Automatic analysis of medial temporal lobe atrophy from structural MRIs for the early assessment of Alzheimer disease.

The purpose of this study is to develop a software for the extraction of the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions from T1-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images with no interactive input from the user, to introduce a novel statistical indicator, computed on the intensities in the automatically extracted MTL regions, which measures atrophy, and to evaluate the accuracy of the newly developed intensity-based measure of MTL atrophy to (a) distinguish between patients with Alzheimer disease (AD), patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and elderly controls by using established criteria for patients with AD and aMCI as the reference standard and (b) infer about the clinical outcome of aMCI patients. For the development of the software, the study included 61 patients with mild AD (17 men, 44 women; mean age +/- standard deviation (SD), 75.8 years +/- 7.

Professional shift-work drivers who adopt prophylactic naps can reduce the risk of car accidents during night work.

Study Objectives: Night work can be dangerous because both circadian sleep propensity (process C) and sleep pressure due to the prolonged wakefulness (process S) contribute to the reduction of vigilance levels. As naps are a countermeasure to sleepiness, this study evaluates the role they play in preventing sleep-related accidents in Italian shift-working police drivers.

Design/setting/participants: The study concerns highway car accidents that occurred to Italian shift-working police drivers; it was performed in 2 steps: a retrospective analysis of the overall number of accidents that occurred during the years 1993--1997 (n, 1195), followed by a validation analysis of a smaller cohort of accidents prospectively collected during 2003 (n, 84).

Sleepiness and sleep disorders in shift workers: a study on a group of italian police officers.

Study Objectives: evaluation of shift-work effect on sleepiness, sleep disorders, and sleep-related accidents in a population of police officers.

Design: Aquestionnaire-based survey was used to gather information on age and physical characteristics, working conditions, sleep problems, and accidents. Sleepiness was measured by the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) while the presence of sleep disorders was evaluated by a score (SDS) drawn from indicators of insomnia, breathing disorders, periodic limb movements and restless legs syndrome, and hypersomnia.