1,148,825 results match your criteria: "Italy; University Centre South Devon[Affiliation]"

l-theanine: From tea leaf to trending supplement - does the science match the hype for brain health and relaxation?

Nutr Res

January 2025

Department of Molecular Medicine, University of Padova, Padova, Italy; IMDEA-Food, Madrid, Spain. Electronic address:

l-Theanine is a unique non-protein amino acid found abundantly in tea leaves. Interest in its potential use as a dietary supplement has surged recently, especially claims related to promoting relaxation and cognitive enhancement. This review surveys the chemistry, metabolism, and purported biological activities of l-theanine.

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Development and validation of the infant nursing assessment scale: Results from exploratory factor analysis and Rasch modeling.

J Pediatr Nurs

January 2025

University of Padua, Laboratory of Studies and Evidence Based Nursing, Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, Vascular Sciences and Public Health, Padua, Italy.

Purpose: The primary challenge in infant care is developing a comprehensive, rapid, and reliable assessment tool that is minimally dependent on subjective evaluations and applicable in various inpatient settings. This study aims to develop and assess the structural validity of the Infant Nursing Assessment Scale (INA), enabling a comprehensive evaluation of hospitalized newborns and infants.

Design And Methods: A development and validation study based on cross-sectional design was undertaken.

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Importance: Endocrine treatments, such as Tamoxifen (TAM) and/or Aromatase inhibitors (AI), are the adjuvant therapy of choice for hormone-receptor positive breast cancer. These agents are associated with menopausal symptoms, adversely affecting drug compliance. Topical estrogen (TE) has been proposed for symptom management, given its' local application and presumed reduced bioavailability, however its oncological safety remains uncertain.

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Predictive model of intrahepatic collateral vessels among hepatic veins in patients with liver tumors involving the caval confluence.

Surgery

January 2025

Department of Biomedical Sciences, Humanitas University, Milan, Italy; Department of Hepatobiliary & General Surgery, IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital, Milan, Italy. Electronic address:

Background: Communicating vessels among hepatic veins in patients with tumors invading/compressing hepatic veins at their caval confluence facilitate new surgical solutions. Although their recognition by intraoperative ultrasound has been described, the possibility of preoperative detection still remains uncertain. We aimed to develop a model to predict their presence before surgery.

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Background: Segmentation models for clinical data experience severe performance degradation when trained on a single client from one domain and distributed to other clients from different domain. Federated Learning (FL) provides a solution by enabling multi-party collaborative learning without compromising the confidentiality of clients' private data.

Methods: In this paper, we propose a cross-domain FL method for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (FL-W3S) of white blood cells in microscopic images.

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One hundred thirty-four germ line PU.1 variants and the agammaglobulinemic patients carrying them.

Blood

January 2025

Division of Immunology and Allergy, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; Department of Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine; Institute for Immunology, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

Leukopoiesis is lethally arrested in mice lacking the master transcriptional regulator PU.1. Depending on the animal model, subtotal PU.

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We present the case of a 60-year-old man admitted to the hospital presenting with high FUO (fever of unknown origin), strong headache, face erythematous-desquamative cutaneous lesions, long history of abdominal pain, and diffuse myalgia. He was also previously treated with immunosuppressants and currently managed with corticosteroids for a seronegative rheumatic disease. Given the immunocompromised state, an infective etiology was suspected.

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Purpose: Fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 isoform IIIb (FGFR2b) protein overexpression is an emerging biomarker in gastric cancer and gastroesophageal junction cancer (GC). We assessed FGFR2b protein overexpression prevalence in nearly 3,800 tumor samples as part of the prescreening process for a global phase III study in patients with newly diagnosed advanced or metastatic GC.

Methods: As of June 28, 2024, 3,782 tumor samples from prescreened patients from 37 countries for the phase III FORTITUDE-101 trial (ClinicalTrials.

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Purpose: To investigate whether hormone receptor-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-low (HR+HER2-low) versus HR+HER2-zero early breast cancers have distinct genomic and clinical characteristics.

Methods: This study included HR+, HER2-negative early breast cancers from patients enrolled in the phase III, randomized BIG 1-98 and SOFT clinical trials that had undergone tumor genomic sequencing. Tumors were classified HR+HER2-low if they had a centrally reviewed HER2 immunohistochemistry (IHC) score of 1+ or 2+ with negative in situ hybridization and HR+HER2-zero if they had an HER2 IHC score of 0.

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Background: Cognition is a research priority for people living with chronic kidney disease (CKD), but identification of critical research questions is lacking. This study aimed to determine which cognition-related research questions are most important to CKD stakeholders.

Methods: A modified Delphi technique with 3 survey rounds was used.

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Background: To assess the impact of attaining aggressive beta-lactam pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) targets on clinical efficacy in critical orthotopic liver transplant (OLT) recipients with documented early Gram-negative infections.

Methods: OLT recipients admitted to the post-transplant ICU between June 2021 and May 2024 having documented Gram-negative infections treated with targeted therapy continuous infusion (CI) beta-lactams, and undergoing therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM)-guided beta-lactam dosing adjustment in the first 72 hours were prospectively enrolled. Free steady-state concentrations (fCss) of beta-lactams (BL) and/or of beta-lactamase inhibitors (BLI) were calculated, and aggressive PK/PD target attainment was measured.

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Appraisal models, such as the Scherer's Component Process Model (CPM), represent an elegant framework for the interpretation of emotion processes, advocating for computational models that capture emotion dynamics. Today's emotion recognition research, however, typically classifies discrete qualities or categorised dimensions, neglecting the dynamic nature of emotional processes and thus limiting interpretability based on appraisal theory. In our research, we estimate emotion intensity from multiple physiological features associated to the CPM's neurophysiological component using dynamical models with the aim of bringing insights into the relationship between physiological dynamics and perceived emotion intensity.

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The time-resolved detection of mid- to far-infrared electric fields absorbed and emitted by molecules is among the most sensitive spectroscopic approaches and has the potential to transform sensing in fields such as security screening, quality control, and medical diagnostics. However, the sensitivity of the standard detection approach, which relies on encoding the far-infrared electric field into amplitude modulation of a visible or near-infrared probe laser pulse, is limited by the shot noise of the latter. This constraint cannot be overcome without using a quantum resource.

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Time series segmentation for recognition of epileptiform patterns recorded via microelectrode arrays in vitro.

PLoS One

January 2025

Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla (IMSE-CNM), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain.

Epilepsy is a prevalent neurological disorder that affects approximately 1% of the global population. Approximately 30-40% of patients respond poorly to antiepileptic medications, leading to a significant negative impact on their quality of life. Closed-loop deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a promising treatment for individuals who do not respond to medical therapy.

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Transcranial Doppler sonography follow-up study in mild vascular cognitive impairment.

PLoS One

January 2025

Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences and Advanced Technologies "G. F. Ingrassia", University of Catania, Catania, Italy.

Background: To date, few data to transcranial Doppler sonography (TCD) are available in patients with mild vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) at risk for vascular or mixed dementia. In a previous study in patients with mild VCI and cerebral small vessels disease, a hemodynamic pattern of cerebral hypoperfusion and enhanced vascular resistance were observed; however, longitudinal data are currently lacking. Here, we perform a clinical, psychopathological, and neurosonological follow-up of patients with VCI in order to monitor any progression and to identify TCD measures to detect it.

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Occlusion of the distal internal carotid artery can simulate a proximal occlusion of its cervical tract on CT angiography in patients with acute ischemic stroke, that is, pseudo-occlusion. As true and false carotid occlusions can present similarly on non-invasive imaging in patients undergoing endovascular treatment for stroke, our study aimed to evaluate clinical and technical differences of these conditions and the possible consequences of a misdiagnosis. We retrospectively reviewed consecutive patients who underwent mechanical thrombectomy for acute ischemic stroke at a single center between July 2015 and May 2022 and included patients with absent opacification of the cervical carotid artery on CT-angiography.

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Optimized protocol for single-cell isolation and alkaline comet assay to detect DNA damage in cells of Drosophila wing imaginal discs.

STAR Protoc

January 2025

Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology (CIBIO), University of Trento, 38123 Trento, TN, Italy; Department of Medicine, NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, NY 10016, USA. Electronic address:

Reduced expression of nucleolar genes induces stress and DNA damage. Here, we present a protocol to analyze DNA fragmentation at the single-cell level in Drosophila imaginal discs using an optimized alkaline comet assay. We describe steps for larvae development, tissue disaggregation, and single-cell dissociation.

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Background: Contrast-associated acute kidney injury (CA-AKI) is frequent in patients with chronic kidney disease who are submitted to cardiac endovascular procedures using iodinated contrast. In hemoadsorption, cartridges containing styrene-divinylbenzene sorbent resin are applied to remove substances from the blood through an extracorporeal circuit. Importantly, iodinated contrast is also removed via adsorption.

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Importance: The D842V platelet-derived growth factor receptor α (PDGFRA) mutation identifies a molecular subgroup of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs), primarily resistant to standard tyrosine kinase inhibitors and with an overall more indolent behavior. Although functional imaging with 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose-labeled positron emission tomography ([18F]FDG-PET) plays a proven role in GISTs, especially in early assessment of tumor response, less is known about [18F]FDG uptake according to the GIST molecular subtypes.

Objective: To evaluate the degree of [18F]FDG uptake in PDGFRA-mutant GISTs and better define the role of functional imaging in this rare and peculiar subset of GISTs.

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Visible-Light Photo-Iniferter Polymerization of Molecularly Imprinted Polymers for Direct Integration with Nanotransducers.

Small Methods

January 2025

Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies (Di.S.Te.B.A.), University of Salento, via Monteroni, Lecce, 73100, Italy.

Molecularly Imprinted Polymers (MIPs) have gained prominence as synthetic receptors, combining simplicity of synthesis with robust molecular recognition akin to antibodies and enzymes. One of their main application areas is chemical sensing. However, direct integration of MIPs with nanostructured transducers, crucial for enhancing sensing capabilities and broadening MIPs sensing applications, remains limited.

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Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) were responsible for approximately 19 million deaths in 2020, marking an increase of 18.7% since 2010. Biological decellularized patches are common therapeutic solutions for CVD such as cardiac and valve defects.

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Transfemoral transcatheter aortic valve Replacement (TAVR) has become the standard therapy for patients with severe aortic stenosis in patients over 75 years old in Europe or 65 years old in the United States, regardless of the surgical risk. Furthermore, iterations of existing transcatheter aortic valves (TAVs), as well as devices with novel concepts, have provided substantial improvements with respect to the limitations of previous-generation devices. Hence, treatment of a broader spectrum of patients has become feasible, and a sophisticated selection of the appropriate TAV tailored to patients' anatomy and comorbidities is now possible.

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Background And Aim: Bulevirtide (BLV) leads to beneficial virologic and biochemical responses when given alone to treat hepatitis delta virus (HDV) infection, which causes the most severe form of chronic viral hepatitis. We evaluated 48 weeks of BLV monotherapy, BLV + tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) and BLV + pegylated interferon alfa-2a (Peg-IFNα-2a), with 24-week follow-up.

Methods: Ninety patients were enrolled into six arms of 15 each (A-F); 60 patients were included in the main randomisation (arms A-D), and 30 patients (arms E-F) were randomised to the extension phase: (A) Peg-IFNα-2a 180 μg once weekly (QW); (B) BLV 2 mg once daily (QD) + Peg-IFNα-2a 180 μg QW; (C) BLV 5 mg QD + Peg-IFNα-2a 180 μg QW; (D) BLV 2 mg QD; (E) BLV 10 mg QD + Peg-IFNα-2a 180 μg QW and (F) BLV 10 mg (5 mg twice daily) + TDF QD.

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