Tra economia della religione ed economia religiosa. Spigolature italiane di storia e teoria economica

SOMMARIO: 1. Premessa - 2. Una rivoluzione contraddittoria - 3. Chiesa e denaro: la questione del prestito a interesse - 4. La svolta della Rerum Novarum: associazionismo e cooperazione - 5. Cattolicesimo e corporativismo - 6. Gli anni ’30 e l’eclissi dell’economia liberale - 7. Il dopoguerra italiano: un miracolo a metà - 8. Gli effetti negativi dei cattolici in politica, Giovanni Paolo II e il dialogo con il mercato. Between the Economics of Religion and Religious Economics. Tangent Questions Regarding Italian History and Economic Theory. ABSTRACT: The paper discusses the most important points of the relationship between social Christian thought and economic facts and how they developed in Italy, with particular reference to the application of competitive market principles. Starting with the second half of the 1800s, it is possible to argue that both the social doctrine and market theories had scarse impact on each other and more importantly, that they did not interact in a way which would have been useful. The author covers the main and most significant contributions that economists, sociologists, philosophers and politicians tried to bring to this missing debate between economic science and religious principles. In view of the creation of a society which responds to mankind’s real needs, we feel the lack of such a debate even though today we are witnessing a certain awakening

Proudhon e la cultura economica italiana degli anni '30. Un corto circuito inatteso?

Si discute se Proudhon, come asserito da alcuni studiosi statunitensi, debba essere considerato uno dei \uabpadri fondatori\ubb del fascismo. Da un'analisi attenta della pubblicistica italiana negli anni '30 e '40 non emergono evidenze che suffraghino questa ipotesi, anzi molteplici appaiono i motivi per sostenere una certa freddezza parte del fascino nei confronti del pensiero prudhoniano

Burnout in cardiac anesthesiologists. results from a national survey in italy

Objective: There is increasing burnout incidence among medical disciplines, and physicians working in emergency settings seem at higher risk. Cardiac anesthesiology is a stressful anesthesiology subspecialty dealing with high-risk patients. The authors hypothesized a high risk of burnout in cardiac anesthesiologists. Design: National survey conducted on burnout Setting: Italian cardiac centers. Participants: Cardiac anesthesiologists. Interventions: The authors administered via email an anonymous questionnaire divided into 3 parts. The first 2 parts evaluated workload and private life. The third part consisted of the Maslach Burnout Inventory test with its 3 constituents: high emotional exhaustion, high depersonalization, and low personal accomplishment. Measurements and Main Results: The authors measured the prevalence and risk of burnout through the Maslach Burnout Inventory questionnaire and analyzed factors influencing burnout. Among 670 contacts from 71 centers, 382 cardiac anesthesiologists completed the survey (57%). The authors found the following mean Maslach Burnout Inventory values: 14.5 ± 9.7 (emotional exhaustion), 9.1 ± 7.1 (depersonalization), and 33.7 ± 8.9 (personal accomplishment). A rate of 34%, 54%, and 66% of respondents scored in “high” or “moderate-high” risk of burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment, respectively). The authors found that, if offered to change subspecialty, 76% of respondents would prefer to remain in cardiac anesthesiology. This preference and parenthood were the only 2 investigated factors with a protective effect against all components of burnout. Significantly lower burnout scores were found in more experienced anesthesiologists. Conclusion: A relatively high incidence of burnout was found in cardiac anesthesiologists, especially regarding high depersonalization and low personal accomplishment. Nonetheless, most of the respondents would choose to remain in cardiac anesthesiology

Leishmaniasis en Pando-Bolivia: Frontera con Brasil y Perú

En la región Amazónica del este, aparentemente circulan la mayor biodiversidad de especies de Leishmania spp. y de Phlebotominae. Nuestro objetivo pretende presentar la revisión del conocimiento de la leishmaniasis en el departamento de Pando-Bolivia, frontera con Acre y Rondonia-Brasil y Madre de Dios-Perú, mediante el análisis de indicadores eco epidemiológicos, reportes, informes institucionales, tesis e Investigaciones médicas sobre la leishmaniasis en Bolivia y publicaciones de los países vecinos sobre esta región. En los últimos 23 años, el departamento de Pando registró 6,614 casos de Leishmaniasis Cutáneo Americana y un caso de Leishmaniasis Visceral. El sexo masculino fue el más afectado (69,6% de los registros). La forma cutánea (90,2%) predominó en relación con la manifestación clínica mucosas. Las tasas de incidencia por 10,000 habitantes fueron de 49,8 en 2,006; 39,3 en 2,012 y 49,7 en 2,018. Leishmania (V.) braziliensis fue la única especie registrada y se determinó la presencia de 20 especies de Phlebotominae, siendo las más frecuentes Nyssomyia shawi y Psychodopygus carrerari. Concluimos que la intensa migración de población susceptible asociada a la existencia de una alta diversidad conocida de especies de Phlebotominae con competencia vectorial, donde varias de ellas se están adaptando a ambientes modificados incluyendo el espacio peri doméstico, refuerzan la necesidad de investigar profundamente las características epidemiológicas de la leishmaniasis en la región de frontera entre Bolivia, Brasil y Perú, que registra las tasas más altas de Leishmaniasis Cutánea Americana en América del Sur.Fil: Mollinedo, Zoraida Aymara. Universidad Autonoma del Beni; BoliviaFil: Mollinedo, Pavel Elvin. Universidad Tecnica Cosmos; Bolivia. Instituto de Salud y Medio Ambiente; BoliviaFil: Noto, Javier. No especifíca;Fil: Mollinedo, Pavel Sergio. Ministerio de Salud Bolivia; BoliviaFil: Gironda, Wilson J.. Sociedad Boliviana de Entomología; BoliviaFil: Mollinedo, Juan Sergio. Instituto de Salud y Medio Ambiente; BoliviaFil: Salomón, Oscar Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Administración Nacional de Laboratorios e Institutos de Salud "Dr. Carlos G. Malbrán". Instituto Nacional de Medicina Tropical; Argentin

La tradizione europea del pensiero economico

Spalletti \ue8 segretario organizzativo, membro del collegio dei docenti del dottorato e co-curatore della cotutela del titolo di dottorato con l'Universit\ue0 Sorbona di Parigi. Lo scopo \ue8 formare studiosi con una preparazione adeguata alla complessit\ue0 che la ricerca nella Storia del pensiero economico ha raggiunto negli ultimi anni, conformemente anche con le nuove funzioni che la disciplina ha assunto nella formazione di economisti e scienziati sociali. La Storia del pensiero economico svolge infatti il ruolo di riflessione critica sui fondamenti della teoria economica; di riconoscimento dell\u2019influenza esercitata dall'evoluzione delle altre scienze; di approfondimento della teoria che nasce dall\u2019inquadramento del contesto culturale e storico che l\u2019ha determinata. In altre parole, la Storia del pensiero contribuisce a mantenere viva la tradizione europea di considerare la scienza economica come una scienza sociale. Tuttavia i corsi di laurea attuali non sono in grado di fornire un\u2019adeguata preparazione alla ricerca \u2013 ed eventualmente all\u2019insegnamento universitario \u2013 in questo settore. La materia richiede sia la conoscenza della teoria economica contemporanea (non fornita dai corsi di laurea propriamente umanistici) sia un\u2019adeguata preparazione alla ricerca storica (non fornita dai corsi di laurea in economia). Studi recenti hanno messo in evidenza i limiti di un approccio alla Storia del Pensiero economico confinato alla tradizione nazionale (considerata come un\u2019esperienza isolata poich\ue9 sovente gli Italiani studiano gli economisti italiani, i Tedeschi studiano gli economisti tedeschi etc.) ovvero alla tradizione anglosassone dominante. Ci\uf2 ha fatto passare in secondo piano interessanti correnti di pensiero che hanno avuto meno fortuna, o che sono legate a realt\ue0 nazionali diverse. La diffusione delle idee economiche tra i Paesi europei e la ricostruzione delle reti internazionali di collaborazione e di influenze costituiscono i campi di ricerca pi\uf9 innovativi e interessanti e sono ancora quasi interamente da esplorare. In particolare i rapporti tra Germania, Francia, Spagna e Italia sono tutti da ricostruire. Occorre, dunque, essere pronti ad accogliere le indicazioni provenienti dalla Comunit\ue0 scientifica internazionale, che gi\ue0 da tempo ha cominciato a interrogarsi sui meccanismi di trasferimento delle idee economiche attraverso i confini nazionali. Proprio l'istituzione scientifica pi\uf9 autorevole in materia, la Societ\ue0 Europea per la Storia del pensiero economico (ESHET), ha organizzato nel 1999 il convegno: "National Traditions in Economic Thought and the Diffusion of Ideas". Si tratta di filoni di ricerca che richiedono una complessa preparazione (disciplinare e linguistica) per essere adeguatamente affrontati. Non esistono dottorati in Europa che abbiano queste caratteristiche di apertura internazionale e di interdisciplinarit\ue0 tra economia e storia. In Italia i giovani studiosi/e che nutrono interesse in questo campo vi accedono generalmente tramite dottorati in economia e sono costretti ad acquisire faticosamente e isolatamente la strumentazione necessaria e a dedicare tempo e risorse ad approfondire conoscenze che non sono funzionali ai loro interessi di ricerca. Inoltre l\u2019alta specializzazione di questo dottorato, che ha quasi come solo sbocco professionale la ricerca, rende efficiente la scelta di concentrare gli sforzi tra diversi Paesi in un unico corso di studio a valenza internazionale

The Protein-Protein Interaction tasks of BioCreative III: classification/ranking of articles and linking bio-ontology concepts to full text

BACKGROUND: Determining usefulness of biomedical text mining systems requires realistic task definition and data selection criteria without artificial constraints, measuring performance aspects that go beyond traditional metrics. The BioCreative III Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) tasks were motivated by such considerations, trying to address aspects including how the end user would oversee the generated output, for instance by providing ranked results, textual evidence for human interpretation or measuring time savings by using automated systems. Detecting articles describing complex biological events like PPIs was addressed in the Article Classification Task (ACT), where participants were asked to implement tools for detecting PPI-describing abstracts. Therefore the BCIII-ACT corpus was provided, which includes a training, development and test set of over 12,000 PPI relevant and non-relevant PubMed abstracts labeled manually by domain experts and recording also the human classification times. The Interaction Method Task (IMT) went beyond abstracts and required mining for associations between more than 3,500 full text articles and interaction detection method ontology concepts that had been applied to detect the PPIs reported in them.RESULTS:A total of 11 teams participated in at least one of the two PPI tasks (10 in ACT and 8 in the IMT) and a total of 62 persons were involved either as participants or in preparing data sets/evaluating these tasks. Per task, each team was allowed to submit five runs offline and another five online via the BioCreative Meta-Server. From the 52 runs submitted for the ACT, the highest Matthew's Correlation Coefficient (MCC) score measured was 0.55 at an accuracy of 89 and the best AUC iP/R was 68. Most ACT teams explored machine learning methods, some of them also used lexical resources like MeSH terms, PSI-MI concepts or particular lists of verbs and nouns, some integrated NER approaches. For the IMT, a total of 42 runs were evaluated by comparing systems against manually generated annotations done by curators from the BioGRID and MINT databases. The highest AUC iP/R achieved by any run was 53, the best MCC score 0.55. In case of competitive systems with an acceptable recall (above 35) the macro-averaged precision ranged between 50 and 80, with a maximum F-Score of 55. CONCLUSIONS: The results of the ACT task of BioCreative III indicate that classification of large unbalanced article collections reflecting the real class imbalance is still challenging. Nevertheless, text-mining tools that report ranked lists of relevant articles for manual selection can potentially reduce the time needed to identify half of the relevant articles to less than 1/4 of the time when compared to unranked results. Detecting associations between full text articles and interaction detection method PSI-MI terms (IMT) is more difficult than might be anticipated. This is due to the variability of method term mentions, errors resulting from pre-processing of articles provided as PDF files, and the heterogeneity and different granularity of method term concepts encountered in the ontology. However, combining the sophisticated techniques developed by the participants with supporting evidence strings derived from the articles for human interpretation could result in practical modules for biological annotation workflows

Spectrum of mutations in Italian patients with familial hypercholesterolemia: New results from the LIPIGEN study

Background Familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) is an autosomal dominant disease characterized by elevated plasma levels of LDL-cholesterol that confers an increased risk of premature atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Early identification and treatment of FH patients can improve prognosis and reduce the burden of cardiovascular mortality. Aim of this study was to perform the mutational analysis of FH patients identified through a collaboration of 20 Lipid Clinics in Italy (LIPIGEN Study). Methods We recruited 1592 individuals with a clinical diagnosis of definite or probable FH according to the Dutch Lipid Clinic Network criteria. We performed a parallel sequencing of the major candidate genes for monogenic hypercholesterolemia (LDLR, APOB, PCSK9, APOE, LDLRAP1, STAP1). Results A total of 213 variants were detected in 1076 subjects. About 90% of them had a pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants. More than 94% of patients carried pathogenic variants in LDLR gene, 27 of which were novel. Pathogenic variants in APOB and PCSK9 were exceedingly rare. We found 4 true homozygotes and 5 putative compound heterozygotes for pathogenic variants in LDLR gene, as well as 5 double heterozygotes for LDLR/APOB pathogenic variants. Two patients were homozygous for pathogenic variants in LDLRAP1 gene resulting in autosomal recessive hypercholesterolemia. One patient was found to be heterozygous for the ApoE variant p.(Leu167del), known to confer an FH phenotype. Conclusions This study shows the molecular characteristics of the FH patients identified in Italy over the last two years. Full phenotypic characterization of these patients and cascade screening of family members is now in progress

SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity are associated with genetic variants affecting gene expression in a variety of tissues

Variability in SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity between individuals is partly due to genetic factors. Here, we identify 4 genomic loci with suggestive associations for SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and 19 for COVID-19 disease severity. Four of these 23 loci likely have an ethnicity-specific component. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals in 11 loci colocalize with expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) associated with the expression of 20 genes in 62 tissues/cell types (range: 1:43 tissues/gene), including lung, brain, heart, muscle, and skin as well as the digestive system and immune system. We perform genetic fine mapping to compute 99% credible SNP sets, which identify 10 GWAS loci that have eight or fewer SNPs in the credible set, including three loci with one single likely causal SNP. Our study suggests that the diverse symptoms and disease severity of COVID-19 observed between individuals is associated with variants across the genome, affecting gene expression levels in a wide variety of tissue types

Contributions of mean and shape of blood pressure distribution to worldwide trends and variations in raised blood pressure: A pooled analysis of 1018 population-based measurement studies with 88.6 million participants

© The Author(s) 2018. Background: Change in the prevalence of raised blood pressure could be due to both shifts in the entire distribution of blood pressure (representing the combined effects of public health interventions and secular trends) and changes in its high-blood-pressure tail (representing successful clinical interventions to control blood pressure in the hypertensive population). Our aim was to quantify the contributions of these two phenomena to the worldwide trends in the prevalence of raised blood pressure. Methods: We pooled 1018 population-based studies with blood pressure measurements on 88.6 million participants from 1985 to 2016. We first calculated mean systolic blood pressure (SBP), mean diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and prevalence of raised blood pressure by sex and 10-year age group from 20-29 years to 70-79 years in each study, taking into account complex survey design and survey sample weights, where relevant. We used a linear mixed effect model to quantify the association between (probittransformed) prevalence of raised blood pressure and age-group- and sex-specific mean blood pressure. We calculated the contributions of change in mean SBP and DBP, and of change in the prevalence-mean association, to the change in prevalence of raised blood pressure. Results: In 2005-16, at the same level of population mean SBP and DBP, men and women in South Asia and in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa would have the highest prevalence of raised blood pressure, and men and women in the highincome Asia Pacific and high-income Western regions would have the lowest. In most region-sex-age groups where the prevalence of raised blood pressure declined, one half or more of the decline was due to the decline in mean blood pressure. Where prevalence of raised blood pressure has increased, the change was entirely driven by increasing mean blood pressure, offset partly by the change in the prevalence-mean association. Conclusions: Change in mean blood pressure is the main driver of the worldwide change in the prevalence of raised blood pressure, but change in the high-blood-pressure tail of the distribution has also contributed to the change in prevalence, especially in older age groups

Repositioning of the global epicentre of non-optimal cholesterol

High blood cholesterol is typically considered a feature of wealthy western countries(1,2). However, dietary and behavioural determinants of blood cholesterol are changing rapidly throughout the world(3) and countries are using lipid-lowering medications at varying rates. These changes can have distinct effects on the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol, which have different effects on human health(4,5). However, the trends of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol levels over time have not been previously reported in a global analysis. Here we pooled 1,127 population-based studies that measured blood lipids in 102.6 million individuals aged 18 years and older to estimate trends from 1980 to 2018 in mean total, non-HDL and HDL cholesterol levels for 200 countries. Globally, there was little change in total or non-HDL cholesterol from 1980 to 2018. This was a net effect of increases in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreases in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe. As a result, countries with the highest level of non-HDL cholesterol-which is a marker of cardiovascular riskchanged from those in western Europe such as Belgium, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta in 1980 to those in Asia and the Pacific, such as Tokelau, Malaysia, The Philippines and Thailand. In 2017, high non-HDL cholesterol was responsible for an estimated 3.9 million (95% credible interval 3.7 million-4.2 million) worldwide deaths, half of which occurred in east, southeast and south Asia. The global repositioning of lipid-related risk, with non-optimal cholesterol shifting from a distinct feature of high-income countries in northwestern Europe, north America and Australasia to one that affects countries in east and southeast Asia and Oceania should motivate the use of population-based policies and personal interventions to improve nutrition and enhance access to treatment throughout the world.Peer reviewe