Anxiety and the management of asthma in an adult outpatient population

Review of the literature suggests that anxiety is more common among patients with asthma than among the general population, yet it does not appear to be given the attention it deserves as part of the overall management of asthma. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between anxiety and asthma management, in terms of Global Initiative for Asthma steps, lung function and medication. Methods: A total of 201 consecutive patients with respiratory physician-diagnosed asthma were recruited from an adult outpatient asthma clinic. Participants underwent a sociodemographic review, and a medical interview which included a detailed drug history. Forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) and peak expiratory flow (PEF) values were recorded using a Micro Medical portable spirometer. The level of anxiety was assessed using the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). Results: A total of 51.5% of participants registered clinically significant levels of anxiety. Of these only 21% had already been diagnosed and were receiving treatment. Females reported significantly higher BAI scores than males (p<0.01). More females (66.3%) registered clinically significant levels of anxiety as compared with males (33.7%) (p<0.05). There was a positive correlation between the BAI score and the prescribed dose of inhaled glucocorticoids (rs¼0.150, p<0.05) and between anxiety and GINA treatment step (rs¼0.139, p<0.05). There was also a positive correlation between anxiety and the number of medicines taken by patients (rs¼0.259, p<0.001). Conclusions: Physicians treating patients with asthma should be sensitised to the association between asthma and anxiety, and should also consider assessing patients for the possibility of anxiety disorders as part of asthma management plans.peer-reviewe

La migrazione studentesca dalla Laurea Triennale alla Laurea Magistrale

In the last years, the Italian universities have experienced significant changes that involve the students and the universities' governance. Students' enrolment has decreased significantly especially after the economic crisis of 2008, while the students' migration from the South to the Central and Northern regions of the country has increased. This phenomenon has created further inequalities within the country and a cultural and socio-economic loss for the South. Important changes have pushed the universities also compete to attract students. Therefore, among the others, student migration is an issue that needs full consideration. In this paper, the attention is devoted to the First Level graduates that choose to enroll in a Second Level Degree Course provided by a different University. First part of the analysis concerns the investigation of the determinants of the First Level graduates at University of Palermo migration, and the second one concerns a study of the most likely attraction aspects of the universities in Italy. Although results are affected by the available information (above all the absence of economic status of the student\u2019s family), they give interesting suggestion about the characteristics of the migrant student and on the strength points of attraction of universities

Conduction state transition induced by solitons in a graphene junction at room temperature

The aim of this research was the study of the transition between high and low electrical resistivity states of two overlapped graphene layers when subjected to short electromagnetic pulses (soliton waves). These transitions have already been previously observed by the authors in experiments carried out with different conductors, separated by a tiny insulating layer. The choice of a highly ordered material, such as graphene, was justified by the attempt to achieve greater stability and reproducibility of these transitions. What has been observed is an instantaneous reversible transition of the graphene overlapped layers to/from a state of insulator with resistance in the order of Mohms from/to a state of resistance of few ohms or, in some cases, of zero ohms. The transition from a high resistance state to a lower one requires EM pulses of different polarity than the transition from a low resistivity state to a higher one. Some intermediate relatively stable states have also been observed

Performance of GMSK for telemetry and PN ranging under realistic conditions

In the frame of CCSDS activities, a system capable of simultaneously transmitting high rate telemetry and ranging has been studied in the last years. In this system the telemetry is transmitted through a GMSK modulator with the PN (Pseudo Noise) ranging sequence included as an additional phase shift. The receiver first estimates the transmitted telemetry bits, regenerates and removes the estimated GMSK signal from the received signal, and then estimates the ranging chips and, through a bank of correlators, the round trip delay of the received ranging signal. Ranging is an interfering signal which degrades the performance of the telemetry subsystem, while errors in the estimation of telemetry bits compromise the correct detection of the ranging chips. The first simulation results obtained by ESOC were presented at TTC 2010 in the paper “Analysis of GMSK for Simultaneous Transmission of Ranging and Telemetry” and were limited to ideal synchronization and to the case of a telemetry bit rate equal to the ranging chip rate. In this new paper we describe additional results obtained from the simulation of the complete system, including realistic synchronization, and for telemetry rates which are different from the chip rate. The paper will: 1) consider the effects of the receiver telemetry clock jitter on the regenerated GMSK signal and on the subsequent ranging receiver: it will be shown that regeneration through the Laurent OQPSK approximation or through a look-up table, which directly stores the GMSK phase for each combination of input bits, achieve good performance with low complexity; 2) discuss the effects of perfect synchronization between the transmitted telemetry and ranging signals: in this case, depending on the relative delay between the two signals, the recovered ranging clock may suffer from a bias, which corresponds to an error in the range estimation (lack of accuracy); 3) estimate the system losses when the telemetry bit rate is different from the ranging chip rate; 4) estimate the loss due to phase noise. The analysis will be limited to the case of GMSK with BTb=0.5 and ranging code T2B, which is the suggested scheme for deep space missions with demanding acquisition time requirements

An Optimized Architecture for CGA Operations and Its Application to a Simulated Robotic Arm

Conformal geometric algebra (CGA) is a new geometric computation tool that is attracting growing attention in many research fields, such as computer graphics, robotics, and computer vision. Regarding the robotic applications, new approaches based on CGA have been proposed to efficiently solve problems as the inverse kinematics and grasping of a robotic arm. The hardware acceleration of CGA operations is required to meet real-time performance requirements in embedded robotic platforms. In this paper, we present a novel embedded coprocessor for accelerating CGA operations in robotic tasks. Two robotic algorithms, namely, inverse kinematics and grasping of a human-arm-like kinematics chain, are used to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The coprocessor natively supports the entire set of CGA operations including both basic operations (products, sums/differences, and unary operations) and complex operations as rigid body motion operations (reflections, rotations, translations, and dilations). The coprocessor prototype is implemented on the Xilinx ML510 development platform as a complete system-on-chip (SoC), integrating both a PowerPC processing core and a CGA coprocessing core on the same Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA chip. Experimental results show speedups of 78x and 246x for inverse kinematics and grasping algorithms, respectively, with respect to the execution on the PowerPC processor

Electron structure, ultra-dense hydrogen and low energy nuclear reactions

In this paper, a simple Zitterbewegung electron model, proposed in a previous work, is presented from a different perspective based on the principle of mass- frequency equivalence. A geometric- electromagnetic interpretation of mass, relativistic mass, De Broglie wavelength, Proca, Klein- Gordon, Dirac and Aharonov- Bohm equations in agreement with the model is proposed. A non-relativistic, Zitterbewegung interpretation of the 3.7 keV deep hydrogen level found by J. Naudts is presented. According to this perspective, ultra-dense hydrogen can be conceived as a coherent chain of bosonic electrons with protons or deuterons located in the center of their Zitterbewegung orbits. This approach suggests a possible role of ultra-dense hydrogen in some aneutronic and many-body low energy nuclear reactions. © 2019 ISCMNS. All rights reserved

A mobile application for assessment of air pollution exposure

In this paper the architecture of a mobile air quality monitoring system is introduced. A mobile application will act as a personal assistant, monitoring and giving advices about gas pollutants daily exposure. Currently in development stage as part of a larger air quality monitoring system project, the application will enable users to monitor their daily exposure to gas pollutants by combining user location data and urban air quality information provided by the network of fixed monitoring stations of the city of Palermo

Hydrogeochemistry of a wetland area of southwestern Sicily (Italy)

The “Preola” and “Gorghi tondi” lakes are the most noticeable wetlands in the Mazara del Vallo territory (south-west Sicily). There are four karst origin lakes located in a natural depression formed by gypsum dissolution and subsequent collapse of the “Calcarenite di Marsala”, a few meters above sea level. Erosion of the depression sides and human activity has caused visible colluvial deposits, which have contributed to a natural filling process of the lakes. A hydrogeological map of the area and the reconstruction of a water circulation model supplying the lakes have been drafted from geochemical and hydrogeological data. It is apparent from 18O values that the well waters are mainly fed by local meteoric water circulating within the calcarenitic aquifer. However, the lake waters chemical composition are very likely controlled by evaporation processes and a complex mixing between seawater and groundwater, depending on seasonal variation in the hydrodynamic equilibrium

Implementation and evaluation of medical imaging techniques based on conformal geometric algebra

Medical imaging tasks, such as segmentation, 3D modeling, and registration of medical images, involve complex geometric problems, usually solved by standard linear algebra and matrix calculations. In the last few decades, conformal geometric algebra (CGA) has emerged as a new approach to geometric computing that offers a simple and efficient representation of geometric objects and transformations. However, the practical use of CGA-based methods for big data image processing in medical imaging requires fast and efficient implementations of CGA operations to meet both real-time processing constraints and accuracy requirements. The purpose of this study is to present a novel implementation of CGA-based medical imaging techniques that makes them effective and practically usable. The paper exploits a new simplified formulation of CGA operators that allows significantly reduced execution times while maintaining the needed result precision. We have exploited this novel CGA formulation to re-design a suite of medical imaging automatic methods, including image segmentation, 3D reconstruction and registration. Experimental tests show that the re-formulated CGA-based methods lead to both higher precision results and reduced computation times, which makes them suitable for big data image processing applications. The segmentation algorithm provides the Dice index, sensitivity and specificity values of 98.14%, 98.05% and 97.73%, respectively, while the order of magnitude of the errors measured for the registration methods is 10-5