Excision for the treatment of periarticular ossification of the knee in patients who have a traumatic brain injury

Patients who are comatose after a traumatic brain injury often have heterotopic periarticular ossification that can be treated with excision to improve the range of motion of the joint

Biomechanical modelling in nanomedicine: multiscale approaches and future challenges

Nanomedicine is the branch of nanotechnology devoted to the miniaturization of devices and to the functionalization of processes for the diagnosis and the design of tools of clinical use. In the perspective to develop patient-specific treatments and effective therapies against currently incurable diseases, biomechanical modelling plays a key role in enabling their translation to clinical practice. Establishing a dynamic interaction with experiments, a modelling approach is expected to allow investigating problems with lower economic burden, evaluating a larger range of conditions. Since biological systems have a wide range of typical characteristic length and timescales, a multiscale modelling approach is necessary both for providing a proper description of the biological complexity at the single scales and for keeping the largest amount of functional interdependence among them. This work starts with a survey both of the common frameworks for modelling a biological system, at scales from atoms to a continuous distribution of matter, and of the available multiscale methods that link the different levels of investigation. In the following, we define an original approach for dealing with the specific case of transport and diffusion of nanoparticles and/or drug-delivery carriers from the systemic circulation to a target tissue microstructure. Using a macro–micro viewpoint, we discuss the existing multiscale approaches and we propose few original strategies for overcoming their limitations in bridging scales. In conclusion, we highlight and critically discuss the future challenges of multiscale modelling for achieving the long-term objective to assist the nanomedical research in proposing more accurate clinical approaches for improved medical benefit

Obesity and Headache/Migraine: The Importance of Weight Reduction through Lifestyle Modifications

The aim of this study is to determine a possible relationship between prevalence, frequency, and severity of migraine and obesity. All pertinent data from the literature have been critically examined and reviewed in order to assess the possible relationship between obesity and migraine, in particular migraine frequency and disability in children, as well as in adult population studies. Prevalence, frequency, and severity of migraine appear to increase in relation to the body mass index, although this evidence is not supported by all the studies examined. Data from literature suggest that obesity can be linked with migraine prevalence, frequency, and disability both in pediatric and adult subjects. These data have important clinical implications and suggest that clinicians should have a special interest for weight reduction of obese children suffering from migraine, prescribing and supporting intensive lifestyle modifications (dietary, physical activities, and behavioral) for the patient and the entire family

Clone Analysis in the Web Era: an Approach to Identify Cloned Web Pages

The Internet and World Wide Web diffusion are producing a substantial increase in the demand of web sites and web applications. The very short time-to-market of a web application, and the lack of method for developing it, promote an incremental development fashion where new pages are usually obtained reusing (i.e. “cloning”) pieces of existing pages without adequate documentation about these code duplications and redundancies. The presence of clones increase system complexity and the effort to test, maintain and evolve web systems, thus the identification of clones may reduce the effort devoted to these activities as well as to facilitate the migration to different architectures. This paper proposes an approach for detecting clones in web sites and web applications, obtained tailoring the existing methods to detect clones in traditional software systems. The approach has been assessed performing analysis on several web sites and web applications

The invention of sadism? The limits of neologisms in the history of sexuality

How important is a new word for the development of newly imagined sexual pathology? In the case of the neologism 'sadism' at the fin de siècle, this invention was strangely both pivotal and incidental. Tracking sexual concepts, as Laqueur does for masturbation, requires that the neologisms invented at precise historic moments be both recontextualized in relation to earlier discourses, and problematized as stable constructs in their ongoing development. This article is a genealogical sketch of this kind in relation to 'sadism', as part of a larger inquiry into how this sexual construct became available to the Frankfurt School philosophers and as an explanation for Nazi genocidal cruelty