Publications by authors named "P J Vassallo"

Scorpion stings have a fatality rate of 0.16%, with the majority of deaths occurring in children. The resources currently available for diagnosing cardiac dysfunction caused by scorpion stings, the most common cause of death, are echocardiograms and laboratory tests, such as troponin, creatine phosphokinase-MB (CKMB), and Brain natriuretic peptide (BNP).

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Introduction: Saliva is a promising option for therapeutic drug monitoring, with studies since the 1970s indicating a good correlation between plasma and saliva levels for early anti-seizure medications, although limited data exist for newer generation drugs.

Objectives: To evaluate the reliability and predictive power of saliva as a minimally invasive surrogate marker of plasma concentration for the routine therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of newer anti-seizure medications (ASM).

Methods: We collected blood samples at steady state in patients at least 6 h post-dose, paired with unstimulated saliva samples.

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Objective: Temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis (HS) is a surgically remediable syndrome. We determined temporal trends in the prevalence of hippocampal sclerosis surgeries and related factors.

Methods: We analysed a prospective cohort of adults who underwent epilepsy surgery at the NHNN, London, between 1990 and 2019.

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Background: Temperature fluctuations are critical indicators of a patient's condition in intensive care units (ICUs). While invasive methods offer a more reliable measurement of core temperature, they carry greater risks of complications, limiting their use in most situations. This underscores the need for research evaluating the reliability of non-invasive temperature monitoring methods.

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Environmental DNA metabarcoding (eDNA metaB) is fundamental for monitoring marine biodiversity and its spread in coastal ecosystems. We applied eDNA metaB to seawater samples to investigate the spatiotemporal variability of plankton and small pelagic fish, comparing sites with different environmental conditions across a coast-to-offshore gradient at river mouths along the Campania coast (Italy) over 2 years (2020-2021). We found a marked seasonality in the planktonic community at the regional scale, likely owing to the hydrodynamic connection among sampling sites, which was derived from numerical simulations.

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