Publications by authors named "Ruocco A"

Article Synopsis
  • * It compared placental samples from three groups: women without diabetes, those with gestational diabetes, and those with a history of diabetes, analyzing their glycemic control and vessel characteristics.
  • * Findings revealed that women with gestational or previous diabetes had altered vessel characteristics, including a reduction in the number and area of vessels, indicating that high blood sugar can impact placental blood supply.
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Article Synopsis
  • - Recent research has advanced our understanding of the neurobiology of borderline personality disorder (BPD) through brain imaging studies, revealing differences in brain structure compared to healthy individuals and other psychiatric disorders.
  • - New findings highlight disruptions in key brain networks involved in emotion regulation and self-perception for individuals with BPD, particularly during both resting states and specific tasks.
  • - Investigations into treatment effects suggest that psychological and pharmacological interventions may positively influence brain regions associated with managing emotions and controlling behaviors in BPD patients.
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Next-generation data networks need to support Tb/s rates. In-phase and quadrature (IQ) modulation combine phase and intensity information to increase the density of encoded data, reduce overall power consumption by minimizing the number of channels, and increase noise tolerance. To reduce errors when decoding the received signal, intersymbol interference must be minimized.

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Transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals continue to experience harassment and discrimination across various aspects of life, significantly impacting their physical and mental health. The scarcity of data on their general health, particularly regarding dietary habits, remains a challenge in developing effective healthcare strategies for this population. To address this gap, we analyzed selected dietary habits, physical activity (PA), and body mass index (BMI) among Italian TGD adults compared to the Italian general population (IGP).

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Background: Substance use disorders (SUDs) are pressing global public health problems. Executive functions (EFs) are prominently featured in mechanistic models of addiction. However, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of EFs in SUDs, including the dimensional relationships of EFs to underlying neural circuits, molecular biomarkers, disorder heterogeneity, and functional ability.

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Background: Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals face significant healthcare barriers, with one of the most critical being the inadequate knowledge and skills of healthcare professionals (HCPs) in TGD health. To address this issue, we undertook a project to develop a distance learning course for all healthcare professions, encompassing a comprehensive range of topics related to TGD health issues.

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of a course on gender-affirming healthcare competence, with a focus on knowledge acquisition and satisfaction levels.

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Background: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is considered a disorder of emotion regulation resulting from the expression of a biologically determined emotional vulnerability (that is, heightened sensitivity to emotion, increased emotional intensity/reactivity, and a slow return to emotional baseline) combined with exposure to invalidating environments. Vagal tone has been associated with activity in cortical regions involved in emotion regulation and a lower resting state of vagal tone has been observed in BPD patients relative to healthy controls. Non-invasive transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has been shown to reduce temper outbursts in adults with Prader-Willi Syndrome, to enhance recognition of emotions in healthy students, and to improve depressive and anxiety symptoms.

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The integration of optoelectronic devices, such as transistors and photodetectors (PDs), into wearables and textiles is of great interest for applications such as healthcare and physiological monitoring. These require flexible/wearable systems adaptable to body motions, thus materials conformable to non-planar surfaces, and able to maintain performance under mechanical distortions. Here, fibre PDs are prepared by combining rolled graphene layers and photoactive perovskites.

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Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe mental disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of emotional and behavioral dysregulation. Dysfunction and distress may be compounded by stigmatizing beliefs held by members of the community. There is a lack of research focusing on stigmatizing beliefs about BPD held by the general population.

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Purpose: Information on the general health of transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals continues to be lacking. To bridge this gap, the National Institute of Health in Italy together with the National Office against Racial Discriminations, clinical centres, and TGD organizations carried out a cross-sectional study to define the sociodemographic profile, health-related behaviours, and experiences of healthcare access in Italian TGD adult population.

Methods: A national survey was conducted by Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI) technique.

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During tumorigenesis, miRNAs with unbalanced expression profiles can increase the threat of disease progression. Here, we focus on the role of miR-331-5p in the pathogenesis of thyroid cancer (TC). In vitro studies were conducted using TC cell lines after the forced expression and silencing of miR-331-5p.

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Personality traits and affective states are associated with biases in facial emotion perception. However, the precise personality impairments and affective states that underlie these biases remain largely unknown. To investigate how relevant factors influence facial emotion perception and recollection, Experiment 1 employed an image reconstruction approach in which community-dwelling adults (N = 89) rated the similarity of pairs of facial expressions, including those recalled from memory.

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Invasive hemodynamic studies have shown improved left ventricular (LV) performances when cardiac resynchronization therapy/defibrillator is delivered through multipoint pacing (MPP). Nowadays, strategies have become available that allow studying the same hemodynamic parameters at a noninvasive level. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the clinical implication of using a patient-tailored approach for cardiac resynchronization therapy programming based on noninvasively assessed LV hemodynamics to identify the best biventricular pacing modality between standard single-site pacing (STD) and MPP for each patient.

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Highly aligned multi-wall carbon nanotubes were investigated with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) before and after bombardment performed using noble gas ions of different masses (argon, neon and helium), in an ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) environment. Ion irradiation leads to change in morphology, deformation of the carbon (C) honeycomb lattice and different structural defects in multi-wall carbon nanotubes. One of the major effects is the production of bond distortions, as determined by micro-Raman and micro-X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

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Background: Recent findings suggest that brief dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) for borderline personality disorder is effective for reducing self-harm, but it remains unknown which patients are likely to improve in brief 12 months of DBT. Research is needed to identify patient characteristics that moderate outcomes. Here, we characterized changes in cognition across brief DBT (DBT-6) a standard 12-month course (DBT-12) and examined whether cognition predicted self-harm outcomes in each arm.

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Background: Although mounting evidence supports that aberrant DNA methylation occurs in the hearts of patients with atrial fibrillation (AF), noninvasive epigenetic characterization of AF has not yet been defined.

Methods: We investigated DNA methylome changes in peripheral blood CD4 T cells isolated from 10 patients with AF relative to 11 healthy subjects (HS) who were enrolled in the DIANA clinical trial (NCT04371809) via reduced-representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS).

Results: An atrial-specific PPI network revealed 18 hub differentially methylated genes (DMGs), wherein ROC curve analysis revealed reasonable diagnostic performance of DNA methylation levels found within CDK5R1 (AUC = 0.

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Alcohol is one of the most widely used substances. Alcohol use accounts for 5.1% of the global disease burden, contributes substantially to societal and economic costs, and leads to approximately 3 million global deaths yearly.

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Behavioral economic demand for cannabis is robustly associated with cannabis consumption and cannabis use disorder (CUD). However, few studies have examined the processes underlying individual differences in the relative valuation of cannabis (i.e.

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The organization of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) model provides unique opportunities to evaluate whether neural risk measures operate as indicators of broader latent liabilities (e.g., externalizing proneness) or narrower expressions (e.

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The emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria represents a growing threat to public health, and it calls for the development of alternative antibacterial approaches not based on antibiotics. Here, we propose vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VA-CNTs), with a properly designed nanomorphology, as effective platforms to kill bacteria. We show, via a combination of microscopic and spectroscopic techniques, the ability to tailor the topography of VA-CNTs, in a controlled and time-efficient manner, by means of plasma etching processes.

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Psoriasis is a chronic multifactorial skin disorder with an immune basis. It is characterized by patches of skin that are usually red, flaky and crusty, and that often release silvery scales. The patches appear predominantly on the elbows, knees, scalp and lower back, although they may also appear on other body areas and severity may be variable.

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Endothelial dysfunction (ED) causes worse prognoses in heart failure (HF) patients treated with cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRTd). ED triggers the downregulation of microRNA-130 (miR-130a-5p), which targets endothelin-1 (ET-1). Thus, we evaluated ED and the response to CRTd by assessing miR-130a-5p and ET-1 serum levels.

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