Publications by authors named "Laura Di Lodovico"

The team is a fundamental and structuring dimension of care, founded on the principles of complementarity, interdependence, and shared objectives and responsibilities towards the patient. As a result of the pandemic and the rationalization of public hospitals, teams are faced with changes in the role of supervisors and the arrival of new figures such as advanced practice nurses. While these changes can bring new dynamism and questioning of practices, they can also be destabilizing.

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Objective: The Videos of Physical Exercise and Sedentary Behaviours (VPESB) database is a novel database designed to experimentally investigate neural reactivity to physical exercise. The aim of this database is to provide a variety of dynamic images with a minimum of confounding factors.

Methods: A total of 196 healthy participants were recruited to evaluate 10 clips of sedentary activities and 10 clips of physical exercise.

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Article Synopsis
  • Cognitive impairment is often overlooked in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), prompting a study to assess cognitive performance in GAD patients compared to those without the disorder.
  • Researchers tested 263 patients using different cognitive tests, revealing that those with GAD were slower in a specific task (the TMT) but faster in recognizing negative emotions.
  • While the TMT can identify GAD with decent accuracy, it is less effective than the GAD-7 questionnaire and highlights the need for further exploration of cognitive issues in GAD.
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Addiction is a dynamic field. Its ongoing changes reflect a persistent but evolving public health problem. Its evolution is reflected in subsequent classifications of mental illness.

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Background: Treatment of anorexia nervosa (AN) sometimes requires hospitalisation, which is often lengthy, with little ability to predict individual trajectory. Depicting specific profiles of treatment response and their clinical predictors could be beneficial to tailor inpatient management. The aim of this research was to identify clusters of weight recovery during inpatient treatment, and their clinical predictors.

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Introduction: Involuntary treatment may be a life-saving option for extremely severe anorexia nervosa (AN) in the context of life-threatening conditions and refusal of care. The long-term outcomes of patients undergoing involuntary treatment for AN are poorly understood. This study aims to explore quality of life, long-term outcomes and attitudes towards involuntary treatment in patients involuntarily treated for extremely severe AN.

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Exercise addiction (EA) refers to excessive exercise, lack of control, and health risks. The Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI) is one of the most widely used tools in its assessment. However, the cross-cultural psychometric properties of the EAI could be improved because it misses three pathological patterns, including guilt, exercise despite injury, and experienced harm.

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The caregiver-patient relationship has progressively evolved to focus on the development of the patient's autonomy. The mobilization of the patient's resources is fundamental to their participation in the co-construction of the care protocol. Identifying these resources is an essential component of caregiving know-how.

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Introduction: Body image distortion is a core symptom of anorexia nervosa (AN), embodying dissatisfaction and overvaluation of body appearance and weight. Body image distortion is an important factor in the maintenance of weight loss behaviours such as compulsive physical exercise. Conversely, physical exercise seems to have an aggravating effect on body image in patients with AN, but the evidence is still poor.

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Background: Patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) show impaired decision-making ability, but it is still unclear if this is a trait marker (i.e., being associated with AN at any stage of the disease) or a state parameter of the disease (i.

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Touching someone is a multisensory encounter with the other, it is listening, hearing, seeing, smelling, feeling, perceiving, etc. This contact allows for the interpersonal circulation of a host of information in a close relationship. The caregiver touches the patient's body with his or her eyes before beginning to grasp it with his or her hands.

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Objective: Low bone mineral density (BMD) is a frequent and invalidating consequence of chronic undernourishment in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN). The aim of this study was to assess prevalence and clinic-biological correlates of low BMD and fractures in extremely undernourished inpatients with AN.

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

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Objective: Poor cognitive flexibility has been highlighted in patients with anorexia nervosa (AN), contributing to the development and maintenance of symptoms. The aim of the present study is to investigate how enhanced cognitive flexibility is involved in treatment outcomes in patients with AN.

Method: One hundred thirty female out-patients treated for AN have been assessed at baseline and after 4 months of treatment.

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Background: The persistence of physical exercise in anorexia nervosa (AN) despite underweight and its maintaining factors are poorly understood. The aim of this study was to explore the attitudes toward physical exercise and its effects on emotions, cognitive functioning, and body image perception in patients with AN, and to search for exercise-related endophenotypes of the pathology.

Methods: Physical exercise dependence, quantity, and dysregulation were assessed by the Exercise Dependence Scale (EDS), the Godin Leisure Time Exercise Questionnaire (GLTEQ) and a standardized effort test in 88 patients with AN, 30 unaffected relatives and 89 healthy controls.

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Objectives: Anorexia nervosa is a complex psychiatric disorder that can lead to specific somatic complications. Malnutrition is frequent and can involve a decrease of mobility, up to functional impotence, in individuals with extremely severe cases. The aim of this pilot study was to examine muscle strength and peak expiratory flow (PEF) in severely undernourished patients with anorexia nervosa at admission and after 5 wk of renutrition by tube feeding, and to find the clinical and biological correlates of muscle-strength impairment.

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Background: Alterations of gut microbiota may play a role in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) through perturbations of the gut-brain axis. Some studies found differences in the gut microbiota of patients with AN compared to healthy controls, but results are heterogeneous. The aim of this work was to systematically review the existing studies comparing gut microbial composition in AN and healthy controls, and to perform a quantitative synthesis of the pooled clinical and microbiological data, when available.

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Objective: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a mental disorder potentially leading to severe malnutrition and life-threatening complications, with high mortality rates and dropouts from treatment. In the most severe cases, treatment refusal associated with acute nutritional disorders may require compulsory admission in specialised units. The aim of this study was to investigate clinical and nutritional parameters associated with the use of compulsory treatment for severely ill AN patients requiring intensive nutritional care.

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A drive for physical activity despite underweight is a core feature of anorexia nervosa. This pilot study detects which aspect of physical activity, if any, could be related to cognitive rigidity in anorexia nervosa. Twenty-eight outpatients with anorexia nervosa and 24 healthy participants were assessed for cognitive flexibility with the Trail Making Test (TMT) and for multiple dimensions of physical activity by subjective and objective assessments.

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Introduction: Excessive physical exercise may evolve into physical exercise addiction, a recently identified entity with many yet unclear aspects, such as global prevalence and variability according to different types of physical exercise.

Methods: We systematically reviewed the current literature up to June 2018 to collect all studies screening exercise addiction with two of the most frequently used screening scales: the Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI) and the Exercise Dependence Scale (EDS).

Results: We detected forty-eight studies (20 using the EAI, 26 the EDS, and 2 both scales) reporting variable point prevalence of exercise addiction risk, depending on the target population and the investigated sport.

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Background: Excessive exercise is frequently associated with eating disorders and may degenerate into exercise addiction. We still don't know whether runners at risk for eating disorders are at risk for exercise addiction. Our aim is to assess: 1) risk for exercise addiction in runners at risk for eating disorders and 2) socio-demographic, behavioral and psychological characteristics distinguishing runners at-risk from not-at-risk for eating disorders.

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Background: Transverse myelitis (TM) is an inflammatory disorder that can be idiopathic or associated with central nervous system autoimmune/dysimmune inflammatory diseases, connective tissue autoimmune diseases, or post-infectious neurological syndromes. Prognosis of initial TM presentations is uncertain.

Objective: To identify outcome predictors in TM.

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A healthy 29-year-old man suffered from adult-onset epilepsy, characterized by polymorphic progressive seizures resistant to AEDs, leading to unilateral cortical deficits and atrophy of the left hemisphere. The disorder satisfied the clinical, EEG, and imaging criteria for a diagnosis of Rasmussen's encephalitis. During the acute phase of the disease, intrathecal synthesis of specific anti-CMV IgG was identified.

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