Publications by authors named "Lucia Rizzato"

In Italy, 1400 children and 800 adolescents are diagnosed with cancer every year. About 80% of them can be cured but are at high risk of experiencing severe side effects, many of which respond to rehabilitation treatment. Due to the paucity of literature on this topic, the Italian Association of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology organized a Consensus Conference on the role of rehabilitation of motor impairments in children/adolescents affected by leukemia, central nervous system tumors, and bone cancer to state recommendations to improve clinical practice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The constant evolution of the health care system has led to a thorough reorganization of the system itself and an improvement in terms of the quality of treatment provided. Many articles in the literature confirm that the answer to increased quality of standards and efficient levels of organization are undoubtedly due to true and efficient team work, without any of the professionals involved having to change their area of expertise. This rapid evolution of the treatment process has required the improvement and definement of technical-specialist skills on the part of the nursing staff; personnel who have proved to be the real link in the technical-communicative processes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In order to bridge the gap between available organs and patients needing transplants, donor selection criteria for donors are increasingly being extended; the possibility of using organs from nonstandard risk donors has been introduced in many countries. This clearly poses considerable ethical issues that should be analyzed and taken into consideration by the competent bodies and institutions. In this article, we illustrate the Italian situation regarding the possibility of using organs from anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) and HCV RNA-positive donors (anti-HCV+ve) in negative recipients (healthy subjects who have never come into contact with the hepatitis C virus) in light of the availability of new direct-acting antiviral drugs (DAAs) for hepatitis C treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: One of the main activities connected with transplantation is the rapid and timely transportation of patients, medical teams, and human organs from donation to transplantation centers under the compliance of national guidelines and principles of quality, performance, and safety. High-speed transportation on a railway network is becoming relevant both in terms of performance and extensiveness of the service.

Methods And Objectives: Our study explores the feasibility of adopting a high-speed rail network for the transportation of those organs with large cold ischemia time and those less influenced by transportation-related perturbations (ie, temperature, speed, vibrations), assessing savings and relative performance improvement.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To implement split liver transplantation (SLT) a mandatory-split policy has been adopted in Italy since August 2015: donors aged 18-50 years at standard risk are offered for SLT, resulting in a left-lateral segment (LLS) graft for children and an extended-right graft (ERG) for adults. We aim to analyze the impact of the new mandatory-split policy on liver transplantation (LT)-waiting list and SLT outcomes, compared to old allocation policy. Between August 2015 and December 2016 out of 413 potentially "splittable" donors, 252 (61%) were proposed for SLT, of whom 53 (21%) donors were accepted for SLT whereas 101 (40.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: We describe the results of the application of the Italian donor cancer screening protocol to all the 7608 candidate multiorgan donors presented in Italy in 2002-2005.

Methods: All suspect findings raised in the two presurgical and surgical phases of the protocol were investigated by extemporary pathologic evaluation. Donors were classified as standard risk (no transmissible risk); nonstandard risk (low-risk of transmission, eligibility restricted to certified clinical emergencies pending informed consent); and unacceptable risk (unconditional exclusion because of high-risk pathologies).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A population-based cohort study of recipients of organs from donors with a recognized history or active cancer has been conducted by linking the Italian National Registry of Transplanted Patients and the National Registry of Donors with Neoplasia Risk. Between 2002 and 2004, 8,198 solid organ transplants have been performed in Italy, 108 of them with organs from 59 cadaveric donors with various risk of neoplasia. There were two reported cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer during the follow up of the transplanted patients, which lasted 27.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Italy was lacking standardised procedures for donor safety evaluation. We developed practice guidelines, while a panel of experts coordinated by the National Transplant Centre, is available 24 hours a day to support decisions in difficult cases. The guidelines identify five levels of risk and give recommendations for the utilization of donors with HBV and HCV infections as well as for malignancies with negligible or very low risk of transmission.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Evaluation of outcomes is a major step in quality assessment of any health process. In the transplant field, the evaluation of outcome is extremely important for both patients' growing demand for health and for the joint commitment the transplant process requires. In this study, the outcome of 12,647 transplants, carried out between 1995 and 2000 were analysed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF