Association between vaccination and persistent COVID-19-related symptoms among patients with mild Omicron infection: A prospective cohort study.

Background: While COVID-19 vaccination has been shown to reduce the risk of severe illness, its impact on the occurrence of persistent symptoms in patients with mild Omicron infection remains uncertain. Our objective was to investigate whether COVID-19 vaccination reduces the occurrence of persistent COVID-19-related symptoms 3 months after mild Omicron infection.

Methods: Multicenter prospective cohort study was conducted in Brazil between January 2022 and June 2023 when Omicron was predominant.

Long-term effects of flexible visitation in the intensive care unit on family members' mental health: 12-month results from a randomized clinical trial.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to assess the effects of flexible intensive care unit (ICU) visitation on the 1-year prevalence of post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression symptoms among family members of critically ill patients.

Methods: This is a long-term outcome analysis of a cluster-crossover randomized clinical trial that evaluated a flexible visitation model in the ICU (12 h/day) compared to a restrictive visitation model (median 1.5 h/day) in 36 Brazilian ICUs.

Impact on pulmonary, cardiac, and renal function and long-term quality of life after hospitalization for acute respiratory distress syndrome due to COVID-19: Protocol of the Post-COVID Brazil 3 study.

Rationale: Evidence about long-term sequelae after hospitalization for acute respiratory distress syndrome due to COVID-19 is still scarce.

Purpose: To evaluate changes in pulmonary, cardiac, and renal function and in quality of life after hospitalization for acute respiratory distress syndrome secondary to COVID-19.

Methods: This will be a multicenter case-control study of 220 participants.

Written language preservation in glioma patients undergoing awake surgery: The value of tailored intra-operative assessment.

Written language is increasingly important, as contemporary society strongly relies on text-based communication. Nonetheless, in neurosurgical practice, language preservation has classically focused on spoken language. The current study aimed to evaluate the potential role of intra-operative assessments in the preservation of written language skills in glioma patients undergoing awake surgery.

Ambulatory oxygen therapy in lung transplantation candidates with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis referred for pulmonary rehabilitation.

Objective: To determine independent factors related to the use of oxygen and the oxygen flow rate in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) patients placed on a lung transplant waitlist and undergoing pulmonary rehabilitation (PR).

Methods: This was a retrospective quasi-experimental study presenting functional capacity and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) data from lung transplant candidates with IPF referred for PR and receiving ambulatory oxygen therapy. The patients were divided into three groups on the basis of the oxygen flow rate: 0 L/min (the control group), 1-3 L/min, and 4-5 L/min.

Ultrafast high-temperature sintering and thermoelectric properties of n-doped MgSi.

Ultrafast high-temperature sintering (UHS) is a recently proposed technique able to synthesize and sinter dense materials within seconds. Although UHS has already proved its effectivity with a large set of materials, spanning from refractory ceramics to complex metal alloys, any application to thermoelectric materials is today still lacking. MgSi is a well-established thermoelectric material.

A Telerehabilitation Program for Maintaining Functional Capacity in Patients With Chronic Lung Diseases During a Period of COVID-19 Social Isolation: Quasi-Experimental Retrospective Study.

Background: Pulmonary diseases represent a great cause of disability and mortality in the world, and given the progression of these pathologies, pulmonary rehabilitation programs have proven to be effective for people with chronic respiratory diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, telerehabilitation has become an alternative for patients with such diseases.

Objective: The aim of this study was to compare the outcomes (ie, functional capacity and quality of life) of telerehabilitation to those of usual care among patients who previously participated in face-to-face pulmonary rehabilitation programs.

The language profile of progressive supranuclear palsy.

A progressive speech/language disorder, such as the non fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia and progressive apraxia of speech, can be due to neuropathologically verified Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). The prevalence of linguistic deficits and the linguistic profile in PSP patients who present primarily with a movement disorder is unknown. In the present study, we investigated speech and language performance in a sample of clinically diagnosed PSP patients using a comprehensive language battery, including, besides traditional language tests, a detailed analysis of connected speech (picture description task assessing 26 linguistic features).

Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration for the Diagnosis of Patients with Primary Progressive Aphasia: Clinical Validity and Psychometric Properties.

Background: We evaluated the psychometric proprieties of the Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration (SAND) battery in Italian primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and movement disorder (MD) patients.

Methods: The sample included 30 consecutive PPA and 45 MD patients who completed the SAND battery together with a clinical interview and a neurological/neuropsychological examination and 130 healthy controls (HC).

Results: The SAND battery showed good internal consistency and good convergent and divergent validity.

Effects of High-Intensity Inspiratory Muscle Training Associated with Aerobic Exercise in Patients Undergoing CABG: Randomized Clinical Trial.

Objective: Evaluate the interaction between high-intensity inspiratory muscle training (IMT) and aerobic exercise on physical capacity, respiratory muscle strength, peripheral muscle strength, and quality of life of patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG).

Methods: Twenty-four patients underwent CABG were randomized into two groups. During 36 sessions, one group received IMT associated with aerobic exercise and the other group received only aerobic exercise.

Microturbine and Thermoelectric Generator Combined System: A Case Study.

Waste heat recovery is one of the suitable industrial applications of thermoelectrics. Thermoelectric generators (TEG) are used, commonly, only for low-mid size power generation systems. The low efficiency of thermoelectric modules generally does not encourage their combination with high power and temperature sources, such as gas turbines.

SAND: a Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration. Development and normative data.

Language assessment has a critical role in the clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, in particular, in the case of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). The current diagnostic criteria (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011) identify three main variants on the basis of clinical features and patterns of brain atrophy.

Mapping nouns and finite verbs in left hemisphere tumors: a direct electrical stimulation study.

Neurosurgical mapping studies with nouns and finite verbs are scarce and subcortical data are nonexistent. We used a new task that uses finite verbs in six Italian-speaking patients with gliomas in the left language-dominant hemisphere. Language-relevant positive areas were detected only with nouns in four patients, with both tasks yet in distinct cortical areas in one patient, and only with finite verbs in another patient.

Advantages and disadvantages of intraoperative language tasks in awake surgery: a three-task approach for prefrontal tumors.

Multidisciplinary efforts are being made to provide surgical teams with sensitive and specific tasks for language mapping in awake surgery. Researchers and clinicians have elaborated different tasks over time. A fair amount of work has been directed to study the neurofunctional correlates of some of these tasks, and there is recent interest in their standardization.

Efficacy of semantic-phonological treatment combined with tDCS for verb retrieval in a patient with aphasia.

Recent studies reported enhanced performance on language tasks induced by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in patients with aphasia. One chronic patient with non-fluent aphasia received 20 sessions of a verb anomia training combined with off-line bihemispheric tDCS applied to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) - anodal tDCS over left DLPFC plus cathodal tDCS over right DLPFC. A significant improvement in verb naming was observed at all testing times (4, 12, 24, and 48 weeks from post-entry/baseline testing) for treated and untreated verbs.

Prefrontal cortex rTMS enhances action naming in progressive non-fluent aphasia.

Background And Purpose: Progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by non-fluent speech with naming impairment and grammatical errors. It has been recently demonstrated that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) improves action naming in healthy subjects and in subjects with Alzheimer's disease.

Purpose: To investigate whether the modulation of DLPFC circuits by rTMS modifies naming performance in patients with PNFA.

Anomia training and brain stimulation in chronic aphasia.

Recent studies have reported enhanced performance on language tasks induced by non-invasive brain stimulation, i.e., repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), or transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in patients with aphasia due to stroke or Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Treatment efficacy of language and calculation disorders and speech apraxia: a review of the literature.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of the treatment for language and calculation disorders and for speech apraxia in vascular subjects. Only therapeutic methods that could be qualified as neuropsychological were taken into account. For language disorders, we searched the pertinent literature published from 1950 to August 31, 2007 by means of electronic data banks and we took into consideration the Cochrane review, and papers in Cicerone et al.

Time perception in spatial neglect: a distorted representation?

Objective: It has been proposed that time, space, and numbers share the same metrics and cortical network, the right parietal cortex. Several recent investigations have demonstrated that the mental number line representation is distorted in neglect patients. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between time and spatial configuration in neglect patients.

Differential gender-related susceptibility to learning and memory deficits in mice submitted to neonatal freezing microgyria model.

Sexual dimorphism during mammalian neural development seems to contribute to differential gender-related incidence in malformations of cortical development in both humans and rodents. Here we investigated the existence of differential gender-related susceptibility to learning and memory deficits and brain injury severity in mice submitted to a microgyria model. Newborn male and female C57BL/6 mice (P0) were submitted to a unilateral freezing lesion (FL) using a cooled steel probe, placed over the right midline anteroposterior plane.

A fMRI study of word retrieval in aphasia.

The neural mechanisms underlying recovery of cognitive functions are incompletely understood. Aim of this study was to assess, using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), the pattern of brain activity during covert word retrieval to letter and semantic cues in five aphasic patients after stroke, in order to assess the modifications of brain function which may be related to recovery. Four out of five patients had undergone language recovery, according to standard testing, after at least 6 months of rehabilitation.

The residual calculation abilities of a patient with severe aphasia: evidence for a selective deficit of subtraction procedures.

We report the case study of a severe fluent aphasic patient, who showed relatively preserved numerical abilities. A detailed investigation of number processing indicated good numerical comprehension and a relative sparing of addition and subtraction abilities; on the other hand, multiplication and division were severely impaired. A further study of multi-digit operations showed that the patient's performance was characterized by a selective impairment of the borrowing procedure, in which she applied the so-called Smaller-from-Larger bug, typically observed in children learning to calculate.