1,721,002 research outputs found
Early Mortality from Malignant Neoplasms of Pleura, a Proxy for Environmental Exposure to Asbestos in Childhood
No full textThe issue of health risk from asbestos exposure in children is rarely addressed, mainly for the long median latency of asbestos-related diseases (45 years for pleural mesothelioma): if children are exposed to asbestos, the effects will occur so late that the causal link can be hidden. As part of SENTIERI KIDS, a project on child health in contaminated sites, mortality from malignant neoplasms of pleura (MNP) in young adults (=50 years) was used as a proxy for environmental exposure to asbestos in childhood. The National Mortality Database, available at the Statistics Unit of the National Institute of Health, was used to analyze early mortality for MNP in Italy: ICD 9th Revision, code 163 (1980-2002), and ICD 10th Revision, codes C45.0 and C38.4 (2003-2010). Standardized rates (SR) and standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) were calculated with 90% confidence intervals (90%CI), using as reference the Italian population for regional estimates, and regional populations for municipal estimates. In Italy, 1594 early deaths from MNP were recorded from 1980 to 2010 (55 per year on average, annual SR=0.2 x 100,000). Friuli, Liguria, Lombardia and Piedmont, the regions mostly affected by activities involving asbestos exposure, display high risks (respectively: SMR=133, 90%CI 102-170, 46 obs; SMR=207, 174-245, 97 obs; SMR=119, 109-131, 319 obs, SMR=164, 146-184, 206 obs). This study identified 147 municipalities where early mortality for MNP is significantly higher than expected. In Biancavilla, a small municipality (20,000 people) where building material extracted from the local quarry was contaminated by amphibolic fibers, 6 early deaths versus 0.5 expected were observed. Within a radius of 10 km from Biancavilla MNP deaths rose to 11 (SMR=367, CI90% 206-608). Results highlight the need to further analyze the space and time distribution of early MNP deaths as a tool to confirm presence of environmental contamination by asbestos and to detect areas at risk not yet identified
Cancer incidence in children and young adults living in industrially contaminated sites: from the Italian experience to the development of an international surveillance system
Get PDFthis paper is based upon work from COST Action ICSHNet. Children's environmental health is on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The incidence of childhood cancer is increasing worldwide and in Europe. Yet, the aetiology of most childhood cancers, including the role of environmental carcinogens, is still largely unknown. Contaminated areas, especially of industrial origin, are of high concern due to complex mix of hazardous pollutants and their potential health impacts on human populations, notably in children
Methodological approaches to evaluate the over-time mortality in SENTIERI epidemiological surveillance system: a focus on cohort analyses
No full text: The SENTIERI Project analyses the health profile of the populations residing in Italian national priority contaminated sites in specific calendar periods using a cross-sectional approach. An aspect that has not been evaluated so far is the analysis over a long period, for understanding the changes in health profiles over time and studying them also in function of the changes occurred in the territories. This article studies temporal trends by birth cohort and calendar period for overall mortality and lung cancer mortality from 1980 to 2018, separately for men and women, for three sites: Priolo (Sicily Region, Southern Italy), Pitelli (Liguria Region, Northern Italy), and Terni-Papigno (Umbria Region, Central Italy). A method for selecting the temporal model that best fits the data is then proposed. General mortality presents complex temporal profiles when considering cumulative risks, and usually the most important temporal axis is the birth cohort for cumulative SMRs (i.e., after adjusting for trends in the reference population). For lung cancer, the most important time axis is the birth cohort and the age-cohort model is the most appropriate, in particular for men of Priolo and Terni
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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