102,080 research outputs found
Gallstone ileus: Endoscopic removal of a gallstone obstructing the lower ileum
No full text2 citazioni su Scopus
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1590865808004337
http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-67349129737&origin=resultslist&sort=plf-f&src=s&st1=benassai&st2=g&sid=oNVoDQG_UHipYnJz9G131SP%3a210&sot=q&sdt=b&sl=30&s=TITLE-ABS-KEY-AUTH%28benassai+g%29&relpos=5&relpos=5&searchTerm=TITLE-ABS-KEY-AUTH(benassai g)
An 81-year-old presented with a 5-day history of increasing abdominal pain, distension, and vomiting. Her bowels were not active for 2 days, but she was passing flatus.
Laboratory examination showed a haemoglobin of 9.7 g/dL (≤14 g/dL), haematocrit of 29.7% (≥41%), leucocytes of 13.6/nl (≤10.0/nl), creatinine of 3.7 mg/dL (≤1.1 mg/dL).
A plain abdominal X-ray showed small bowel distension; abdominal CT with contrast media showed a large gallstone in the lower ileum. Distended bowel loops were shown as a sign of a small intestinal ileus. Pneumobilia was not present (Fig. 1).
Due to the weakened state of the patient and the concurrent diseases (coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure, renal insufficiency), an operation was considered unsafe and an endoscopic removal of the stone was tried.
Colonoscopy revealed a large gallstone obstructing the distal ileum (about 10 cm above the ileo-cecal valve) The mucosa was diffusely edematous (Fig. 2).
The stone was mobile and it was possible to grab the stone with a Roth net device (US Endoscopy, Mentor, OH, USA), to remove it from the site of impaction and finally retrieve the stone trough the anus.
The stone measured 3.5 cm × 3.5 cm × 3 cm.
The patient rapidly recovered and was discharged 5 days later.
Gallstone ileus occurs almost exclusively in the elderly and accounts for 25% of mechanical small-bowel obstructions in patients over the age of 65, with a mortality of 15%.
Early surgical intervention is the mainstay of treatment for gallstone ileus but has a mortality of 12–50%. Colonoscopic retrieval may be technically possible, carries small risks compared with surgery, and requires a shorter period of rehabilitation [1], [2] and [3]
Legal status of immigrants and criminal behavior: evidence from a natural experiment
No full textWe estimate the causal effect of immigrants' legal status on criminal behavior exploiting exogenous variation in migration restrictions across nationalities driven by the last round of the European Union enlargement. Unique individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy five months before the enlargement allow us to compare the post-release criminal record of inmates from new EU member countries with a control group of pardoned inmates from candidate EU member countries. Difference-in-differences in the probability of re-arrest between the two groups before and after the enlargement show that obtaining legal status lowers the recidivism of economically motivated offenders, but only in areas that provide relatively better labor market opportunities to legal immigrants. We provide a search-theoretic model of criminal behavior that is consistent with these results
Legal status and the criminal activity of immigrants
No full textWe exploit exogenous variation in legal status following the January 2007 European Union enlargement to estimate its effect on immigrant crime. We difference out unobserved time-varying factors by 1) comparing recidivism rates of immigrants from the "new" and "candidate" member countries and 2) using arrest data on foreign detainees released upon a mass clemency that occurred in Italy in August 2006. The timing of the two events allows us to set up a difference-in-differences strategy. Legal status leads to a 50 percent reduction in recidivism and explains one-half to two-thirds of the observed differences in crime rates between legal and illegal immigrants
Econometrics of Crime
No full textThis entry highlights different methods that have been proposed to overcome the endogeneity issue and, more generally, different econometric strategies that have been proposed to identify the causal effect of deterrence on crime
Silence of the Innocents: Illegal Immigrants' Underreporting of Crime and their Victimization
No full textWe analyze the consequences of illegally residing in a country on the likelihood of reporting a crime to the police and, as a consequence, on the likelihood to become victims of a crime. We use an immigration amnesty to address two issues when dealing with the legal status of immigrants: it is both endogenous as well as mostly unobserved in surveys. Right after the 1986 US Immigration Reform and Control Act, which disproportionately legalized individuals of Hispanic origin, crime victims of Hispanic origin in cities with a large proportion of illegal Hispanics become considerably more likely to report a crime. Non-Hispanics show no changes. Difference-in-differences estimates that adjust for the misclassification of legal status imply that the reporting rate of undocumented immigrants is close to 11 percent. Gaining legal status the reporting rate triples, approaching the reporting rate of non-Hispanics. We also find some evidence that following the amnesty Hispanics living in metropolitan areas with a large share of illegal migrants experience a reduction in victimization. This is coherent with a simple behavioral model of crime that guides our empirical strategies, where amnesties increase the reporting rate of legalized immigrants, which, in turn, modify the victimization of natives and migrants
An automated software pipeline for shotgun lipidomics using direct-infusion, high-resolution mass spectrometry
No full textIn the last ten years, lipidomics has attracted increasing attention as a research tool in a wide range of disciplines including physiology, lipid biochemistry, clinical biomarker discovery and pathology. Lipid metabolism is found to be critically aberrant in several different human diseases such as diabetes, obesity, atherosclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. All these characteristics make lipids profiling an essential tool not only for investigation of many pathological processes but also in identifying potential biomarkers for establishing preventive or therapeutic approaches for human health. Here we present a direct-infusion mass spectrometry approach (shotgun lipidomics) in order to identify and quantify at least ten lipid species classes using a two-step extraction procedure, enabling both lipidiomics as well as polar metabolite analysis via GC-MS. We developed a new automated data analysis pipeline, which allows for the fast and robust quantification and identification of lipid species from high-resolution MS data. The software is based on the open-source C++ library OpenMS and R scripts, and supports automated ion-mode and adduct detection, isotope- assembly and correction, non-linear mass calibration, an in-house lipid database combining LipidMaps and HMDB for mass-based identification. Quality control plots are created for all major processing steps for each sample, allowing the operator to quickly judge data quality. Spike-in internal standards serve as abundance normalization for their respective lipid class. Additionally, a new robot-based sample preparation method is introduced, which allows standardized sample handling, ensures rapid sample processing, and minimizes potential variations in pipetting or weighing. Furthermore, due to use of glass vials, we show that common background signal (e.g. from tris(ditert-butylphenyl) phosphate) are significantly reduced. To study the effects of lifestyle factors, we investigate the lipidome changes in a mouse model considering four tissue types (WAT, serum, muscle and liver) under normal vs. high-fat diet
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