76 research outputs found
A case of cryptogenic organizing pneumonia occurring in Crohn's disease.
A 29 year-old-man with Crohn's disease, who developed diffuse pulmonary infiltrates and hypoxemia two months following oral administration of mesalazine, was examined. Clinical findings and computed tomography were suggestive of, and lung histology was diagnostic of, bronchiolitis obliterans organizing pneumonia, also known as cryptogenic organizing pneumonia. Although the data did not allow for definitive conclusions, they did suggest that the pulmonary disease was an extraintestinal manifestation of Crohn's disease, rather than an adverse reaction to mesalazine. In fact, the patient showed clinical, radiological and functional improvements, despite the treatment with mesalazine and the withdrawal of steroid therapy
Hilltop Curvature Increases With the Square Root of Erosion Rate
This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Gabet, E. J., Mudd, S. M., Wood, R. W., Grieve, S. W. D., Binnie, S. A., & Dunai, T. J. (2021). Hilltop curvature increases with the square root of erosion rate. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 126, e2020JF005858. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JF005858, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JF005858. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions
Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physicians’ different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physicians’ identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing – from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations – also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals – those quintessential Catholic institutions – as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research. (pp. 551–567
Linguistic profile automated characterisation in pluripotential clinical high-risk mental state (CHARMS) conditions: methodology of a multicentre observational study
Introduction: Language is usually considered the social vehicle of thought in intersubjective communications. However, the relationship between language and high- order cognition seems to evade this canonical and unidirectional description (ie, the notion of language as a simple means of thought communication). In recent years, clinical high at-risk mental state (CHARMS) criteria (evolved from the Ultra-High-Risk paradigm) and the introduction of the Clinical Staging system have been proposed to address the dynamicity of early psychopathology. At the same time, natural language processing (NLP) techniques have greatly evolved and have been successfully applied to investigate different neuropsychiatric conditions. The combination of at-risk mental state paradigm, clinical staging system and automated NLP methods, the latter applied on spoken language transcripts, could represent a useful and convenient approach to the problem of early psychopathological distress within a transdiagnostic risk paradigm.
Methods and analysis: Help-seeking young people presenting psychological distress (CHARMS+/− and Clinical Stage 1a or 1b; target sample size for both groups n=90) will be assessed through several psychometric tools and multiple speech analyses during an observational period of 1-year, in the context of an Italian multicentric study. Subjects will be enrolled in different contexts: Department of Neuroscience, Rehabilitation, Ophthalmology, Genetics, Maternal and Child Health (DINOGMI), Section of Psychiatry, University of Genoa—IRCCS Ospedale Policlinico San Martino, Genoa, Italy; Mental Health Department—territorial mental services (ASL 3—Genoa), Genoa, Italy; and Mental Health Department—territorial mental services (AUSL—Piacenza), Piacenza, Italy. The conversion rate to full-blown psychopathology (CS 2) will be evaluated over 2 years of clinical observation, to further confirm the predictive and discriminative value of CHARMS criteria and to verify the possibility of enriching them with several linguistic features, derived from a fine-grained automated linguistic analysis of speech.
Ethics and dissemination: The methodology described in this study adheres to ethical principles as formulated in the Declaration of Helsinki and is compatible with International Conference on Harmonization (ICH)-good clinical practice. The research protocol was reviewed and approved by two different ethics committees (CER Liguria approval code: 591/2020—id.10993; Comitato Etico dell’Area Vasta Emilia Nord approval code: 2022/0071963). Participants will provide their written informed consent prior to study enrolment and parental consent will be needed in the case of participants aged less than 18 years old. Experimental results will be carefully shared through publication in peer- reviewed journals, to ensure proper data reproducibility.
Trial registration number DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/BQZTN
How Close Do We Live to Water? A Global Analysis of Population Distance to Freshwater Bodies
Traditionally, people have inhabited places with ready access to fresh water.
Today, over 50% of the global population lives in urban areas, and water
can be directed via tens of kilometres of pipelines. Still, however, a large
part of the world's population is directly dependent on access to natural
freshwater sources. So how are inhabited places related to the location of
freshwater bodies today? We present a high-resolution global analysis of how
close present-day populations live to surface freshwater. We aim to increase the
understanding of the relationship between inhabited places, distance to surface
freshwater bodies, and climatic characteristics in different climate zones and
administrative regions. Our results show that over 50% of the
world's population lives closer than 3 km to a surface freshwater body, and
only 10% of the population lives further than 10 km away. There are,
however, remarkable differences between administrative regions and climatic
zones. Populations in Australia, Asia, and Europe live closest to water.
Although populations in arid zones live furthest away from freshwater bodies in
absolute terms, relatively speaking they live closest to water considering the
limited number of freshwater bodies in those areas. Population distributions in
arid zones show statistically significant relationships with a combination of
climatic factors and distance to water, whilst in other zones there is no
statistically significant relationship with distance to water. Global studies on
development and climate adaptation can benefit from an improved understanding of
these relationships between human populations and the distance to fresh
water
Semi-arid zone caves:Evaporation and hydrological controls on δ<sup>18</sup>O drip water composition and implications for speleothem paleoclimate reconstructions
Oxygen isotope ratios in speleothems may be affected by external processes that are independent of climate, such as karst hydrology and kinetic fractionation. Consequently, there has been a shift towards characterising and understanding these processes through cave monitoring studies, particularly focussing on temperate zones where precipitation exceeds evapotranspiration. Here, we investigate oxygen isotope systematics at Wellington Caves in semi-arid, SE Australia, where evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation. We use a novel D2O isotopic tracer in a series of artificial irrigations, supplemented by pre-irrigation data comprised four years of drip monitoring and three years of stable isotope analysis of both drip waters and rainfall. This study reveals that: (1) evaporative processes in the unsaturated zone dominate the isotopic composition of drip waters; (2) significant soil zone ‘wetting up’ is required to overcome soil moisture deficits in order to achieve infiltration, which is highly dependent on antecedent hydro-climatic conditions; (3) lateral flow, preferential flow and sorption in the soil zone are important in redistributing subsurface zone water; (4) isotopic breakthrough curves suggest clear evidence of piston-flow at some drip sites where an older front of water discharged prior to artificial irrigation water; and (5) water residence times in a shallow vadose zone (<2 m) are highly variable and can exceed six months. Oxygen isotope speleothem records from semi-arid regions are therefore more likely to contain archives of alternating paleo-aridity and paleo-recharge, rather than paleo-rainfall e.g. the amount effect or mean annual. Speleothem-forming drip waters will be dominated by evaporative enrichment, up to ∼3‰ in the context of this study, relative to precipitation-weighted mean annual rainfall. The oxygen isotope variability of such coeval records may further be influenced by flow path and storage in the unsaturated zone that is not only drip specific but also influenced by internal cave climatic conditions, which may vary spatially in the cave
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