The Impact of Vision Loss on Allocentric Spatial Coding.

Several works have demonstrated that visual experience plays a critical role in the development of allocentric spatial coding. Indeed, while children with a typical development start to code space by relying on allocentric landmarks from the first year of life, blind children remain anchored to an egocentric perspective until late adolescence. Nonetheless, little is known about when and how visually impaired children acquire the ability to switch from an egocentric to an allocentric frame of reference across childhood.

Association between sleep disordered breathing, neurocognitive impairment and diastolic function in acute heart failure patients: an insight after the vulnerable phase of the hospitalization.

Sleep disordered breathing (SDB) and neurocognitive impairment (NI) are a typical feature of HF (heart failure), especially with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). So far, very few data exist regarding changes in the severity of SDB, the degree of NI, and the diastolic function in acute HF (AHF) patients and during follow up. In a population of 24 AHF patients (12 with reduced ejection fraction-HFrEF- and 12 HFpEF) with SDB a complete echocardiogram, a set of NI tests, and a polysomnography were performed in the acute phase and after 90 days.

Palmitic Acid Affects Intestinal Epithelial Barrier Integrity and Permeability In Vitro.

Palmitic acid (PA), a long-chain saturated fatty acid, might activate innate immune cells. PA plays a role in chronic liver disease, diabetes and Crohn's disease, all of which are associated with impaired intestinal permeability. We investigated the effect of PA, at physiological postprandial intestinal concentrations, on gut epithelium as compared to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and ethanol, using an in vitro gut model, the human intestinal epithelial cell line Caco-2 grown on transwell inserts.

Visual representations of time elicit early responses in human temporal cortex.

Time perception is inherently part of human life. All human sensory modalities are always involved in the complex task of creating a temporal representation of the external world. However, when representing time, people primarily rely on auditory information.

Temporal representation impairment in developmental dyslexia for unisensory and multisensory stimuli.

Dyslexia has been associated with a problem in visual-audio integration mechanisms. Here, we investigate for the first time the contribution of unisensory cues on multisensory audio and visual integration in 32 dyslexic children by modelling results using the Bayesian approach. Non-linguistic stimuli were used.

Comparison of auditory spatial bisection and minimum audible angle in front, lateral, and back space.

Although vision is important for calibrating auditory spatial perception, it only provides information about frontal sound sources. Previous studies of blind and sighted people support the idea that azimuthal spatial bisection in frontal space requires visual calibration, while detection of a change in azimuth (minimum audible angle, MAA) does not. The influence of vision on the ability to map frontal, lateral and back space has not been investigated.

Publisher Correction: Collective behavior of oscillating electric dipoles.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Statistical methods to assess the prognostic value of risk prediction rules in clinical research.

Prognosis aims at estimating the future course of a given disease in probabilistic terms. As in diagnosis, where clinicians are interested in knowing the accuracy of a new test to identify patients affected by a given disease, in prognosis they wish to accurately identify patients at risk of a future event conditional to one or more prognostic factors. Thus, accurate risk predictions play a primary role in all fields of clinical medicine and in geriatrics as well because they can help clinicians to tailor the intensity of a treatment and to schedule clinical surveillance according to the risk of the concerned patient.

[Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction: an update on diagnosis and treatment].

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (≥50%, HFpEF) has a high prevalence, affecting approximately 50% of patients with heart failure, for which no effective medication exists as yet, as no drug therapy was successful in improving survival. HFpEF is a syndrome that in its classical form is associated with multiple risk factors and comorbidities, which confer an extreme heterogeneity characterizing HFpEF. In addition to the clinical presentation, also the pathophysiological mechanisms are multiple.

Measles surveillance activities in the Metropolitan Area of Milan during 2017-2018.

Introduction: In Italy, the transmission of measles is still endemic, and 7,919 cases were reported to the National Surveillance System between January 2017 and December 2018. Aim of this study is to report the results of the measles surveillance activities in the Metropolitan City of Milan from March 2017 to December 2018, and to evaluate the surveillance performance WHO indicators.

Methods: The Local Health Units (LHUs) carried out case investigations and collected specimens to send to the EpiSoMI Lab (Subnational Reference Laboratory, SRL) of the University of Milan for cases/outbreaks confirmation and genotyping performed according to the WHO Guidelines.

Spatial metric in blindness: behavioural and cortical processing.

Visual modality dominates spatial perception and, in lack of vision, space representation might be altered. Here we review our work showing that blind individuals have a strong deficit when performing spatial bisection tasks (Gori et al., 2014).

Coherent Riemannian-geometric description of Hamiltonian order and chaos with Jacobi metric.

By identifying Hamiltonian flows with geodesic flows of suitably chosen Riemannian manifolds, it is possible to explain the origin of chaos in classical Newtonian dynamics and to quantify its strength. There are several possibilities to geometrize Newtonian dynamics under the action of conservative potentials and the hitherto investigated ones provide consistent results. However, it has been recently argued that endowing configuration space with the Jacobi metric is inappropriate to consistently describe the stability/instability properties of Newtonian dynamics because of the nonaffine parametrization of the arc-length with physical time.

A comparative effectiveness study of lipegfilgrastim in multiple myeloma patients after high dose melphalan and autologous stem cell transplant.

G-CSF administration after high-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) has been shown to expedite neutrophil recovery. Several studies comparing filgrastim and pegfilgrastim in the post-ASCT setting concluded that the two are at least equally effective. Lipegfilgrastim (LIP) is a new long-acting, once-per-cycle G-CSF.

Audio-Motor Training Enhances Auditory and Proprioceptive Functions in the Blind Adult.

Several reports indicate that spatial perception in blind individuals can be impaired as the lack of visual experience severely affects the development of multisensory spatial correspondences. Despite the growing interest in the development of technological devices to support blind people in their daily lives, very few studies have assessed the benefit of interventions that help to refine sensorimotor perception. In the present study, we directly investigated the impact of a short audio-motor training on auditory and proprioceptive spatial perception in blind individuals.

Risk stratifying asymptomatic left ventricular systolic dysfunction in the community: beyond left ventricular ejection fraction.

Aims: Midwall fractional shortening (MWFS) is a measure of left ventricular (LV) systolic function that is more reliable in case of concentric LV geometry compared to LV ejection fraction (LVEF). We hypothesized that MWFS might predict heart failure (HF) and death in a high-risk asymptomatic population, beyond other echocardiographic parameters.

Methods And Results: Among 4047 subjects aged ≥55/≤80 years followed by 10 general practitioners in northern Italy, the DAVID-Berg study prospectively enrolled 623 asymptomatic outpatients at increased risk for HF.

Shape Recognition With Sounds: Improvement in Sighted Individuals After Audio-Motor Training.

Recent studies have demonstrated that audition used to complement or substitute visual feedback is effective in conveying spatial information, e.g., sighted individuals can understand the curvature of a shape when solely auditory input is provided.

Coarse to Fine Audio-Visual Size Correspondences Develop During Primary School Age.

Developmental studies have shown that children can associate visual size with non-visual and apparently unrelated stimuli, such as pure tone frequencies. Most research to date has focused on audio-visual size associations by showing that children can associate low pure tone frequencies with large objects, and high pure tone frequencies with small objects. Researchers relate these findings to coarser association, i.

Hand size underestimation grows during childhood.

Cortical body size representations are distorted in the adult, from low-level motor and sensory maps to higher levels multisensory and cognitive representations. Little is known about how such representations are built and evolve during infancy and childhood. Here we investigated how hand size is represented in typically developing children aged 6 to 10.

The Sound of Scotoma: Audio Space Representation Reorganization in Individuals With Macular Degeneration.

Blindness is an ideal condition to study the role of visual input on the development of spatial representation, as studies have shown how audio space representation reorganizes in blindness. However, how spatial reorganization works is still unclear. A limitation of the study on blindness is that it is a "stable" system and it does not allow for studying the mechanisms that subtend the progress of this reorganization.

Time attracts auditory space representation during development.

Vision is the most accurate sense for spatial representation, whereas audition is for temporal representation. However, how different sensory modalities shape the development of spatial and temporal representations is still unclear. Here, 45 children aged 11-13 years were tested to investigate the abilities to evaluate spatial features of auditory stimuli during bisection tasks, while conflicting or non-conflicting spatial and temporal information was delivered.