“Every cockroach is beautiful to his mother’s eyes”? A multicentric study on the perception of child’s health status according to the parent.

INTRODUCTION: Childhood obesity is a social health problem in the Western World and an important goal is to analyze and correct risk factors. However, part of the problem could be determined by a different perception of the weight. MATERIAL AND METHODS: In October 2019, we conducted a cross-sectional study in which a questionnaire was administered to the parents of primary and secondary school children in South-East Tuscany, Italy. The aim was to determine the association between children’s Body Mass Index (BMI) and the parent’s perception.RESULTS: Analysis was carried out on 1,405 complete questionnaires. We found that most parents wrongly perceive the weight of their children. 88.3% of parents with obese children believe that their children are of normal weight or only “a little overweight”. 67.6% of parents who have overweight children think that their children are of normal weight (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Our results show a misperception of the weight of the children in the parents eyes. The acquisition of healthy behaviour during childhood is extremely important for health in adulthood and for avoiding the onset of associated diseases. Therefore, food education becomes a crucial objective. Children and parents need to increase consciousness of the correct weight and diseases resulting from bad nutrition

BACTERIAL LYSATES (OM-85 BV): a cost-effective proposal in order to contrast antibiotic resistance

Background Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is one of the most frequent pathologies in which antibiotics are used because 50% of the exacerbations are attributable to a bacterial infection. The aims of our study were: i)to perform a meta-analysis on the efficacy of the bacterial lysate OM-85 BV in preventing acute exacerbations in patients with COPD; ii) to evaluate whether this preventive treatment can lead to significant savings for the National Health Service (NHS).   Methods A systematic research was conducted in the electronic database MEDLINE (PubMed) in June 2017-July 2020, collecting evidences without time restrictions. Only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were included. The keywords used were "OM 85 BV AND chronic bronchitis" and "OM 85 BV AND COPD". We realized the cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) considering the costs for a treatment with OM-8BV, the costs for the treatment of an acute exacerbation and the number of prevented exacerbations.   Results 59 publications were found, but the meta-analysis was conducted on 13 studies conducted between 1981 and 2015.OM-85 BV is responsible of a statistically significant reduction in the mean number of COPD exacerbations (p <0.01; WMD -0.86;CI 95% -1.38, -0.34) and in the days of antibiotic therapy (p <0.01; WMD -9.49;CI 95% -11.93, -7.05). The cost-effectiveness ratio with a negative value is in favor to treatment.      Conclusions OM-85 BV is effective in reducing exacerbations, and could lead to significant savings for the NHS. Moreover, reducing the number of exacerbations it avoids an over-use of antibiotics and the consequent antibiotic resistance

A giant retroperitoneal hemangiosarcoma in a young boy: CT findings

Retroperitoneal hemangiosarcoma (RH) is an uncommon neoplasm that derives from the vascular endothelium; due to its biological behavior, it should be distinguished from other retroperitoneal tumors. We report a case of a 40-year-old man with diagnosis of retroperitoneal mass, that was suspected to be malignant. The specimen was histopathologically proved to be a hemangiosarcoma. The patient was suffering from left upper quadrants prolonged abdominal pain, and had made a contrast-enhanced abdominal Computed Tomography (CT) that had shown the voluminous abdominal mass

Detecting damage through the processing of dynamic shapes measured by a PSD-triangular laser sensor

AbstractThere exist several studies in the literature which have shown the potentiality offered by certain vibration-based techniques aimed at detecting damage in structural systems. In all these existing techniques noise (distributed and/or outliers) plays a significant role and can make the difference between a successful or an unsuccessful application. In spite of such a mentioned remarkable influence, the studies aimed at investigating the influence of noise on the success of the techniques are not as rich in experimental details as they are in numerical simulations. In this work an extensive set of experiments aimed at evaluating the feasibility of certain diagnosing techniques is provided. This work should also be considered as the experimental validation of certain analytical and numerical simulations carried out in the past [Gentile, A., Messina, A., 2003. On the continuous wavelet transforms applied to discrete vibrational data for detecting open cracks in damaged beams. International Journal of Solids and Structures 40, 295–315; Messina, A., 2004. Detecting damage in beams through digital differentiator filters and continuous wavelet transforms. Journal of Sound and Vibration 272, 385–412] within the frame of real measurements based on a particular laser technology; in addition, the mentioned validating experiments illustrate certain peculiarities not shown in the past, and, finally, valuable benchmarks are provided for testing future diagnosing techniques in numerical simulations. The experimental set-up consists of both commercial and electronic circuits appropriately designed and realized, whose significance, in the measuring system is accurately described in order to increase the signal/noise ratio of the dynamical measurements

Combining EfficientNet and Vision Transformers for Video Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes are the result of digital manipulation to obtain credible videos in order to deceive the viewer. This is done through deep learning techniques based on autoencoders or GANs that become more accessible and accurate year after year, resulting in fake videos that are very difficult to distinguish from real ones. Traditionally, CNN networks have been used to perform deepfake detection, with the best results obtained using methods based on EfficientNet B7. In this study, we combine various types of Vision Transformers with a convolutional EfficientNet B0 used as a feature extractor, obtaining comparable results with some very recent methods that use Vision Transformers. Differently from the state-of-the-art approaches, we use neither distillation nor ensemble methods. The best model achieved an AUC of 0.951 and an F1 score of 88.0%, very close to the state-of-the-art on the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC)

Effectiveness of near-UVA in SARS-CoV-2 inactivation

This experimental study aimed to determine the activity of a near-UVA (405 nm) LED ceiling system against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The ceiling system comprised 17 near-UVA LED lights with a radiant power of 1.1 W/each centred at 405 nm wavelength. A 96-multiwell plate, fixed to a wooden base, was inoculated with suspensions of VERO E6 cell cultures infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus and irradiated at a distance of 40 cm with a dose of 20.2 J/cm(2) for 120 min. The collected suspensions were transferred to VERO cell culture plates and incubated for 3 days. The maximum measurable log reduction obtained, starting from a concentration of 10(7.2) TCID50/mL, was 3.0 log(10) and indicated inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 replication by the near-UVA LED ceiling system. Near-UVA light at a 405-nm wavelength is emerging as a potential alternative treatment for localised infections and environmental decontamination because it is far less harmful to living organisms' cells than UV-C irradiation