic variants located in non-coding regions can affect processes that regulate protein expression, functionally contributing to human disease. Germline heterozygous mutations in the non-coding region of the PTEN gene have been previously identified in patients with PTEN hamartoma tumor syndrome (PHTS) diagnosed with breast, thyroid, and/or endometrial cancer. In this study, we report a PTEN promoter variant (rs34149102 A allele) that was identified by direct sequencing in an Italian family with a history of gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) adenocarcinoma and breast cancer. In order to investigate the putative functional role of the rs34149102 A allele variant, we evaluated the status of PTEN alterations at the somatic level. We found that PTEN protein expression was absent in the GEJ adenocarcinoma tissue of the index case. Moreover, we detected the occurrence of copy number loss involving the PTEN rs34149102 major C allele in tumor tissue, revealing that the second allele was somatically inactivated. This variant is located within an active regulatory region of the PTEN core promoter, and in silico analysis suggests that it may affect the binding of the nuclear transcription factor MAZ and hence PTEN expression. Overall, these results reveal the functional role of the PTEN promoter rs34149102 A allele variant in the modulation of PTEN protein expression and highlight its contribution to hereditary cancer risk

Convolutional neural network based on fluorescein angiography images for retinopathy of prematurity management

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the use of fluorescein angiography (FA) images in a convolutional neural network (CNN) in the management of retinopathy of prematurity (ROP).Methods: The dataset involved a total of 835 FA images of 149 eyes (90 patients), where each eye was associated with a binary outcome (57 "untreated" eyes and 92 "treated"; 308 "untreated" images, 527 "treated"). The resolution of the images was 1600 and 1200 px in 20% of cases, whereas the remaining 80% had a resolution of 640 and 480 px. All the images were resized to 640 and 480 px before training and no other preprocessing was applied. A CNN with four convolutional layers was trained on 90% of the images (n = 752) randomly chosen. The accuracy of the prediction was assessed on the remaining 10% of images (n = 83). Keras version 2.2.0 for R with Tensorflow backend version 1.11.0 was used for the analysis.Results: The validation accuracy after 100 epochs was 0.88, whereas training accuracy was 0.97. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) presented an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.91.Conclusions: Our study showed, we believe for the first time, the applicability of artificial intelligence (CNN) technology in the ROP management driven by FA. Further studies are needed to exploit different fields of applications of this technology.Translational Relevance: This algorithm is the basis for a system that could be applied to both ROP as well as experimental oxygen induced retinopathy