1,721,194 research outputs found
Micronutrients and Brain Development
Full text linkPurpose of review: This review summarizes the most recent evidence regarding the effects of micronutrients on brain development. Recent findings: Emerging evidence indicates that nutrition in the early life can profoundly influence neurodevelopment, affecting later life health outcomes, neurocognitive performances, and disease risks. Inadequate early life nutrition has been associated with some neuropsychiatric disorders. Epigenetic mechanisms could play a crucial role, imprinting the genomes in early life making the individual more susceptible to develop diseases later in life. Children adequately nourished are more likely to reach their developmental potential in cognitive, motor, and socioemotional abilities, with positive societal repercussions. Data from further clinical trials are needed before more definitive conclusions can be drawn regarding the efficacy of dietary interventions for improving neurocognitive and social outcomes and preventing some neuropsychiatric illnesses. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to make recommendations to our patients to adopt certain dietary habits to optimize early life nutritional status in order to avoid long-term adverse consequences. Strategies of prevention should focus on ensuring more quality food to preconceptional, pregnant, lactating women and to children in their early life, not only in those areas where malnutrition is common but also in developed countries
Review of: Fabio Remondino and Stefano Campana. eds. 2014. “3D Recording and Modelling in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage: Theory and best practices”. BAR International Series 2598. Oxford: BAR
No full text«La nature n’est pas en surface; elle est en profondeur». As S. Campana, one of the curators of this text, quotes the maxim stated by the French painter Paul Cézanne at the beginning of the book, it also appears well suited to describe the latest developments occurring in the use of 3D in the field of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage during recent years. Out of the curator’s consideration, the necessity to propose an ensemble of new “best practices” arises, in order to include these technologies in the current methodologies applied to Archaeology. The present volume is made up of scientific articles on theory and case studies, written by several authors with expertise in lecturing and tutoring on 3D applications in documenting cultural heritage and archaeological practice, who aim to introduce the application of 3D recording and modeling as a standard in the realm of archaeological recording and interpretation
2016B Archaeological Campaign Report at Iron Age site of Salut (Oman): SL_Q_North preliminary report and anthropological study: 2016B Salut campaign
No full textThe 2016B archaeological campaign included the extensive excavation of the Islamic cemetery area, which occupied the superior layers of the abandoned Iron Age settlement. This sector covers a sub-rectangular area of roughly 70 m2 and hosts about 50 burials
Asthma and obesity in childhood: on the road ahead
No full textEpidemiological data show a link between asthma and obesity, suggesting many different mechanisms that may underlie the association. However, diagnosis of asthma is often self-reported by patients or caregivers. Definition of asthma is crucial, particularly in childhood. Obesity can be associated with symptoms commonly attributed to asthma, such as wheezing, dyspnoea and sleep apnoea. Obese subjects are less fit and may have more frequent bouts of breathlessness on exertion accompanied by an exaggerated symptom perception. Therefore, the link between the two diseases should be analysed by focusing not only on reported diagnosis of asthma but also on objective markers that can better characterize the asthma phenotype. These markers should include lung function parameters, bronchial hyper-reactivity, atopic sensitization and indices of lung inflammation. As we look back and move forward, a multidisciplinary approach is increasingly necessary to understand the complexity of obesity and asthma, keeping in mind that diet and exercise could influence both diagnosis and treatment. In the meantime, in clinical settings, physicians should be cautious about diagnosing asthma in obese children on the basis of self-reported symptoms alone and should confirm the diagnosis by using objective measurements and marker evaluations that can better identify asthma phenotype and exclude overdiagnosis
Essays on the use of agricultural technologies in developing countries
Full text linkAdopting new technologies and agricultural practices can help smallholder farmers improving their livelihoods, increasing their income and other aspects of their well-being, such as nutrition. Despite this, adoption rates in developing countries are still low, especially in Africa. Factors affecting the adoption and the use of these practices are manifold and include elements such as access to information, risk aversion and sufficient liquidity. Among them, special attention in the recent debate has been paid to information and market access, which will be two of the core elements in this thesis. Indeed, here I try to provide a comprehensive picture of technology adoption, analyzing its determinants and the specific consequences on household food security and nutrition for women. Technology will be defined throughout the essays as something not necessarily new to the context under analysis but as an improved product (good or service) or process.
This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the debate on technology adoption in developing countries in several ways. Firstly, this thesis wants to contribute by pointing out benefits deriving from the use of agricultural technologies using a gender perspective and evaluating the impact of agricultural practices on women's nutrition and household food security, improving evidence that is still scarce. Secondly, it contributes to the debate around the determinants of the adoption of agricultural practices with peculiar reference to access to information and to the market for small farmers. Another relevant contribution of this thesis is the use, along the three essays, of several approaches to analyze transmission channels through formal or informal mediation analysis. Mediation analysis is a statistical framework used to analyze the mechanism through which a variable of interest, the treatment, affects an outcome through one or more intermediate variables called mediators. This methodology is commonly used in sociology, psychology, and epidemiology, but despite the importance of knowing transmission mechanisms of economic phenomena, few studies use this approach in economics. Indeed, many studies estimated the magnitude and the significance of an impact but cannot disentangle what are the causes of that impact, leaving the causal effect as what was called a “black box” in the mediation analysis literature. In principle, mediation analysis implies a sequence in the influence among variables. The treatment affects the outcome directly, and indirectly it has an influence on the mediator that in turn impacts the outcome. In real cases, it is not always so straightforward as there could be reverse causality and the use of cross-sectional data can create problems related to the temporal order of the variables in the analysis. The
analyses will be performed using both cross-sectional and panel data. Overall, throughout the three essays, some regularities emerged. However, the frameworks under examination in this thesis are quite complex and many variables could play a role, making the analysis complicated. Therefore, it is no surprise that across the manuscript results could lead to different conclusions depending on the context considered and requiring to approach them with caution.
This thesis is built by three independent, although related, empirical essays investigating both the determinants and the impact of agricultural technology and agricultural practices.
Essay 1 examines the link between agricultural technology use, food security and nutrition, using new panel data on smallholder oil palm growers in Ghana collected by the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) consortium in 2017 and 2019. In this essay, I introduce a gender perspective, focusing on women and the possible mediating role of women's empowerment that could be an important mechanism in driving the results. Here, technology use will be defined firstly as the use of one practice among agrochemicals, irrigation, and intercropping, three relevant practices for oil palm cultivation in the country. Secondly, I narrowed the definition to the use of irrigation and agrochemicals only due to possible heterogeneity when including also intercropping. Using fixed effect models with interaction terms and a Heckman’s model, the core results are: i) for oil palm producers in south-western Ghana, the use of at least one agricultural practice among irrigation and agrochemicals is significantly linked with women’s dietary diversity; ii) women empowerment appears to be a positive factor for household food security, regardless of the technological use status and iii) women empowerment mediates the relationship between technology use and women’s dietary diversity.
Essay 2 shifts the focus to another country and a different type of technology. One of the main barriers to technology adoption identified in the literature is limited knowledge about the technology, a barrier that could be reduced by increasing and improving extension services. In this essay, I assess the role of extension services on the adoption of laser land leveling (LLL) among 604 households in the Indian state of Karnataka using cross-sectional data collected by the South Asia Regional (SAR) division of IFPRI. The empirical analysis includes propensity score matching and causal mediation analysis. The core results are: i) having visited at least once the extension center (or received a visit by its officials) increases the likelihood of using LLL; ii) after explaining the advantages of the technology and its cost, farmers develop a perception about the affordability of laser land leveling that mediates the treatment effects of the extension service on laser land leveling adoption.
Finally, essay 3 includes the role of market access in determining the use of agricultural technologies. This essay wants to shed light on the nexus between market access, the three main constraints to technology
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adoption detected in the literature (i.e., limited knowledge, farmers’ risk aversion and limited liquidity and access to credit), and the final adoption. Using the four waves of the LSMS-ISA for Nigeria, I firstly identify the local governmental areas (LGAs) that can be classified as hot spots and cold spots for the main crops grown in the country - cereals, cassava or tubers. To do so, I use the Getis and Ord statistic to detect how the geographical concentration of certain crops and agricultural commercialization are linked. Then, I employ an instrumental variables mediation analysis to account for non-random selection and possible simultaneity between market access and the use of agrochemicals. Results show a positive correlation between selling on the market and the outcome variable, and this is confirmed also by the instrumental variable mediation. The primary transmission channel identified seems to be the possibility to access to credit
Pediatric body composition in clinical studies: which methods in which situations?
No full textThere is currently much interest in the subject of pediatric obesity. Accurate
measures of body composition are required given the potential influence of
variables such as growth, metabolic rate, physical activity, and physical
fitness. Because boys and girls have a different growth pattern, gender is a
fundamental consideration when measuring children and assessing body composition.
The central aim of this paper is to review methods of pediatric body composition
assessment that can provide new insights for clinical practice
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
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