Alcohol consumption and metabolic syndrome in the elderly: results from the Italian longitudinal study on aging.

Background/objectives: Although there is plenty of evidence of the association between metabolic syndrome (MS) and cardiovascular disease, the relationship between alcohol consumption and MS is still questioned. The few publications with respect to the elderly seem to indicate that alcohol consumption is unassociated with MS. The aim of this study was to assess the association between alcohol consumption and the prevalence and incidence of MS, as well as its components in a large sample of Italian elderly people.

[Geographical analysis of mortality in a municipality of the Veneto region, where a landfill is located, and the surrounding area. Years 1995-2003].

Objective: the study explores whether a potential source of environmental pollution (a dumping ground with different kinds of waste, in Spinea, an area adjacent to Venice, population 25,000) could have led to an excess of mortality from certain pathologies, and in particular some cancers which have been reported to be associated to the presence of dumping grounds. Besides traditional estimation techniques, Bayesian estimators (BMR) have been used, which--if based on appropriate statistical analysis techniques--allow to consider the spatial dependence of the data. The smoothed geographical distribution of mortality in the area surrounding the pollution source is then represented as a map and the presence of particular mortality patterns is verified.