1,721,061 research outputs found
Anorexia Nervosa and Body Fat Distribution: A Systematic Review
No full textThe aim of this paper was to conduct a systematic review of body fat distribution before and after partial and complete weight restoration in individuals with anorexia nervosa. Literature searches, study selection, method development and quality appraisal were performed independently by two authors, and data was synthesized using a narrative approach. Twenty studies met the inclusion criteria and were consequently analyzed. The review had five main findings. First, during anorexia nervosa adolescent females lose more central body fat, while adult females more peripheral fat. Second, partial weight restoration leads to greater fat mass deposition in the trunk region than other body regions in adolescent females. Third, after short-term weight restoration, whether partial or complete, adults show a central adiposity phenotype with respect to healthy age-matched controls. Fourth, central fat distribution is associated with increased insulin resistance, but does not adversely affect eating disorder psychopathology or cause psychological distress in female adults. Fifth, the abnormal central fat distribution seems to normalize after long-term maintenance of complete weight restoration, indicating that preferential central distribution of body fat is a transitory phenomenon. However, a discrepancy in the findings has been noted, especially between adolescents and adults; besides age and gender, these appear to be related to differences in the methodology and time of body composition assessment
Scala di Valutazione degli stati depressivi: Valutazione fattoriale su un campione di 2300 adolescenti
No full textTracing back to the onset of abnormal head circumference growth in Italian children with autism spectrum disorder
No full textThis retrospective study aims to describe head circumference (HC) developmental course during the first year of life in 50 Italian children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and in a control group of 100 typically developing children (TD). To this end, we use anthropometric measurements (HC, body height, body weight) obtained at birth (T0), 1-2 months (T1), 3-5 months (T2) and 6-12 months (T3) from paediatricians and reported in the infant's 'baby book'. Data indicate that at T2 and T3 HC was significantly greater in ASD group compared to TD, while from T1 weight was significantly smaller in ASD subjects compared to healthy infants. After controlling for weight and height, ASD HC shows an excessive rate of growth from birth. The abnormal HC growth is present in the majority of infants with ASD and could represent a biomarker that together with other clinical signs might promote an early ASD identification
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
Quality of care in children with chronic diseases
No full textBackground
Improving health care for chronic health conditions is a major goal of contemporary health service delivery systems. To date, the main research focus has been on adults and elderly, while fewer attention has been focused on newborns and children with chronic health conditions. To address the challenges related to the provision of integrated care to children with special health care needs, the Special Needs Kids (SpeNK) project was carried out in Emilia-Romagna Region. The specific aims of this study were: to review the ongoing sheltered discharge procedures, to develop and test instruments to assess the families’ perspective on the continuity of care and to estimate the time devoted by the family pediatrician to care coordination activities.
Materials and methods
The SpeNK project is still ongoing. After reviewing the procedures implemented in the Local Health Authorities of the study area, 10 face-to-face, 3 telephone semi-structured interviews and a focus group with the families at 1-6 months from discharge were conducted by a psychologist. A 20-item questionnaire on continuity of care was then developed, based on the contents of the interview and on Haggerty’s constructs of informational, management and relational continuity. The questionnaire was validated on 102 parents of preterm newborns and then administered by phone to the families of children enrolled in the SpeNK study after 9 months from discharge.
Results
A qualitative analysis of the contents of the semi-structured interviews revealed that families underscored the importance of informational continuity among hospital clinicians and across health care services, set a high value on the information/training received during the hospital stay of children and at discharge, and exhibited a mixed attitude towards involvement in the health care decisions.
Examination of the structure of the questionnaire using factor analysis with oblique rotation identified 5 factors accounting for 61.1% of the variance of items. The factors identified can be interpretable as ‘management continuity’ , ‘informational continuity’ ‘trustful relation with the family pediatrician’, ‘information provided to families’ and ‘family empowerment’.
Conclusions
The preliminary results of the qualitative analysis of the semi-structured interviews suggest the relevance to the families of the hospital experience and some criticalities in the informational continuity among professionals. The questionnaire on continuity of care has a well-defined structure and can be a useful tool to capture problems related to informational continuity and to the interaction of families with the professionals involved in the care of children with special care needs
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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