Osteoma Cutis: Report of a Case and Literature Review

Osteoma Cutis is a rarely seen benign disease. Osteoma cutis (OC) is an abnormal development of bone within tegumentary tissue. OC is a benign and asymptomatic lesion, characterized by presence of ectopic osseous lamellae with osteoblastic cells in dermis and hypodermis.The case described in this report regards a healthy 57-years-old man with a neoformation on left abdominal wall, without pathologic anamnestic history

Diventare insegnanti, tra ricerca e servizio. La pedagogia del Service Learning nella formazione dei futuri docenti

Il presente articolo intende introdurre e analizzare il Service Learning quale metodo per la formazione dei futuri insegnanti alla ricerca. L\u201fimportanza di acquisire competenze di ricerca da parte dei docenti \ue8 ormai riconosciuta sia nella letteratura scientifica internazionale e nazionale, sia in alcuni recenti documenti europei sulla formazione iniziale degli insegnanti. Il Service Learning viene quindi presentato come metodo in grado di sviluppare le competenze di ricerca nei futuri docenti, secondo un modello capace di promuovere contestualmente altri importanti elementi connessi alla prospettiva etica del servizio: ascolto dei problemi reali del mondo della scuola, promozione del senso di comunit\ue0, valorizzazione della relazione scuola-universit\ue0

La “banalità” della ricerca educativa. Le attese di educatrici e insegnanti della scuola dell’infanzia

The present article aims to address a perceived lack of connection between research and practice. Teachers seem to be skeptical about the potential for research to improve practice and thus they don’t use research resultsin their daily work with children. What sense can be made of educational research and theorizing unless it attempts to make sense of the practice of educating and unless it addresses the problems as they are perceived by those who are engaged in it. Starting from this account it is pivotal to listen to the voice of teachers in order to understand which are their expectations from academic research. In the current article, the authors present the voice of teachers in ECEC about their expectations.Considerato il gap esistente tra mondo della ricerca in educazione e mondo dell’agire si può ipotizzare che la ricerca accademica non sia percepita dai pratici come rilevante. Di conseguenza la ricerca non viene utilizzata dai pratici e la pratica continua a svilupparsi solo a partire da se stessa. Quale senso può essere dato alla ricerca educativa e alla sua teorizzazione se non essereun tentativo per dare senso alla pratica dell’educare, e affrontare i problemi così come essi sono percepiti da chi è coinvolto in questa pratica? Se accettiamo questa assunzione allora diventa fondamentale sentire la voce dei pratici per capire cosa pensano della ricerca educativa e cosa si attendono da essa. Abbiamo quindi voluto intraprendere una ricerca con l’obiettivo di comprenderela loro prospettiva. In particolare, in questo articolo vengono presentate le aspettative espresse delle educatrici di nido e dalle insegnanti di scuola dell’infanzia

Diventare insegnanti, tra ricerca e servizio. La pedagogia del Service Learning nella formazione dei futuri docenti

Il presente articolo intende introdurre e analizzare il Service Learning quale metodo per la formazione dei futuri insegnanti alla ricerca. L’importanza di acquisire competenze di ricerca da parte dei docenti è ormai riconosciuta sia nella letteratura scientifica internazionale e nazionale, sia in alcuni recenti documenti europei sulla formazione iniziale degli insegnanti. Il Service Learning viene quindi presentato come metodo in grado di sviluppare le competenze di ricerca nei futuri docenti, secondo un modello capace di promuovere contestualmente altri importanti elementi connessi alla prospettiva etica del servizio: ascolto dei problemi reali del mondo della scuola, promozione del senso di comunità, valorizzazione della relazione scuola-università

Becoming a caregiver: new family carers\u2019 experience during the transition from hospital to home

Aims and objectives. To explore and understand the experience of new informal caregivers in Italy during the transition from hospital to home. Background. Frequent patient discharge into the home environment has lead to a significant increase in postdischarge care being provided by family caregivers. The transition period in particular is seen as a period of great significance, as caregivers may be unprepared and concerned as to the amount of care required by the recipient. Design. A qualitative phenomenological approach was used to gain a deeper understanding of caregivers\u2019 lived experiences. Methods. Data were collected at two points in time using different methodologies: in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the caregivers\u2019 perspective of the predischarge period; focus groups obtained data after the patients\u2019 re-entry into the home environment and aimed to validate interview findings. Results. Family caregivers reflected on three main themes during the transition period: (1) their newly acquired role; (2) the recipient\u2019s condition; and (3) the support they required. The core concept of \u2018being responsible for everything\u2019 seemed to be a recurring theme running through these three subject matters. Fulfilling numerous commitments and different social roles besides the caring activity itself seemed to weigh heavily on caregivers. Carers were referring particularly to their need for hope, confidence and safety during the transition from hospital to home. Conclusions. It cannot be assumed a priori that families can cope with the demands of care-giving. Therefore, healthcare professionals should come to recognise caregivers as persons in need of emotional and practical support. Relevance to clinical practice. The findings of this study can stimulate healthcare professionals to acquire effective communication skills and display an empathic attitude when assessing caregivers\u2019 needs in the particularly challenging phase of transition from hospital to home

Vibrational calling signals improve the efficacy of pheromone traps to capture the brown marmorated stink bug

Halyomorpha halys (Stål, 1855), the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB), is an invasive species that has become a key agricultural pest in its invaded range. Commercial traps available for BMSB monitoring rely on male produced aggregation pheromones as lure, with two possible shortcomings: trap spillover and low detection precision. In this study, we assessed if vibrational signals can increase the attractiveness of pheromone traps by testing the optimized vibration-based lure (Female Song 2, FS2) associated with a specifically designed trap (i.e., the vibrotrap). We evaluated the efficacy of this bimodal trap (i.e., pheromones + vibrations) on females, males and nymphs in controlled conditions (greenhouse) and in the field, in two sites at the margin of two commercial vineyards. In the field, bimodal vibrotraps were compared to three unimodal (i.e., only pheromone) trap types. Both experiments showed that the vibrotrap is highly attractive for BMSB, and the optimized FS2 signal significantly improved its effectiveness. Even though FS2 was selected to target males, the number of trapped females increased as well. Overall, the presented findings show a feasible improvement to future commercial BMSB traps through the synergic use of semiophysicals and semiochemicals. Further research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of vibrotraps for both early detection and mass trapping

An attention-based deep learning approach for the classification of subjective cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment using resting-state EEG

Objective. This study aims to design and implement the first deep learning (DL) model to classify subjects in the prodromic states of Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) signals.Approach. EEG recordings of 17 healthy controls (HCs), 56 subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and 45 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects were acquired at resting state. After preprocessing, we selected sections corresponding to eyes-closed condition. Five different datasets were created by extracting delta, theta, alpha, beta and delta-to-theta frequency bands using bandpass filters. To classify SCDvsMCI and HCvsSCDvsMCI, we propose a framework based on the transformer architecture, which uses multi-head attention to focus on the most relevant parts of the input signals. We trained and validated the model on each dataset with a leave-one-subject-out cross-validation approach, splitting the signals into 10 s epochs. Subjects were assigned to the same class as the majority of their epochs. Classification performances of the transformer were assessed for both epochs and subjects and compared with other DL models.Main results. Results showed that the delta dataset allowed our model to achieve the best performances for the discrimination of SCD and MCI, reaching an Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) of 0.807, while the highest results for the HCvsSCDvsMCI classification were obtained on alpha and theta with a micro-AUC higher than 0.74.Significance. We demonstrated that DL approaches can support the adoption of non-invasive and economic techniques as EEG to stratify patients in the clinical population at risk for AD. This result was achieved since the attention mechanism was able to learn temporal dependencies of the signal, focusing on the most discriminative patterns, achieving state-of-the-art results by using a deep model of reduced complexity. Our results were consistent with clinical evidence that changes in brain activity are progressive when considering early stages of AD

A Moderate Walking Test Predicts Survival in Women With Cardiovascular Disease

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the principal cause of death in U.S. women. Peak oxygen uptake is strongly related to mortality and CVD. This study aimed to investigate the association between estimated peak oxygen uptake, determined using a moderate 1-km walking test, and all-cause mortality in female patients with stable CVD. Methods: Of the 482 women in our registry between 1997 and 2020, we included 430 participants in the analysis (aged 67 [34-88] years). A Cox proportional hazard model was used to determine the variables significantly associated with mortality. On the basis of the peak oxygen uptake estimated using the 1-km walking test, the sample was subdivided into tertiles, and mortality risk was calculated. The discriminatory accuracy of peak oxygen uptake in estimating survival was assessed by receiver operating characteristic curves. All results were adjusted for demographic and clinical covariates. Results: A total of 135 deaths from any cause occurred over a median of 10.4 years (IQR=4.4-16.4), with an average annual mortality of 4.2%. Estimated peak oxygen uptake was a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than demographic and clinical variables (c-statistic-0.767; 95% CI=0.72, 0.81; p<0.0001). The survival rate decreased from the highest tertile of fitness to the lowest. Compared with the lowest group, hazard ratios (95% CIs) for the second and third tertiles were 0.55 (0.37, 0.83) and 0.29 (0.16, 0.51), respectively (p for trend <0.0001). Conclusions: Higher peak oxygen uptake levels were associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality. The indirect estimation of peak oxygen uptake using the 1-km walking test is feasible and can be applied for risk stratification among female patients undergoing secondary prevention programs

Effects of irradiation on biology and mating behaviour of wild males of brown marmorated stink bug using a 6 MV medical linear accelerator

The brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys, is a pentatomid bug of Eastern Asian origin that became an economically relevant pest in the Eurasian and American continents. Management of this species is limited to use of chemical insecticides: an inefficient method due to the strong adaptability of the target pest. The sterile insect technique (SIT) is potentially a valid tactic in the search for nontoxic alternatives. In this work, we investigated the suitability of masstrapped overwintering males, collected during the aggregation phase before the winter diapause, for their release as competitive sterile males in an SIT programme. Differently from previous studies, irradiation was applied with a linear accelerator device that produced high-energy photons. Following a similar scientific protocol with newly emerged irradiated males, the effects of X-ray irradiation on physiological parameters (longevity, fecundity and fertility) were assessed. In addition, behavioural bioassays were carried out in no-choice conditions to evaluate if irradiation interferes with mating processes. The results are very encouraging; the effects of the irradiation at 32 Gy did not differ from the controls in the longevity or fecundity of the exposed overwintering adults. The hatching rate of the eggs laid by the fertile females that had mated with the irradiated males was less than 5%. The results of behavioural bioassays showed that the irradiation did not cause a significant impact on the quality of the sterile males. More research is warranted to evaluate the mating competitiveness of sterile males in semi-field and field condition