Publications by authors named "Bonacina S"

Objective: Children with HIV (CWH) are at increased risk for cognitive and developmental delays, although HIV's influence on reading development remains unclear. Research using internationally validated reading measures with control for factors known to influence literacy outcomes is needed. The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) is a tool for assessing students' progress toward reading that has been validated across countries.

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Article Synopsis
  • Sports-related concussions require a comprehensive assessment approach, but current evaluations often overlook auditory processing, which may be affected due to the complexity and fragility of the auditory system.
  • The study measured frequency-following responses (FFRs) in male Division I football players before and after they experienced a concussion, anticipating a decrease in auditory processing capabilities post-injury.
  • Results indicated that concussion led to reduced pitch and phonetic encoding, with repeated injuries resulting in cumulative declines, suggesting that auditory processing should be integrated into concussion assessments and warranting further research in diverse sports and for different demographics.
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Aim: Difficulty understanding speech following concussion is likely caused by auditory processing impairments. We hypothesized that concussion disrupts pitch and phonetic processing of a sound, cues in understanding a talker.

Patients & Methods/results: We obtained frequency following responses to a syllable from 120 concussed and 120 control.

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For type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients, self-management of the disease is an essential part of the treatment. Patient portals and personal health records (PHRs) are powerful applications for self-managing T2D. It is however unclear what features of existing applications provide best support for self-management of type 2 diabetes.

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Introduction/purpose: We tested the hypothesis that an objective measure of auditory processing reveals a history of head trauma that does not meet the clinical definition of concussion.

Methods: Division I collegiate student-athletes ( = 709) across 19 sports were divided into groups, based on their sport, using prevailing classifications of "contact" (317 males, 212 females) and "noncontact" (58 males, 122 females). Participants were evaluated using the frequency-following response (FFR) to speech.

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Objective: Central nervous system (CNS) damage from HIV infection or treatment can lead to developmental delays and poor educational outcomes in children living with HIV (CLWH). Early markers of central nervous system dysfunction are needed to target interventions and prevent life-long disability. The frequency following response (FFR) is an auditory electrophysiology test that can reflect the health of the central nervous system.

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Menopausal women increasingly rely on FemTech apps to manage their symptoms, as mobile applications can provide a convenient and easily accessible health solution. However, this scoping review and content analysis of 14 menopause apps available on Google Play in the European Union found that most applications categorisation is not aligning with their features as well as lack adequate data privacy and security sufficiency. Thereby sensitive health data of menopausal women are put at risk, highlighting the need for collaborative efforts between developers and regulators to implement effective and achievable data protection practices to enhance menopausal women's data safely.

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Background: Cyber threats are increasing across all business sectors, with health care being a prominent domain. In response to the ever-increasing threats, health care organizations (HOs) are enhancing the technical measures with the use of cybersecurity controls and other advanced solutions for further protection. Despite the need for technical controls, humans are evidently the weakest link in the cybersecurity posture of HOs.

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Chapter 26 of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11-CH26) has introduced Traditional Medicine knowledge for use and integration with Western Medicine. Traditional Medicine is the use of beliefs, theories, and experiences to provide healing and care. The amount of information on Traditional Medicine in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SCT), the world's most comprehensive health terminology, is unclear.

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Objective: Children with HIV (CWH) are at increased risk for cognitive and developmental delays. Whether HIV affects literacy development, however, remains unknown. Rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks offer the simplest preliteracy assessment a child can perform that predicts future reading skills across languages.

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Although Parkinson's disease (PD) key neuropathological hallmarks are well known, the underlying pathogenic mechanisms of the disease still need to be elucidated to identify innovative disease-modifying drugs and specific biomarkers. NF-κB transcription factors are involved in regulating several processes associated with neurodegeneration, such as neuroinflammation and cell death, that could be related to PD pathology. NF-κB/c-Rel deficient (c-rel) mice develop a progressive PD-like phenotype.

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Background: The lack of an international standard for assessing and communicating health app quality and the lack of consensus about what makes a high-quality health app negatively affect the uptake of such apps. At the request of the European Commission, the international Standard Development Organizations (SDOs), European Committee for Standardization, International Organization for Standardization, and International Electrotechnical Commission have joined forces to develop a technical specification (TS) for assessing the quality and reliability of health and wellness apps.

Objective: This study aimed to create a useful, globally applicable, trustworthy, and usable framework to assess health app quality.

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Biology and experience both influence the auditory brain. Sex is one biological factor with pervasive effects on auditory processing. Females process sounds faster and more robustly than males.

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Background: Arterial Tortuosity Syndrome (ATS) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by elongated and tortuous arteries. Although ATS showed a significant clinical and pathophysiological overlap with other syndromes involving connective tissues, only few cases of cerebrovascular events related to this syndrome have been described so far.

Case Presentation: We report the case of a 33-years-old male diagnosed with ATS since childhood, that experienced three sudden episodes of expressive aphasia and right hemiparesis with spontaneous resolution.

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Background: Subclinical vascular brain lesions are highly prevalent in elderly patients with stroke. Little is known about predisposing factors and their impact on long-term outcome of patients with stroke at a young age.

Methods: We quantified magnetic resonance-defined subclinical vascular brain lesions, including lacunes and white matter hyperintensities, perivascular spaces and cerebral microbleeds, and assessed total small-vessel disease (SVD) score in patients with first-ever acute ischemic stroke aged 18 to 45 years, and followed them up, as part of the multicentre Italian Project on Stroke in Young Adults.

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Objectives: The role of subcortical synchrony in speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition and the frequency-following response (FFR) was examined in multiple listeners with auditory neuropathy. Although an absent FFR has been documented in one listener with idiopathic neuropathy who has severe difficulty recognizing SIN, several etiologies cause the neuropathy phenotype. Consequently, it is necessary to replicate absent FFRs and concomitant SIN difficulties in patients with multiple sources and clinical presentations of neuropathy to elucidate fully the importance of subcortical neural synchrony for the FFR and SIN recognition.

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Cybersecurity is increasingly becoming a prominent concern among healthcare providers in adopting digital technologies for improving the quality of care delivered to patients. The recent reports on cyber attacks, such as ransomware and WannaCry, have brought to life the destructive nature of such attacks upon healthcare. In complement to cyberattacks, which have been targeted against the vulnerabilities of information technology (IT) infrastructures, a new form of cyber attack aims to exploit human vulnerabilities; such attacks are categorised as social engineering attacks.

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Background: The frequency-following response, or FFR, is a neurophysiologic response that captures distinct aspects of sound processing. Like all evoked responses, FFR is susceptible to electric and myogenic noise contamination during collection. Click-evoked auditory brainstem response collection standards have been adopted for FFR collection, however, whether these standards sufficiently limit FFR noise contamination is unknown.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to explore how traditional stroke risk factors affect the likelihood of intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) based on age.
  • Researchers conducted a case-control analysis involving 3,492 ICH patients and an equal number of stroke-free controls from a multi-center study in Italy.
  • Results indicated that untreated hypertension significantly increases ICH risk more in younger individuals, while untreated hypercholesterolemia's impact decreases with age; untreated diabetes and high alcohol intake were only risky for older adults.
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A child's success in school relies on their ability to quickly grasp language and reading skills, the foundations of which are acquired even before entering a formal classroom setting. Previous studies in preschoolers have begun to establish relationships linking beat synchronization, preliteracy skills, and auditory processing. Beat synchronization involves the integration of sensorimotor systems with auditory and cognitive circuits and, therefore calls on many of the same neural networks as language.

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The European Commission published in 2019 the Recommendation on the European Electronic Health Record exchange format (EHRxF) to support citizens and healthcare providers in securely accessing and sharing EHRs. The European EHRxF is expected to contribute to the digital transformation of health and care in the digital single market empowering citizens and building a healthier society. This paper presents areas of work that need to be resolved for the European EHRxF to advance shared decision-making for patients and citizen-centered science.

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Objective: To characterize patients with acute ischemic stroke related to SARS-CoV-2 infection and assess the classification performance of clinical and laboratory parameters in predicting in-hospital outcome of these patients.

Methods: In the setting of the STROKOVID study including patients with acute ischemic stroke consecutively admitted to the ten hub hospitals in Lombardy, Italy, between March 8 and April 30, 2020, we compared clinical features of patients with confirmed infection and non-infected patients by logistic regression models and survival analysis. Then, we trained and tested a random forest (RF) binary classifier for the prediction of in-hospital death among patients with COVID-19.

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Background: The number of people with diabetes is estimated to increase to 642 million by 2040, with most having type 2 diabetes. Patients with diabetes require continuous monitoring and possible treatment changes. Patient education is the process of enabling individuals to make informed decisions about their personal health-related behaviours and internet-enabled interventions have the potential to provide support and information to patients with diabetes.

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Rhythmic expertise is a multidimensional skill set with clusters of distinct rhythmic abilities. For example, the ability to clap in time with feedback relates extensively to distinct beat- and pattern-based rhythmic skills in school-age children. In this study we aimed to determine whether clapping in time would relate to both beat- and pattern- based rhythmic tasks among adolescents and young adults.

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Whether and how SARS-CoV-2 outbreak affected in-hospital acute stroke care system is still matter of debate. In the setting of the STROKOVID network, a collaborative project between the ten centers designed as hubs for the treatment of acute stroke during SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Lombardy, Italy, we retrospectively compared clinical features and process measures of patients with confirmed infection (COVID-19) and non-infected patients (non-COVID-19) who underwent reperfusion therapies for acute ischemic stroke. Between March 8 and April 30, 2020, 296 consecutive patients [median age, 74 years (interquartile range (IQR), 62-80.

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