Impact of different recommendations on adequacy rate for sleep duration in children

A huge amount of literature in the last decades showed that sleep is essential for children’s health and well-being and that short sleep duration is associated with several negative health outcomes. Many developmental phases in infancy and childhood are in strict relationship with an healthy sleep. In the last years some specific recommendations made for how much sleep children need have been published. The empirical evidences for contemporary sleep recommendations has changed and the new recommendations are clearly different from the previous ones and reflect clearly the changes in the sleep need of the children and adolescents in the last decades although seem still to be largely unfitting for preadolescence and adolescence. If sleep is to be treated as a therapeutic intervention, then consensus guidelines, statements, and evidence-based best-practice documents are needed to underpin sleep recommendations for children. Sleep recommendations for children play an important role for public policies and interventions, and to advertise parents and children of the negative consequences of sleep deprivation/reduction

Prenatal exposure to TCDD and atopic conditions in the Seveso second generation: a prospective cohort study.

Background2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) is a toxic environmental contaminant that can bioaccumulate in humans, cross the placenta, and cause immunological effects in children, including altering their risk of developing allergies. On July 10, 1976, a chemical explosion in Seveso, Italy, exposed nearby residents to a high amount of TCDD. In 1996, the Seveso Women's Health Study (SWHS) was established to study the effects of TCDD on women's health. Using data from the Seveso Second Generation Health Study, we aim to examine the effect of prenatal exposure to TCDD on the risk of atopic conditions in SWHS children born after the explosion.MethodsIndividual-level TCDD was measured in maternal serum collected soon after the accident. In 2014, we initiated the Seveso Second Generation Health Study to follow-up the children of the SWHS cohort who were born after the explosion or who were exposed in utero to TCDD. We enrolled 677 children, and cases of atopic conditions, including eczema, asthma, and hay fever, were identified by self-report during personal interviews with the mothers and children. Log-binomial and Poisson regressions were used to determine the association between prenatal TCDD and atopic conditions.ResultsA 10-fold increase in 1976 maternal serum TCDD (log10TCDD) was not significantly associated with asthma (adjusted relative risk (RR) = 0.93; 95% CI: 0.61, 1.40) or hay fever (adjusted RR = 0.99; 95% CI: 0.76, 1.27), but was significantly inversely associated with eczema (adjusted RR = 0.63; 95% CI: 0.40, 0.99). Maternal TCDD estimated at pregnancy was not significantly associated with eczema, asthma, or hay fever. There was no strong evidence of effect modification by child sex.ConclusionsOur results suggest that maternal serum TCDD near the time of explosion is associated with lower risk of eczema, which supports other evidence pointing to the dysregulated immune effects of TCDD

The Italian expenditure in transport infrastructure: a survey

The aim of the paper is to analyse the most important quantitative data on Italian expenditures in transport infrastructures (investment and maintenance costs), linking the expenditure with traffic flows. The analysis concerns rail and road networks (both for national and local roads), over the last ten years, and a possible forecast for the next years, thanks to the official previsions of the “Objective Law”. The whole analysis is based on official data. The planned infrastructures will analyzed with taxonomical and cost – benefit approaches, in order to provide a ranking of priority. The results show how the planning of the investment expenditure is still based on different criteria than efficiency. So, the foreseen expenditure will not able to give relevant effects in order to improve the efficiency of the transport system and to obtain better allocative issues.transport expenditure; italy; infrastructure; investment

Space-time coupling in the up-conversion of broadband down-converted light

We investigate the up-conversion process of broadband light from parametric down-conversion (PDC), focusing on the spatio-temporal spectral properties of the sum-frequency generated (SFG) radiation. We demonstrate that the incoherent component of the SFG spectrum is characterized by a skewed geometry in space-time, which originates from a compensation between the group-velocity mismatch and the spatial walk-off of the fundamental and the SFG fields. The results are illustrated both by a theoretical modeling of the optical system and by experimental measurements.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1308.236

Behind and beyond the pediatric metabolic syndrome

The growing use of the Metabolic Syndrome in pediatric age need a critical approach, on the basis of recent concerns on definition and usefulness for individual management in clinical practice. We reviewed these aspects from a pediatric point of view, providing a set of questions about what the Metabolic Syndrome means in a clinical setting. The new proposed pediatric definition by IDF was discussed, by outlying how it does not fully consider the peculiarities of children and adolescents. The comparison between two cases of obese children was used in order to show how this diagnosis could be confusing for a correct management. We stressed the need for health-related limits for each component of the Metabolic Syndrome instead of percentile-derived cut-points, as well as the opportunity to extend the estimation to other family or individual risk factors by means of a multiple-items screening form. In conclusion, Metabolic Syndrome use in pediatric age suffers at present from important limitations (i.e., adult derived definition, possibility to rule-in but not to rule-out the individual metabolic risk, instability of MetS during adolescence, poor usefulness of the diagnosis for specific treatment). Consequently, a prudent use of Metabolic Syndrome for children and adolescents seems to be the best and honest position for paediatricians, waiting for long term, longitudinal follow-up studies that could clarify the entire question

Dioxin Exposure and Cancer Risk in the Seveso Women’s Health Study

Background: 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD), a widespread environmental contaminant, disrupts multiple endocrine pathways. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified TCDD as a known human carcinogen, based on predominantly male occupational studies of increased mortality from all cancers combined

Algorithms for Vision-Based Quality Control of Circularly Symmetric Components

Quality inspection in the industrial production field is experiencing a strong technological development that benefits from the combination of vision-based techniques with artificial intelligence algorithms. This paper initially addresses the problem of defect identification for circularly symmetric mechanical components, characterized by the presence of periodic elements. In the specific case of knurled washers, we compare the performances of a standard algorithm for the analysis of grey-scale image with a Deep Learning (DL) approach. The standard algorithm is based on the extraction of pseudo-signals derived from the conversion of the grey scale image of concentric annuli. In the DL approach, the component inspection is shifted from the entire sample to specific areas repeated along the object profile where the defect may occur. The standard algorithm provides better results in terms of accuracy and computational time with respect to the DL approach. Nevertheless, DL reaches accuracy higher than 99% when performance is evaluated targeting the identification of damaged teeth. The possibility of extending the methods and the results to other circularly symmetrical components is analyzed and discussed

Childhood adversities and bipolar disorder: a neuroimaging focus

Early-life adverse events or childhood adversities (CAs) are stressors and harmful experiences severely impacting on a child's wellbeing and development. Examples of CAs include parental neglect, emotional and physical abuse and bullying. Even though the prevalence of CAs and their psychological effects in both healthy and psychiatric populations is established, only a paucity of studies have investigated the neurobiological firms associated with CAs in bipolar disorder (BD). In particular, the exact neural mechanisms and trajectories of biopsychosocial models integrating both environmental and genetic effects are still debated. Considering the potential impact of CAs on BD, including its clinical manifestations, we reviewed existing literature discussing the association between CAs and brain alterations in BD patients. Results showed that CAs are associated with volume alterations of several grey matter regions including the hippocampus, thalamus, amygdala and frontal cortex. A handful of studies suggest the presence of alterations in the corpus callosum and the pre-fronto-limbic connectivity at rest. Alterations in these regions of the brain of patients with BD are possibly due to the effect of stress produced by CAs, being hippocampus part of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and thalamus together with amygdala filtering sensory information and regulating emotional responses. However, results are mixed possibly due to the heterogeneity of methods and study design. Future neuroimaging studies disentangling between different types of CAs or differentiating between BD sub-types are needed in order to understand the link between CAs and BD

Language disturbances in ADHD.

This article aims to review the studies exploring language abilities in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; with or without comorbid language impairment) focusing on oral speech discrimination, listening comprehension, verbal and spatial working memory as well as on discourse analysis and pragmatic aspects of communication and language comprehension