Publications by authors named "De Angelis G"

This research aims to understand the prevalence of religious slaughter practices in Italy. Two different ways of slaughtering animals are identified. Conventional slaughter is performed with prior stunning; kosher slaughter is practiced without stunning.

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Neural mechanisms underlying depth perception are reviewed with respect to three computational goals: determining surface depth order, gauging depth intervals, and representing 3D surface geometry and object shape. Accumulating evidence suggests that these three computational steps correspond to different stages of cortical processing. Early visual areas appear to be involved in depth ordering, while depth intervals, expressed in terms of relative disparities, are likely represented at intermediate stages.

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It is generally accepted that in mammals visual information is sent to the brain along functionally specialized parallel pathways, but whether the mouse visual system uses similar processing strategies is not known. It is important to resolve this issue because the mouse brain provides a tractable system for developing a cellular and molecular understanding of disorders affecting spatiotemporal visual processing. We have used single-unit recordings in mouse primary visual cortex to study whether individual neurons are more sensitive to one set of sensory cues than another.

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The association of cystic fibrosis and Crohn's disease (CD) is well known, but to date, there are very few cases in the literature of patients suffering from mucoviscidosis who have required treatment with infliximab. We report the case of a 23-year-old patient suffering from cystic fibrosis and severe CD treated successfully with infliximab without any infective complications or worsening of the pulmonary disease and with a long term (2 years) complete remission.

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Policy-makers have recommended universal screening to reduce nosocomial methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection. Risk profiling of MRSA carriers and rapid PCR tests are now available, yet cost-effectiveness data are limited. The present study assessed the cost-effectiveness of universal PCR screening on admission to surgery.

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Objective: High-mobility group box-1 (HMGB1) protein is a nuclear DNA-binding protein released from necrotic cells, inducing inflammatory responses and promoting tissue repair and angiogenesis. Diabetic human and mouse tissues contain lower levels of HMGB1 than their normoglycemic counterparts. Deficient angiogenesis after ischemia contributes to worse outcomes of peripheral arterial disease in patients with diabetes.

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The parieto-insular vestibular cortex (PIVC) is thought to contain an important representation of vestibular information. Here we describe responses of macaque PIVC neurons to three-dimensional (3D) vestibular and optic flow stimulation. We found robust vestibular responses to both translational and rotational stimuli in the retroinsular (Ri) and adjacent secondary somatosensory (S2) cortices.

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Little is known about late-onset hemorrhagic cystitis (HC) in children, its relationship to BK virus, and treatment with cidofovir (CDV) following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). We prospectively investigated BK virus reactivation in children who underwent HSCT from a matched related donor for thalassemia or sickle cell anemia following busulfan-cyclophosphamide-based conditioning regimens and analyzed risk factors for development of HC and its treatment with CDV. Grade 2-4 HC occurred in 30 patients with a cumulative incidence of 26% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 18%-34%).

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The perception of self-motion direction, or heading, relies on integration of multiple sensory cues, especially from the visual and vestibular systems. However, the reliability of sensory information can vary rapidly and unpredictably, and it remains unclear how the brain integrates multiple sensory signals given this dynamic uncertainty. Human psychophysical studies have shown that observers combine cues by weighting them in proportion to their reliability, consistent with statistically optimal integration schemes derived from Bayesian probability theory.

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Although the pili of Gram-positive bacteria are putative virulence factors, little is known about their structure. Here we describe the molecular architecture of pilus-1 of Streptococcus pneumoniae, which is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. One major (RrgB) and two minor components (RrgA and RrgC) assemble into the pilus.

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Fetomaternal microchimerism suggests immunological tolerance between mother and fetus. Thus, we performed primary hematopoietic stem cell transplantation from a mismatched mother to thalassemic patient without an human leukocyte antigen-identical donor. Twenty-two patients with thalassemia major were conditioned with 60 mg/kg hydroxyurea and 3 mg/kg azathioprine from day -59 to -11; 30 mg/m(2) fludarabine from day -17 to -11; 14 mg/kg busulfan starting on day -10; and 200 mg/kg cyclophosphamide, 10 mg/kg thiotepa, and 12.

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We evaluated the distribution of the two known Streptococcus pneumoniae pilus encoding islets (PI-1 and PI-2) among a panel of 113 acute otitis media clinical isolates from Israel. PI-1 was present in 30.1% (n = 34) of the isolates tested, and PI-2 was present in 7% (n = 8).

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Background: Platelet (PLT) gel has been successfully used in tissue regeneration of diabetic/surgical wounds through the releasing of growth factors such as basic fibroblast growth factor and PLT-derived growth factor. Therefore, the PLT gel could represent a therapeutic tool in treating the deep and painful wounds sometimes occurring during graft-versus-host disease (GVHD).

Study Design And Methods: The aim of this study was to verify the efficacy and safety of PLT gel for treating GVHD ulcers.

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Isospin symmetry breaking has been investigated in mass A=67 mirror nuclei through the experimental determination of the E1 strengths of analog electromagnetic transitions. Lifetimes of excited states have been measured in (67)Se and (67)As with the centroid shift method. Through the comparison of the B(E1) strengths of the mirror 9/2(+)-->7/2(-) transitions, the isovector and the isoscalar components of the electromagnetic transition amplitude were extracted.

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Semicarbazide (SEM) is a by-product of the blowing agent azodicarbonamide, present in glass jar-sealed foodstuffs mainly baby foods. The pleiotropic in vivo SEM toxicological effects suggested to explore its possible role as endocrine modulator. Endocrine effects of SEM were assessed in vivo in male and female rats after oral administration for 28 days at 0, 40, 75, 140mg/kg bw pro die during the juvenile period.

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Recent studies have described vestibular responses in the dorsal medial superior temporal area (MSTd), a region of extrastriate visual cortex thought to be involved in self-motion perception. The pathways by which vestibular signals are conveyed to area MSTd are currently unclear, and one possibility is that vestibular signals are already present in areas that are known to provide visual inputs to MSTd. Thus, we examined whether selective vestibular responses are exhibited by single neurons in the middle temporal area (MT), a visual motion-sensitive region that projects heavily to area MSTd.

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Background: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is commonly associated with both microvascular and macrovascular complications and a strong correlation exists between glycaemic control and the incidence and progression of vascular complications. Pioglitazone, a Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma (PPARgamma) ligand indicated for therapy of type T2DM, induces vascular effects that seem to occur independently of glucose lowering.

Methods: By using a hindlimb ischemia murine model, in this study we have found that pioglitazone restores the blood flow recovery and capillary density in ischemic muscle of diabetic mice and that this process is associated with increased expression of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF).

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The capacity to perceive depth is critical for an observer to interact with his or her surroundings. During observer movement, information about depth can be extracted from the resulting patterns of image motion on the retina (motion parallax). Without extraretinal signals related to observer movement, however, depth-sign (near versus far) from motion parallax can be ambiguous.

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Detection and eradication of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) represents a public health priority worldwide. Our aim was to do a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised, non-randomised, and observational studies to summarise the available evidence on the effect of MRSA detection by rapid screening tests on hospital-acquired MRSA infections and acquisition rate. Eligible studies were retrieved from Medline, EmBase, Science Citation Index, and the Cochrane database.

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Accurate assessment of risk factors for nosocomial acquisition of colonization by antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) is often confounded by scarce data on antibiotic use. A 12-month, nested, multicenter cohort study was conducted. Target ARB were methicillin (meticillin)-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), and ciprofloxacin-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (CR-PA).

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The lifetimes of the first excited states of the N = 30 isotones (50)Ca and (51)Sc have been determined using the Recoil Distance Doppler Shift method in combination with the CLARA-PRISMA spectrometers. This is the first time such a method is applied to measure lifetimes of neutron-rich nuclei populated via a multinucleon transfer reaction. This extends the lifetime knowledge beyond the f_{7/2} shell closure and allows us to derive the effective proton and neutron charges in the fp shell near the doubly magic nucleus (48)Ca, using large-scale, shell-model calculations.

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Fundamental observations and principles derived from traditional physiological studies of multisensory integration have been difficult to reconcile with computational and psychophysical studies that share the foundation of probabilistic (Bayesian) inference. We review recent work on multisensory integration, focusing on experiments that bridge single-cell electrophysiology, psychophysics, and computational principles. These studies show that multisensory (visual-vestibular) neurons can account for near-optimal cue integration during the perception of self-motion.

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A wide number of pesticides, including highly persistent organochlorinated compounds, such as lindane (LIN), may induce reproductive and developmental alterations by directly binding to the estrogen/androgen receptors or altering steroid hormone metabolism. In the present work, we have investigated whether LIN in utero exposure of CD1 mice affects the reproductive system in male offspring by causing an impairment of the CYP-dependent steroid hormone metabolism. Dam exposure to 25 mg kg(-1) b.

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