Theatre Is a Valid Add-On Therapeutic Intervention for Emotional Rehabilitation of Parkinson's Disease Patients.

Conventional medical treatments of Parkinson's disease (PD) are effective on motor disturbances but may have little impact on nonmotor symptoms, especially psychiatric ones. Thus, even when motor symptomatology improves, patients might experience deterioration in their quality of life. We have shown that 3 years of active theatre is a valid complementary intervention for PD as it significantly improves the well-being of patients in comparison to patients undergoing conventional physiotherapy.

Assessment of an expert system for the automated validation of electrophoretic profiles.

Background: The Core-lab of the Greater Romagna Area Hub Laboratory carries out about 250,000 capillary electrophoresis assays/year. The huge workload demands the assessing of an Experimental Expert System (EES) capable to sort out the negative samples.

Methods: Capillarys 2 analyzer has been employed coupled with an EES (based on five simple rules) integrated with the electrophoretic test management software PhoresisCore for assessing the entire workload of a week (5,683 samples).

Spatial patterns of soil pathogens in declining Mediterranean forests: implications for tree species regeneration.

Soil-borne pathogens are a key component of the belowground community because of the significance of their ecological and socio-economic impacts. However, very little is known about the complexity of their distribution patterns in natural systems. Here, we explored the patterns, causes and ecological consequences of spatial variability in pathogen abundance in Mediterranean forests affected by oak decline.