1,721,075 research outputs found
Medium to long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on colorectal cancer diagnosis and management in Italy: preliminary findings from an updated analysis of the real-world multicenter COVID-DELAY study
No full textPemigatinib in pazienti affetti da colangiocarcinoma localmente avanzato o metastatico con fusione o riarrangiamento di FGFR2 pretrattati: analisi congiunta degli studi di coorte multicentrici, osservazionali, "real-world" francese PEMI-BIL e italiano PEMI-REAL
No full textBackground
Pemigatinib è approvato per il trattamento di pazienti affetti da colangiocarcinoma (CCA) localmente avanzato o metastatico con riarrangiamento o fusione di FGFR2 in progressione ad almeno una precedente linea di terapia sistemica. Lo scopo del presente studio era quello di raccogliere dati di pratica clinica circa efficacia, attività e sicurezza in questa tipologia di pazienti gestiti in pratica clinica.
Materiali e metodi
È stata effettuata un'analisi congiunta di due studi retrospettivi di coorte osservazionali multicentrici condotti in modo indipendente in Francia e in Italia. Sono stati inclusi tutti i pazienti affetti da CCA localmente avanzato insperabile o metastatico FGFR2-positivo e trattati con pemigatinib come seconda o ulteriore linea di trattamento sistemico in un Setting di pratica clinica, all'interno o all'esterno del Programma di Uso Compassionevole.
Risultati
Tra luglio 2020 e settembre 2022, 72 pazienti sono stati trattati con pemigatinib in 14 centri italiani e 25 centri francesi.
I pazienti avevano un'età mediana di 57 anni, il 76% erano donne, l'81% aveva ECOG-PS 0-1, il 99% aveva un CCA intraepatico, il 74% aveva 2 siti metastatici, il 67% aveva una malattia metastatica alla diagnosi, mentre il 38,8% aveva già ricevuto 2 linee precedenti di trattamento sistemico.
Ad aprile 2023 (data cut-off), il tasso di risposte obiettive (ORR) e il tasso di controllo di malattia (DCR) erano rispettivamente del 45,8% e 84,7%. La durata mediana della risposta (DoR) era di 7 mesi (IQR: 5,8-9,3).
Ad un follow-up mediano di 19,5 mesi (95%IC: 15,0-30,5), la sopravvivenza libera da progressione (PFS) mediana e il tasso di PFS a 1 anno sono stati di 8,7 mesi (95%CI: 7,3-11,8; 41/72 eventi) e del 32,8% (95%CI: 21,2-50,9), rispettivamente. La sopravvivenza globale (OS) mediana e il tasso di OS a 1 anno sono stati di 17,1 mesi (95%CI: 12,7-NA; 27/72 eventi) e del 60,6% (95%CI: 48,7-75,5), rispettivamente.
Tra i fattori predittivi di risposta valutati, i pazienti "responder" hanno ottenuto un maggiore beneficio in OS rispetto ai "non-responder" all'analisi univariata (OS mediana 18.7 vs 12.7 mesi; HR: 0.38 [95%CI:0.2- 0.9], p=0.016)
Astenia (69,4%), tossicità oculare (68%, compresi xeroftalmia, cheratite e distacco di retina), tossicità ungueale (61,1%), tossicità dermatologica (41,6%, compresi eritema ed eritrosi palmare-plantare), iperfosfatemia (55,6%), stomatite (48,6%) e diarrea (36.1%), sono stati i più frequenti, principalmente di grado (G)1-G2, eventi avversi (AE).
L'incidenza di AE di ogni grado è stata del 97,2%. L'incidenza complessiva di AE G3 è stata del 22,2%, mentre nessuno dei pazienti ha sperimentato AE G4. Riduzione e sospensione temporanea di dose si sono rese necessarie nel 33,3% e nel 40,3% dei casi, con solo 1 interruzione permanente a causa di AE.
Conclusioni
Questi risultati, condotti su una coorte di pazienti affetti da CCA FGFR2-positivo in progressione a precedente chemioterapia sistemica, confermano l'efficacia, l'attività e un profilo di sicurezza maneggevole di pemigatinib in un setting di pratica clinica.Background
Pemigatinib is approved for patients with pretreated, locally advanced or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) harboring FGFR2 rearrangements or fusions. The purpose of this study was to collect real world clinical practice effectiveness, activity, and safety data for pemigatinib in this patient population
Integrating temporal probability in landslide hazard evaluation towards the assessment of the economic risk at regional scale
Full text linkAmong the others, the number of disasters caused by natural hazards and the consequent economic losses have continuously increased during last decades. The risk management posed by the occurrence of natural hazards is challenging. Nowadays, the consequences of natural hazards are expected to worsen. The effect of climate change, as well as the interaction between natural hazards, environmental and human drivers make the consequent risks more complex to manage. The growing awareness of international community about disaster risk reduction is remarked by the ratification of international agreements, guidelines and global targets from local to global scales. However, hazardous phenomena, in particular recurring small-scale and slow-onset ones, have continued to significantly impact communities and their assets undermining the efforts to achieve a sustainable development. The present research work deals with the landslide hazard, which is one of the most frequent natural phenomena and a major threat to human safety and the environment. In future, since most of landslides are rainfall-triggered, an increase of their recurrence is expected in some areas because of the variation in the hydrological cycles and the increased frequency of extreme weather events. Moreover, the urbanization of steep and unstable slopes exposes more people and more assets to the negative impacts of landslide events. Landslide hazard and risk assessment, which are fundamental tools in the management of natural hazards, are a main subject of research since a long time. Several factors influence the choice of the methodological approach, such as: the purpose of the assessment, the landslide triggering factors, the types of elements at risk, the kind of involved mass movements, the available data and those to be collected, the scale of the study (i.e. individual, local, regional, national or global), and the available time. According to these factors, literature provides us many approaches to assess landslide hazard and risk. Whatever the method is, the key basis to start the analysis is a reliable landslide inventory, i.e. a detailed record of spatial and time characteristics of past landslides within a territory. Collecting data about past landslide occurrences may constitute a tedious procedure, inasmuch mass movements are generally isolated and localised events, which need to be mapped and described individually because of their diverse attributes. Most of the analyses aiming at assessing the landslide hazard and risk are limited to the spatial probability of occurrence. As the matter of fact, they do not include the assessment of the temporal probability of landsliding. The difficulty in determining the frequency of landslide events is mainly due to the lack of information about the date of occurrence within landslide databases. Thus, adding the temporal dimension to the hazard module results challenging. In the light of the above, this work aims at improving the current procedures concerning hazard and risk analysis by dealing with the landslide risk assessment of a hazard-prone area located in southern Italy (Daunia area, Apulia region). What clearly emerges from the overview about the current procedure to assess landslide hazard and risk within the study area is that there are many procedures for the assessment of landslide hazard and risk in many areas of the study area, inasmuch different Basin Authorities were competent. Nowadays, although they have been grouped from the administrative point of view in the District Basin Authority of the Southern Apennines, the landslide hazard and risk procedures have not been standardised yet. Therefore, an attempt has been made to develop a methodological approach to hazard and risk assessment, which was univocal for the same territory and took into account the spatial and temporal probability of landslide phenomena. The spatial probability assessment derives from a susceptibility assessment. It consists in a procedure that involves predisposing and triggering factors, which cause landslides. Regarding the temporal aspect, after counting the number of landslide events occurred within slope units, it has been quantified by applying a Poisson probability model. Since the available databases have scarce information about the temporal occurrence of landslide events, a new multi-temporal landslide inventory was necessary. The new inventory has been obtained by the analysis of paper documents collected by the Apulian administrative Difesa del Suolo office (namely, Soil Defense), which is in charge of planning structural mitigation interventions in the field of soil protection. From the analysis of the paper documents associated to the study area (the southern part of the Daunia area), 493 landslide events have been counted in the period 1998-2018. These events have complete information about spatial and temporal aspects, and thus they were useful to carry out the temporal probability assessment. The following landslide risk analysis consists in the combination of the spatial and temporal probability of landsliding, the areal extent of the elements at risk and their economic values. The outputs of landslide risk analysis result in economic values associated to each municipality located in the study area. Moreover, the risk value in monetary terms has been assessed for each slope unit within the municipality in the study area. The comparison between the economic values permits to rank the areas most-at-risk from an economic point of view. Moreover, the estimated economic risk per each municipality has been normalised by the corresponding areal extent, in order to avoid its influence on the risk assessment. After that, the results of risk assessment have been compared with the funds that concern mitigation measures. The results of such comparison could be used as a tool in the management of landslide risk at regional scale, guiding the choices of decision makers involved in the financing of mitigation measures
TORSIONAL OSCILLATIONS OF NONBARE STRANGE STARS
No full texttrange stars are one of the possible compact stellar objects that can form after a supernova collapse. We consider a model of a strange star having an inner core in the color-flavor locked phase surmounted by a crystalline color superconducting (CCSC) layer. These two phases constitute the quarksphere, which we assume to be the largest and heaviest part of the strange star. The next layer consists of standard nuclear matter forming an ionic crust, hovering on the top of the quarksphere and prevented from falling by a strong dipolar electric field. The dipolar electric field arises because quark matter is confined in the quarksphere by the strong interaction, but electrons can leak outside forming an electron layer a few hundred fermi thick separating the ionic crust from the underlying quark matter. The ionic matter and the CCSC matter constitute two electromagnetically coupled crust layers. We study the torsional oscillations of these two layers. Remarkably, we find that if a fraction larger than 10−4 of the energy of a Vela-like glitch is conveyed to a torsional oscillation, the ionic crust will likely break. The reason is that the very rigid and heavy CCSC crust layer will absorb only a small fraction of the glitch energy, leading to a large-amplitude torsional oscillation of the ionic crust. The maximum stress generated by the torsional oscillation is located inside the ionic crust and is very close to the star’s surface. This peculiar behavior leads to a much easier crust cracking than in standard neutron stars
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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