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Analisi ed ottimizzazione del processo di produzione di energia elettrica mediante una cella a combustibile microbiologica (microbial fuel cell, MFC) alimentata da liquami zootecnici
No full textENAMA - Ente Nazionale per la Meccanizzazione Agricol
Area of residence and household influences on perceived health among Italian adults
No full textBackground
Many Countries consider health as a fundamental right for their citizens. In terms of health policy, this means equal opportunity of prevention and access to care guaranteed to all. Thus, a major concern in research has been given to health inequalities and their determinants. A body of evidence has shown that individual characteristics primary affect health, however contextual factors also substantially contribute to the final perception of health and/or mediate the effect of the individual determinants (Kawachi and Subramanian, 2005). Contextual factors could involve geographically the location where the person lives, but also networks to which the individual belongs in terms of culture, socio economic status, family ties. Geographical differences in health can occur as a response to many different characteristics of places, such as environmental conditions, economic background, social context, but also public health resources. Whether health resources have an affect on population health has been much debated (Joumard et al. 2008) and to date there is no conclusive evidence on this issue.
At a lower level, the household also acts like a cluster, being the first grouping structure in the society. Family members exhibit similar patterns of morbidity (Johnson et al, 1965; Monden 2007; Merlo et al. 2012), health-related behaviors (Rice et al. 1998), help-seeking behavior (Cardol et al. 2005) and utilization of health services (Sepheri et al. 2008). On the one hand, household’s characteristics, such as socio-economic level of the family, housing conditions, household structure and the burden of care for ill-health member can be hypothesized as determinants of health for the household’s members. On the other hand, health perception itself can operate as a determinant for health status of other members within the same households. Stated differently mutual influences in health perception can be exerted within the households and they result in a high resemblance of health status for people living together.
Very limited research have dealt with territorial and familial influences on health perception, and no studies of this kind have been carried out for the Italian context, where paradoxically the magnitude of the family on demographic behaviours is extremely pronounced.
This research aims to provide an estimation of the influence that the context (both territorial and relational) has on self-perceived health and to gain a better understanding of the pathways through which this influence is exerted.
Methods
This is a population-based cross sectional study. Data come from the Italian Health Survey “Condizioni di salute e ricorso ai servizi sanitari” (2004/2005). The survey has a cluster sample design based on households and representative of the population at sub-regional level, with the definition of the so called “Large Areas”, an aggregation of neighboring Local Health Providers (ASL) constituting a unit for health planning. We selected three outcome variables to investigate perceived health: Physical Component Summary – PCS, Mental Component Summary – MCS and poor self-perceived health –poor SPH. The first two measures are a quantitative assessment of physical and mental health conditions as perceived by the respondent through a standardized questionnaire (SF-12), the latter is a binary variable indentifying people reporting “poor” and “very poor” health conditions in the WHO question “how is your health in general?”. Data have a hierarchical structure defined as individuals (level 1) living in different households (level 2), which are, in turns, located in different “Large Areas” (level 3). We adopted a multilevel approach which is entirely coherent with this structure of the data and allows to obtain unbiased . By means of this approach we have been able to capture determinants of perceived health at different levels and to disentangle the proportion of variability due to differences between individuals, households or Large Areas. According to the characteristics of the outcome we run linear and logistic multilevel models, with random intercepts at the household and Large Area level.
Results:
We documented a very limited, although always significant, impact of area of residence on self perceived health (0.3% for PCS, 0.6% for MCS and 2.3% for poor-SPH, adjusted for individual covariates). This result is partially in contrast with previous works illustrating a health gradient for objective and subjective health in Italy (Costa et al. 2003; Mazzuco 2009). However, researches that adopted a multilevel approach to investigate the Italian Regional/Large Area health heterogeneity came to our same conclusion, recognizing a proportion of variability at Large Area level lower than 3% for poor self-perceived health among the elderly population (Pirani and Salvini 2012b).
By contrast, the relevance of household on perceived health was quite substantive. The 15% of variability in PCS is due to household differences, but MCS and poor-SPH show an even greater impact with, respectively, a 33% and 38% of variability at the household level. The characteristics of the household (e.g. economic resources, family structure, size of the municipality of residence) are significantly associated with perceived health, but they explain a very little amount of the overall variability between households. We hypothesized then that mutual influences between family members can have a role in explaining the heterogeneity in household health. We investigated this hypothesis by observing the pattern of health resemblance by family structure and found that the similarity in health status was higher in those circumstances where the link between members were expected to be tighter (2 components, marriage-like link, mono-nucleus families). These results are in line with findings from social psychology, which consistently documented a similarity in mental illness, depressive symptom and distress (Meyler et al. 2007; Monden 2007), and with those from sociology reporting a positive effect of partners interactions on well-being, happiness and life satisfaction (White 1983).
By conducting the research by means of three health outcomes we were able to cross-validate the results and shed further light on the different profile of determinants for physical and mental conditions. More particularly, we illustrated how PCS is affected by very concrete agents such as age, education, economic conditions, whereas MCS is particularly linked to socio-relational dimensions at the individual and household level. This result is coherent with the knowledge about determinants of mental health, which include elements as social support, perceived stress and self esteem (Bovier et al. 2004).
Conclusions
With this research we provided evidence of the existence and the complexity of contextual factors influencing perceived health. Geographical differences seem to be overestimated when a multilevel approach is not taken into account. On the other hand, households are often neglected as a level affecting health perception, whereas they deserves as much attention as individual in the study of health
Diffusive processes in systems with geometrical constraints: from lattice models to continuous channels
No full textWe focus on the Brownian motion within channels with varying cross – section as well
as on the diffusion on branched structures, a subject particularly relevant for the
modeling of the passive transport process within living cells, which are characterized
by a naturally constrained environment and the motion, at least on the length scales
of the macromolecules, is well described by diffusion rather than bulk flow. In
particular, we studied the occurrence of anomalous transport in a variety of branched
structures and fractal trees. We proved that the Fluctuation Dissipation Relation
(FDR) can be extended, in some cases, to the anomalous transport regime, at least
within the linear response approximation. On the other hand, We pointed out how the
FDR can be broken by choosing properly the branching of the analyzed structure, as a
consequence of the emergence of an “entropic” drift due to the high ramifications
introduced. This result suggests that FDRs are more sensitive to the geometrical
structure rather than to the details of the dynamics. We also analyzed, in contrast to
those examples showing anomalous diffusion, a series of situations characterized by a
standard scaling of the MSD (and/or of the higher order moments), however with a
non Gaussian probability density, thus showing how standard diffusion is not always
Gaussian
Finite Temperature Effects in the White Dwarf Structure and Neutron Star Cooling in General Relativity
No full textExploring defective Golgi N-glycosylation: interplay between cell stress response and calcium signaling in Kluyveromyces lactis.
No full text
Development of novel extraction methodologies for the determination of illicit drugs in biological matrices
No full textSample preparation is a critical step in bioanalytical methods and is a key factor in determining the success of analysis. The aim of this work was to investigate and develop new techniques to address some of the shortcomings of current sample preparation techniques in forensic analytical chemistry. The goal has been to provide automation of the clean-up step, short sample preparation times, increasing selectivity and low sample volumes minimizing the consumption of solvents and chemicals.
The developed procedures were intended for use with biological samples, such as human urine, plasma, serum, oral fluids and hair. All these matrices are equally important for forensic purposes as they give different kind of information about the time of assumption and they show some distinctive features. Therefore in this project appropriate sample preparation techniques have been investigated with special regard to each different matrix. Biological samples are complex matrices which often need an effective clean-up step before analysis to reduce the levels of possible interfering substances from the matrix, especially if the analytes are present at trace levels. Conventionally, liquid–liquid extraction (LLE), protein precipitation (PP) and solid-phase extraction (SPE) are used as sample preparation techniques. The manual operations associated with these processes are often labor-intensive and time-consuming, for these reasons in this work we have investigated and developed new procedures based on innovative sample preparation. New selective stationary phases for SPE based on hexapeptides were developed while miniaturized SPE techniques such as microextraction on packed sorbent (MEPS) and µ-SPE were investigated for the analysis of urine, plasma and oral fluids; finally for the first time pressurised liquid extraction (PLE) was shown to be effective for the extraction of drugs belonging to different classes from hair samples.
Development of methods based on liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS) was also a crucial component of this work. LC–MS is considered to be the benchmark for quantitative/qualitative bioanalysis, providing specificity, sensitivity and speed to the method. Different chromatographic conditions have been evaluated for the optimal separation and detection of the investigated compounds. As a new trend, the application of fused core columns has been investigated, which allowed fast chromatographic runs and high efficiency. To improve the method selectivity multi reaction monitoring (MRM) acquisition modes were used for quantification of the investigated compounds.
All the methods developed have been validated according to international guidelines
IL MANAGEMENT NELL'ERA DELLA CONOSCENZA
No full textNella trattazione mi sono proposto, in ottica manageriale, di analizzare il ruolo della conoscenza quale driver fondamentale per la sopravvivenza delle organizzazioni. La nota sequenzialità di fattori quali una crescente “entropia”, con conseguente esubero e ridondanza di unità informative, e che sfocia in una corsa sempre meno razionale al cambiamento, caratterizza l’attuale contesto socio economico, e richiede sempre più che le organizzazioni abbiano a dotarsi di nuova conoscenza metodologica e strumentale per affrontare in modo proattivo le necessarie trasformazioni.
Adattarsi “darwinianamente” all’ambiente che cambia non può ritenersi sufficiente, diviene necessaria ed imprescindibile una attività delle organizzazioni tesa a favorire il cambiamento, trasformandolo in opportunità di crescita.
Una delle chiavi di tale trasformazione è la valorizzazione del sapere.
Il lavoro, recependo l’indirizzo derivante dalle considerazioni suesposte, si propone di tradurle in domanda di ricerca, assumendo come finalità quella di individuare, in un percorso scientifico interdisciplinare, quegli elementi propri della cosiddetta “scienza della conoscenza”. Una locuzione quest’ultima che rispetto alla epistemologia strictu sensu accoglie, nel limite dell’ammissibile, anche l’incerto, provando ad evidenziare quegli elementi cruciali che investono il dibattuto e non del tutto definito “Management nell’era della conoscenza”