1,721,336 research outputs found
Erratum: Patients with Severe Obesity during the COVID- 19 Pandemic: How to Maintain an Adequate Multidisciplinary Nutritional Rehabilitation Program? (Obes Facts. (2021) DOI: 10.1159/000513283)
No full textIn the article by De Amicis et al. entitled "Patients with Severe Obesity during the COVID- 19 Pandemic: How to Maintain an Adequate Multidisciplinary Nutritional Rehabilitation Program?" [Obes Facts. 2021, DOI: 10.1159/000513283], the author list is incorrect. The correct author list is: De Amicis R. Cancello R. Capodaglio P. Gobbi M. Brunani A. Gilardini L. Castelnuovo G. Molinari E. Barbieri V. Mambrini S.P. Battezzati A. Bertoli S
Environmental and economic benefits from the phase-out of residential oil heating: A study from the Aosta Valley region (Italy)
Full text linkAlthough its use is declining, oil heating is still used in areas not covered by the methane grid. Oil heating is becoming more and more expensive, requires frequent tank refill operations, and has high emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) and air pollutants such as SOx. In addition, spills from oil underground storage tanks (USTs) represent a serious environmental threat to soil and groundwater quality. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis on technical alternatives to oil heating with reference to the Aosta Valley (NW Italy), where this fuel is still often used and numerous UST spills have been reported in the last 20 years. We assess operational issues, GHG and pollutant emissions, and unit costs of the heat produced for several techniques: LPG boilers, wood boilers (logs, chips, pellets) and heat pumps (air-source, geothermal closed-loop and open-loop systems). We examine the investment to implement such solutions in two typical cases, a detached house and a block of flats, deriving payback times of about 3–8 years. Wood log boilers turn out to be the most economically convenient solutions; however, heat pumps provide several benefits from the operational and environmental points of view. In addition, including solar thermal panels for domestic hot water or a photovoltaic plant would have payback times of about 6–9 years. The results highlight the economic feasibility and the multiple benefits of a rapid phase-out of oil heating in Italy
The Hedonic Experience Associated with a Gentle Touch Is Preserved in Women with Fibromyalgia
Full text linkBackground/Objectives: Although manual therapies can be used for pain alleviation in fibromyalgia, there is no clear evidence about the processing of gentle, affective touch in this clinical condition. In fact, persistent painful sensations and psychological factors may impact the hedonic experience of touch. Methods: This observational cross-sectional study compared the subjective experience of affective touch between 14 women with fibromyalgia (age range: 35–70; range of years of education: 5–13) and 14 pain-free women (age range: 18–30; range of years of education: 13–19). The participants rated the pleasantness of slow and fast touches delivered by a brush, the experimenter’s hand, and a plastic stick. Tactile stimuli were either imagined or real to disentangle the contribution of top-down and bottom-up sensory components. Additionally, a self-report questionnaire explored the lifetime experiences of affective touch. Results: Akin to healthy counterparts, individuals with fibromyalgia rated slow touches delivered by the experimenter’s hand or a brush as more pleasant than fast touches, regardless of whether they were imagined or real. However, the intensity of pain affects only the imagined pleasantness in our participants with fibromyalgia. Furthermore, despite the fibromyalgia patients reporting fewer experiences of affective touch in childhood and adolescence, this evidence was not associated with the experimental outcomes. Conclusions: The hedonic experience of affective touch seems preserved in fibromyalgia despite poor intimate bodily contact in youth. We confirmed that bottom-up and top-down factors contribute to the affective touch perception in fibromyalgia: bodily pain may impact even more the expected pleasure than the actual experience. Future investigations may introduce neurophysiological measures of the implicit autonomic responses to affective touch in fibromyalgia. To conclude, although preliminary, our evidence may be in favor of manual therapies for pain relief in fibromyalgia
Physical exercise in the elderly: Its effects on the motor and endocrine system
No full textAgeing is associated with reduced maximal aerobic power, muscle strength and power; namely, reduced fitness. Based on the existing evidence concerning exercise prescription for healthy adults, in 1990, the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) made the following recommendations: frequency of training: 3-5 days/-week, intensity: 60-90% HRmax, or 50-85%VO2max, duration: 20-60 min of continuous aerobic activity with involvement of large muscle groups. However, the target of improving/maintaining physical fitness is inappropriate for the whole elderly population, which includes the frail. In these subjects, the achievement of a better health status is certainly the primary goal, as recently stated by the 1996 Heidelberg guidelines. Physical activity should be prescribed on the basis of an individual health/fitness gradient with different goals. Lower levels of physical activity than those recommended by the ACSM may reduce the risk for certain chronic degenerative diseases and yet may not be of sufficient quantity or quality to improve VO2max. In the wake of these considerations and the inclusion of the improvement/maintaining of health status among the goals of exercise prescription in the elderly population, in 1991, the ACSM lowered the recommended exercise intensity to as low as 35-40%VO2max. One of the most critical consequences of ageing of the motor system is muscle weakness. Several causes may be held responsible for this phenomenon; among these sarcopenia is, probably, the most common. The latter involves both a decrease in muscle fibre size and number. However, atrophy cannot alone entirely account for senile muscle weakness. As a matter of fact, the maximum force that may be generated per muscle cross-sectional area (F/CSA) is lower in elderly subjects. This phenomenon suggests that muscular or neural factors, or more likely both, are involved. Another common cause for the decrease in F/CSA is muscle activation. Recent reports show incomplete quadriceps muscle activation in very old (80+) men and women. Since almost complete (95%) muscle activation was found in a population of subjects ∼70 year old, it seems that activation capacity rapidly falls beyond the 7th decade. Therefore, taken together, the above neural factors may account for large part of the decrease in force with ageing. Hormonal changes in themselves are not the simple explanation for all of the changes associated with ageing. Studying the effects of strength training on the endocrine system is complicated by a variety of factors related to both the exercise challenge itself and the accurate measurements of hormones. The measurement of hormonal changes is complicated by the manner in which they are released, transported and interact with the target tissue. Many hormones are released in a pulsatile manner with superimposed diurnal, monthly, and seasonal rhythms. They often exist in different molecular weight fractions and are frequently transported in a bound form. From the work that has been carried out in younger people it would appear, that if sufficient high resistance exercise is carried out, then the acute hormonal response is not qualitatively different to that following a bout of endurance exercise. Exercise training programs have been suggested as possible countermeasures against involutional bone loss, being able to prevent or reverse almost 1% of bone loss per year in both lumbar spine and femoral neck for both pre- and postmenopausal women. As far as elderly people are concerned, it appears that strength training may have a more beneficial effect than aerobic training on BMD, especially in postmenopausal women, although some evidence suggests that also aerobic training may improve BMD in the elderly. To date, the effect of physical activity on bone turnover has received limited attention despite the strict dependence of bone mass on the balance between bone formation and bone resorption. The equilibrium between these two components of bone turnover is crucial for bone mass and BMD, since bone loss, or increase, results from an uncoupling of bone formation and bone resorption. During the last few years there has been a rapid development of reliable methods to measure biochemical markers of bone metabolism. Since these markers reflect the cellular events, they may provide new opportunities to elucidate the effects of physical exercise on bone metabolism
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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