Biological risk for healthcare workers: current Italian law and guidelines on vaccination strategies.

The assessment and management of biological risk has always been a primary goal toward which occupational medicine has focused its efforts, in particular in healthcare workplaces. Healthcare professionals represent a category of workers at high risk for infections, many of which are vaccine-preventable diseases. There are various reasons for vaccinating healthcare workers, including to prevent illness among them so as to reduce absenteeism, to ensure an effective health service to users and to reduce social costs.

[Longitudinal study on osteoarthritis and bone metabolism].

Objective: The relationship between Osteoarthritis (OA) and Osteoporosis (OP) is not well defined due to lacking in longitudinal data, mainly regarding correlations between biochemical factors and OA incidence. Aim of this paper was to investigate the predictive value for OA incidence of bone mass variations and of selected biochemical markers in healthy women participating in a population-based longitudinal study carried out in Naples (Italy).

Subjects And Methods: High completion rate (85.

Epidemiology of osteoporosis in women in southern Italy.

Studies on the distribution of bone mineral density (BMD) values in different age groups and in different populations are valuable for understanding the causes of the appreciable geographical variability in fracture incidence. We studied a population of southern Italy in an area where the incidence of hip fracture had been previously estimated. With a completion rate of 85%, we recruited a group of 264 women between 45 and 79 years of age, representative of non-institutionalized and active women in the population, and measured bone density both at the lumbar spine (L1-L4) and at the right femoral neck using a dual X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) system.

[The determinants of bone mineral density in hemiplegic patients. Preliminary data].

We studied a group of hemiplegic patients to determine the amount of bone loss of the paretic versus the normal limb and to evaluate the importance of several variables in determining this difference. Thirty consecutive subjects with hemiplegia caused by a cerebral vascular accident were studied: 15 postmenopausal women (average age 65.1 years) and 15 men (average age 58.