Accuracy of Pancreatic Stone Protein for diagnosis of sepsis in children admitted to pediatric intensive care or high-dependency care: a pilot study.

Background: Pancreatic Stone Protein (PSP) is one of the most promising diagnostic and prognostic markers. The aim of the study was to assess the accuracy of PSP, compared to C-Reactive Protein (CRP), and Procalcitonin (PCT) for sepsis diagnosis in pediatric patients. Furthermore, we explored the correlation of PSP levels with sepsis severity and organ failure measured with PELOD-2 score.

Circulating microRNAs as novel non-invasive biomarkers of paediatric celiac disease and adherence to gluten-free diet.

Background: Celiac Disease (CD) is a multifactorial autoimmune enteropathy (with a prevalence of approximately 1% worldwide) that exhibits a wide spectrum of clinical, serological and histological manifestations. For the diagnosis of paediatric CD, the gold standard is the combination of serological tests (with high TGA-IgA values greater than 10 times the upper limit of normal) and duodenal biopsy (with a positive TGA-IgA but low titer). Therefore, a diagnostic test that totally excludes an invasive approach has not been discovered so far and the discovery of novel biological markers would represent an undoubted advantage for the diagnosis of CD and prognostic evaluation.

Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Surgical Neuro-Oncology Planning: Towards a Standardization in Clinical Settings.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rest-f-MRI) is a neuroimaging technique that has demonstrated its potential in providing new insights into brain physiology. rest-f-MRI can provide useful information in pre-surgical mapping aimed to balancing long-term survival by maximizing the extent of resection of brain neoplasms, while preserving the patient's functional connectivity. Rest-fMRI may replace or can be complementary to task-driven fMRI (t-fMRI), particularly in patients unable to cooperate with the task paradigm, such as children or sedated, paretic, aphasic patients.

Bleeding after invasive procedures is rare and unpredicted by platelet counts in cirrhotic patients with thrombocytopenia.

Background: In cirrhotics with low circulating platelets (PLT), restoration of normal cell counts has been traditionally recommended before invasive procedures. However, there is neither consensus on the PLT transfusion threshold nor evidence of its clinical efficacy.

Patients: In order to fill this gap of knowledge, we prospectively collected and analyzed data on circulating PLT counts [and International Normalized Ratio (INR)] values in a case series of 363 cirrhotics scheduled to undergo invasive investigations.