自記式「健康チェック票THI」による健康に及ぼす喫煙の影響評価－地方都市と大都市の学生間の比較－

キャンパスが群馬県内（Ｉキャンパス）、東京都内（Ｔキャンパス）および愛知県内（Ｎキャンパス）にあるＡ私立大学の学生347人（男子121人、女子226人）を対象に、喫煙が健康に及ぼす影響について、自記式「健康チェック票THI」によって評価した。対象学生の喫煙率は全国平均と比較して、Ｉキャンパスの男子学生がやや高かったことを除くと、ほぼ同程度であった。健康状態は1.2万人の標準グループから得られた尺度得点の分布をもとに、パーセンタイル値で評価した。喫煙者の健康状態は非喫煙者と比較して、身体面およびメンタル面の両方において劣る傾向がみられ、特に、女子学生の方が男子学生より顕著であった。さらに、Ｉキャンパスの学生より、ＴキャンパスやＮキャンパスの学生の方が、メンタル面の症状レベルが高い傾向が認められた。これらの結果は、喫煙が身体面の健康状態に悪影響を及ぼすことを確認するとともに、その影響は地方都市より大都会で学ぶ学生に強く出やすい可能性を示している

Ocular Refraction at Birth and Its Development During the First Year of Life in a Large Cohort of Babies in a Single Center in Northern Italy

The purpose of this study was to investigate refraction at birth and during the first year of life in a large cohort of babies born in a single center in Northern Italy. We also aimed to analyze refractive errors in relation to the gestational age at birth. An observational ophthalmological assessment was performed within 24 h of birth on 12,427 newborns. Refraction was examined using streak retinoscopy after the administration of tropicamide (1%). Values in the range of between +0.50 ≤ D ≤ +4.00 were defined as physiological refraction at birth. Newborns with refraction values outside of the physiological range were followed up during the first year of life. Comparative analyses were conducted in a subgroup of babies with known gestational ages. The following distribution of refraction at birth was recorded: 88.03% of the babies had physiological refraction, 5.03% had moderate hyperopia, 2.14% had severe hyperopia, 3.4%, had emmetropia, 0.45%, had myopia, 0.94% had astigmatism, and 0.01% had anisometropia. By the end of the first year of life, we observed reductions in hyperopia and astigmatism, and stabilization of myopia. Preterm babies had a four-fold higher risk of congenital myopia and a three-fold higher risk of congenital emmetropia as compared to term babies. Refraction profiles obtained at birth changed during the first year of life, leading to a normalization of the refraction values. Gestational age at birth affected the incidence of refractive errors and amblyopia

A study of Machine Learning models for Clinical Coding of Medical Reports at CodiEsp 2020

The task of identifying one or more diseases associated with a patient’s clinical condition is often very complex, even for doctors and specialists. This process is usually time-consuming and has to take into account different aspects of what has occurred, including symptoms elicited and previous healthcare situations. The medical diagnosis is often provided to patients in the form of written paper without any correlation with a national or international standard. Even if the WHO (World Health Organization) released the ICD10 international glossary of diseases, almost no doctor has enough time to manually associate the patient’s clinical history with international codes. The CodiEsp task at CLEF 2020 addressed this issue by proposing the development of an automatic system to deal with this task. Our solution investigated different machine learning strategies in order to identify an approach to face that challenge. The main outcomes of the experiments showed that a strategy based on BERT for pre-filtering and one based on BiLSTMCNN-SelfAttention for classification provide valuable results. We carried out several experiments on a subset of the training set for tuning the final model submitted to the challenge. In particular, we analyzed the impact of the algorithm, the input encoding strategy, and the thresholds for multi-label classification. A set of experiments has been carried out also during a post hoc analysis. The experiments confirmed that the strategy submitted to the CodiEsp task is the best performing one among those evaluated, and it allowed us to obtain a final mean average error value on the test set equal to 0.202. To support future developments of the proposed approach and the replicability of the experiments we decided to make the source code publicly accessible

Molecular interactions, characterization and photoactivity of Chlorophyll a/chitosan/2-HP-β-cyclodextrin composite films as functional and active surfaces for ROS production

Novel photosensitizing film based on the natural hybrid polymer Chitosan/2-hydroxy-propyl-β-Cyclodextrin (CH/CD) is synthesized introducing Chlorophyll a (CH/CD/Chla) as a photoactive agent for possible application in antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (PDT). The polymer absorbs visible light, in turn able to generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) and, therefore it can be used as environmental friendly and biodegradable polymeric photosensitizer (PS). The modified film is characterized by means of different spectroscopic, calorimetric, diffraction techniques and microscopic imaging methods including time-resolved absorption spectroscopy. UV–Vis, FTIR-ATR and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) analyses suggest that Chla shows a strong affinity toward Chitosan introducing interactions with amino groups present on the polymer chains. Nanosecond laser flash photolysis technique provides evidence for the population of the excited triplet state of Chla. Photogeneration of singlet oxygen is demonstrated by both direct detection by using infrared luminescence spectroscopy and chemical methods based on the use of suitable traps. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) analyses confirm also the occurrence of structural changes both on the film surface and within the film layer induced by the insertion of the pigment. Moreover, X-ray Diffraction data (XRD) shows the existence of an amorphous phase for the chitosan films in all the compared conditions

Le Difficoltà di Calcolo e l’Ansia Matematica. Uno studio sulla Scuola Secondaria di Primo Grado.

Diversi studi evidenziano come tanti studenti sperimen- tano ansia e senso di inadeguatezza in compiti che coin- volgono le abilità di calcolo (Ashcraft, 2002; Maloney e Beilock, 2012) e supportano l’idea che l’alunno sia influenzato nell’apprendimento della matematica da tali sentimenti e come questi siano associati ad un minore rendimento in questa disciplina (Lee, 2009). Gli studi sulle “convinzioni” permettono di affermare che l’apprendimento di uno studente è orientato dal proprio Sè. Tali idee del tutto soggettive e non lega- te alle conoscenze oggettive connesse alla disciplina, svolgono un ruolo di filtro rispetto all’apprendimento e interpretazione delle nuove informazioni (Boscolo, 1997). Questo sistema di idee influenza l’apprendimento dell’alunno, fornendogli, a seconda dei casi, un valido supporto per sostenere gli sforzi nel processo di ap- prendimento, oppure un condizionamento negativo che rende vano ogni tentativo di riuscita (Demarchi, 2015). L’intento del presente studio è stato quello di indaga- re la competenza oggettiva nell’area del calcolo e la competenza soggettiva intesa come l’ansia percepita ri- spetto all’apprendimento matematico e alla valutazione matematica ed infine l’ansia scolastica generalizzata. Lo studio è stato condotto su un gruppo di 54 alunni frequentanti la scuola secondaria di primo grado di un Istituto Comprensivo della provincia di Taranto. La ricerca ha evidenziato come le prestazioni in ma- tematica peggiorino all’aumentare della classe di fre- quenza e come, buone prestazioni nell’area del calcolo corrispondono a più bassi livelli di ansia nelle tre di- mensioni: Ansia da Apprendimento Matematico, Ansia da Valutazione Matematica e Ansia Scolastica Genera- lizzata

Nanoscale Assembly of Functional Peptides with Divergent Programming Elements

Self-assembling peptides are being applied both in the biomedical area and as building blocks in nanotechnology. Their applications are closely linked to their modes of self-assembly, which determine the functional nanostructures that they form. This work brings together two structural elements that direct nanoscale self-association in divergent directions: proline as a β-breaker and the β-structure-associated diphenylalanine motif, into a single tripeptide sequence. Amino acid chirality was found to resolve the tension inherent to these conflicting self-assembly instructions. Stereoconfiguration determined the ability of each of the eight possible Pro-Phe-Phe stereoisomers to self-associate into diverse nanostructures, including nanoparticles, nanotapes, or fibrils, which yielded hydrogels with gel-to-sol transition at a physiologically relevant temperature. Three single-crystal structures and all-atom molecular dynamics simulations elucidated the ability of each peptide to establish key interactions to form long-range assemblies (i,e., stacks leading to gelling fibrils), medium-range assemblies (i.e., stacks yielding nanotapes), or short-range assemblies (i.e., dimers or trimers that further associated into nanoparticles). Importantly, diphenylalanine is known to serve as a binding site for pathological amyloids, potentially allowing these heterochiral systems to influence the fibrillization of other biologically relevant peptides. To probe this hypothesis, all eight Pro-Phe-Phe stereoisomers were tested in vitro on the Alzheimer's disease-associated Aβ(1-42) peptide. Indeed, one nonfibril-forming stereoisomer effectively inhibited Aβ fibrillization through multivalent binding between diphenylalanine motifs. This work thus defined heterochirality as a useful feature to strategically develop future therapeutics to interfere with pathological processes, with the additional value of resistance to protease-mediated degradation and biocompatibility