1,721,116 research outputs found
Farmacosorveglianza
No full textAmpiamente aggiornata e integrata, la seconda edizione di Farmacologia, a cura di Stefano Govoni et al., mantiene le caratteristiche fondative che hanno caratterizzato l’edizione recedente.
I tratti salienti dell’opera sono
Intrathecal Baclofen in Patients With Persistent Vegetative State: 2 Hypotheses
No full textSarà M, Pistoia F, Mura E, Onorati P, Govoni S. Intrathecal baclofen in patients with persistent vegetative state: 2 hypotheses. Sporadic cases of recovery from persistent vegetative state (PVS) after administration of intrathecal baclofen (ITB) have been reported without giving any possible explanation for its paradoxical effect. We summarize our recent findings on 5 patients with PVS treated with ITB and make some speculations on the mechanisms responsible for the observed clinical improvement. The patients developed spasticity and were judged eligible for ITB therapy. Two weeks after pump implantation, patients began to show a clinical improvement that, at the end of the 6 months' follow-up, was stable in all but 1 patient, ranging from a mere increased alertness to a full recovery of consciousness, as revealed by changes of the Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) score. Our findings suggest that ITB might favor a variable degree of clinical improvement. A proposal for a pharmacodynamic explanation of this effect has not been formally put forward. We hypothesize 2 possible mechanisms: first, a modulation confined to spinal cord segmental activities and to neuronal centripetal outputs reaching the cortex; and second, a modulation of sleep-wake cycles that, although present, may be dysregulated and interfere with alertness and awareness. Although our research is confined to a few subjects, it provides follow-up information by means of the CRS-R that is a validated standardized neurobehavioral instrument expressly designed for use in patients with PVS. Our observations indicate that further systematic investigation of the mechanisms and the putative clinical applications of ITB should be undertaken. © 2009 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine
Brain and Heart Dynamics
No full textThis ambitious and comprehensive handbook represents an essential contribution to our current understanding of interactions between heart and brain, a research topic generating growing interest.
Despite the increasing awareness that neural mechanisms are the primary cause of cardiac disease and its progression, therapy continues to focus on end-organ protection and does not approach the neural core of the problem. Growing public health problems such as heart failure are still treated with autonomic drugs that are 30-40 years old and simply act on cardiac receptors. However, it has now been shown that the progression of ischemic heart disease to heart failure is mainly due to abnormal central responses to incipient cardiac disease, with neural activation the primary cause rather than the consequence of cardiac remodeling.
Written by leading international experts in their respective research areas, the book presents a variety of perspectives on the core topic: from social and philosophical to gender-related aspects.
It is designed for a broad readership and includes dedicated sections for cardiologists, psychiatrists, neurologists and psychotherapists looking for a more insightful and targeted approach to neuro-cardiovascular disease
Drug prescription in elderly hospitalized patients with cognitive impairment in the Italian dementia‐friendly hospital project
No full textBackgroundOlder patients with cognitive impairment represent a significant proportion of the patients hospitalized for various acute illnesses. The health staff is not prepared to deal with such patients which do not fit the standard of care of the hospital stay. Accordingly, we recorded a series of clinical parameters reflecting the health status and the drug prescriptions at the entry and during hospital stay before and after a brief (5 hrs. frontal teaching) intervention of staff training, focusing on improving the management of patients with cognitive impairment.MethodsParticipants were evaluated within 48 h of admission and at discharge with Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), Barthel Index, Instrumental Activity of Daily Life (IADL), and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). A preliminary analysis of 68 hospitalized participants aged 65 and older with cognitive impairment (MMSE ≥ 16, ≤24) allocated in the control group (n = 34, 20 females, 82.38 years) and intervention group (n = 34, 20 females, 81.97 years) was performed. For each patient, the number of prescriptions, sedative and anticholinergic load, and drug–drug interactions were evaluated.ResultsParticipants presented a widespread polypharmacy receiving as average 6.9 (+/- 1.7 drugs/daily in the control group) and 5.9 (+/- 1.6 drugs/daily in the intervention group), the difference being not statistically significant (P = 0,068). Also, the sedative load presented a trend toward lower values in the intervention group. The results concerning the other clinical indices (submitted elsewhere) show that personnel training significantly improved the functional and anxiety parameters at discharge.ConclusionsThe results suggest that an intervention, focused on improving dementia care practices in health staff, having the potential to improve outcomes for hospitalized older adults with cognitive impairment, but not directly designed to manage drug polypharmacy, is not sufficient to modify drug prescription patterns
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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