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Most children with pain are managed by either acetaminophen or ibuprofen. However, no study has so far investigated if children are prescribed adequate doses of acetaminophen or ibuprofen in emergency department. Aim of this retrospective study was to investigate the prevalence of under-dosage of these drugs in children presenting with pain in emergency department. Children initially prescribed with acetaminophen or ibuprofen for pain management were included. The χ 2 automatic interaction detection method was used considering the percentage variation from the minimum of the appropriate dose as dependent variable while prescribed drug, age, gender, body weight, type of hospital (pediatric or general), and availability of internal guidelines on pediatric pain management in the emergency department as independent variables. Data on 1471 children managed for pain were available. Under-dosage was prescribed in 893 subjects (61%), of whom 577 were prescribed acetaminophen and 316 ibuprofen. The use of acetaminophen suppositories, body weight <12 kg or >40 kg, and the use of oral ibuprofen identified clusters of children associated with under-dosage prescription.Conclusion: Prescription of acetaminophen and ibuprofen was frequently under-dosed. The use of suppositories, lower and higher body weight, and the use of ibuprofen were associated with under-dosage. Under-dosing may reflect prescription of anti-pyretic doses.Clinical Trial Registration: Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco-Observational Study Register (RSO). Registration code: PIERRE/1 What is Known: • Pain is frequent in children presented to emergency department. • International recommendations on pain management are often not implemented. What is New: • Acetaminophen and ibuprofen were frequently underdosed in children prescribed for pain in the Italian emergency departments. • Under-dosage may be related to the habit of using acetaminophen and ibuprofen in the recommended range for fever treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: "The Club Foot" (or "Mismatched Foot") is an acquired or congenital flexural deformity of the distal interphalangeal joint, caused by a shortening of the musculotendinous unit of the deep digital flexor tendon. Aim: The aim of this research was to detect the incidence of the disorder in Arabian Pureblood horses, attempting to understand its causes and to analyze a possible role of inbreeding in its expression. In this breed, in fact, the pathology is widespread because in the environment of origin, the rocky desert, a hard and almost goat's hoof is not disabling so the selection against this disorder has never been done. Methods: Pedigrees were taken from 141 (reference population = RP) adult Arabian Pureblood horses (51 males and 90 females) belonging to eight Italian different farms during the period 1982-2017. For each horse, the presence or not of the disorder was observed and inbreeding coefficients (F) was performed. Four grades of deformity were considered. Moreover, the environmental condition of each farm was considered: boxes, paddocks, nutrition, orientation, and hoof care and shoeing. The chi-square test was applied. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the differences in the average inbreeding coefficient (F) between affected and healthy animals, between sexes and between shod and unshod animals. Results: Two grades of deformity were observed (I and II) which give less severe manifestations, with 28 females and 25 males (37.59% of the examined horses) showing the disorder. No differences between males and females or between shod (38.29%) and unshod (61.70%) were observed. Environmental conditions do not influence the rate of pathology in the different farms, with a prevalence of the disorder ranging from 7.69% up to 100% on farm. The whole population (WP = RP and its genealogy) included 3,355 records subdivided in seven traced generations. One hundred and eighteen out of 141 horses (RP) were inbred (83.69%). The average inbreeding coefficient (F) in the RP was 0.095. Inbreeding coefficient in RP was <0.05 in only 15 horses (12.71% of inbred), whereas it was >0.25 in 28 horses (23.73% of inbred). Conclusion: High inbreeding coefficients were observed in all farms and in particularly in affected animals suggesting that high inbreeding coefficients increases the probability that the disorder occurs. Future works may include the study of the hereditability of the character, and the attempt to identify loci associated with the disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Checklists represent a basic tool for conservation and management of regional faunas. However, our knowledge on species composition in a territory changes over time due to species movements across borders, extinctions, introductions, as well as to new taxonomic evidence. We aimed to provide the most updated data on native and non-native species of mammals occurring, or that used to occur until recently, on the Italian political territory and seas. The checklist only includes species whose taxonomic status was explicitly agreed in the most recent peer-reviewed literature and based on the most updated taxonomic approaches. For each species, we provided the following information: scientific and common name, global and Italian range, relevant information for management and conservation (e.g. whether it is endemic, allochthonous, or listed in international regulations and red list assessments), as well as remarks on taxonomy and distribution. This new check list of Italian mammal fauna includes nine marine and 114 terrestrial species, belonging to seven orders (Erinaceomorpha, Soricomorpha, Chiroptera, Carnivora, Cetartiodactyla, Rodentia, Lagomorpha), and 28 families. Vespertilionidae represents the richest family (n=27 species), followed by Cricetidae (n=12) and Soricidae (n=11). The list includes 15-16 allocthonous species. Considering the relative small size of the country, Italy is confirmed as a hotspot of mammal diversity in Europe, hosting the highest species richness in relation to the total area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article illustrates a case study on the economic impact of autonomy of one of the five Italian special-statute regions, namely Friuli-Venezia Giulia. This region had, and continues to have, legislative, administrative and financial prerogatives in areas of public intervention that are the duty of the central government in the 15 Italian ordinary regions. Accordingly, Friuli-Venezia Giulia could have year by year exploited such prerogatives to achieve an economic development higher than that attainable in the absence of its autonomy. In other words, Friuli-Venezia Giulia long-run economic growth would have been less than that actually experienced if the region had been an ordinary one. To test this hypothesis, the synthetic control method has been adopted. A suitable synthetic Friuli-Venezia Giulia has been constructed to contrast the evolution of regional real per capita GDP, observed over the post-autonomy-policy period, with the corresponding evolution of the same aggregate for the synthetic counterpart. This comparison reveals that if Friuli-Venezia Giulia were not an autonomous region, its per capita GDP would be significantly lower than that effectively observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Italian national guidelines on pain management were published in 2010, but there is little information on how effective pain management is in paediatric emergency care, with other countries reporting poor levels. Using headache as an indicator, we described pain assessment in Italian emergency departments and identified predictors of algometric scale use.Methods: All Italian paediatric and maternal and child hospitals participated, plus four general hospitals. Data on all children aged 4-14 years admitted during a one-month period with headache as their chief complaint were abstracted from clinical records. Multivariable analyses identified predictors of algometric assessment, taking into account the cluster study design.Results: We studied 470 admissions. During triage, pain was assessed using a standardised scale (41.5%), informally (15.5%) or was not recorded (42.9%). Only 32.1% of the children received analgesia in the emergency department. The odds ratios for predictors of algometric assessment were non-Italian nationality (3.6), prehospital medication (1.8), admission to a research hospital (7.3) and a more favourable nurses-to-admissions ratio of 10.8 for the highest versus lowest tertile.Conclusion: Despite national guidelines, paediatric pain assessment in Italian emergency care was suboptimal. Hospital variables appeared to be stronger predictors of adequate assessment than patient characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the economic and urban history of the Italian colonization of Eritrea and Ethiopia, with a focus on the urban planning of Asmara and Addis Ababa. Topics discussed include background information on the urban planning of the Italian Fascist regime in Ethiopia and Eritrea, the expression of Fascism and Fascist ideals in the urban planning and architectural plan for Addis Ababa, and the involvement of the financial and building sector in Italy in the construction of Italian urban areas in the region.

This paper presents the results of different numerical analyses (nonlinear dynamic FEM simulations) regarding the monumental buildings in Ripabottoni village (Campobasso, southern Italy), which were damaged by the 2002 Molise earthquake. In particular, the church of S. Maria Assunta, for which typological data and an exhaustive damage survey are available, is taken into account. Some preliminary studies [Spallarossa et al., 2004], which correlate the waveform of the available recordings from aftershocks and the surveyed damage mechanism (due to the crushing of the vertical structural elements), suggested that a feasible explanation for this particular damage pattern does not involve only the intrinsic vulnerability of this type of buildings, but deals also with the high energy content in the high frequency range observed in the vertical component of the seismic events. In order to understand the structural damage patterns surveyed, synthetic accelerograms, representative of the main shock (Ml = 5.4 on 31 October 2002), were computed. The Empirical Green Function (EGF) method was applied to compute the seismic input adopted in the nonlinear dynamic analyses that we performed for the church of S. Maria Assunta. The results confirm that the observed damage pattern cannot totally be put down to the vulnerability of the building, but the particular characteristics of the seismic action played a fundamental role in determining it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the findings of a comparative study on poverty in certain subnational areas of Italy. The first part of the study shows how traditional differences between Italy's North and South tend to decrease if one adopts a local rather than a national income distribution in order to identify the poverty threshold. In the second and more extensive part of the study, the effects of using different thresholds - i.e., 40, 50, 60, or 70% of the median income of the local distribution - on the composition and the incidence of poor individuals are explored. This in turn is compared to the risks of a household experiencing such conditions. The analysis is focused on three particular local areas of Italy (the provinces of Trento and Modena and the Tuscany region). While individual level analysis shows some significant variations across areas and poverty thresholds, household level analysis reveals an invariant pattern across both of these dimensions. The article concludes that a sensitivity analysis does not involve contradictory outcomes, but may provide a more accurate picture of poverty in order to define appropriate public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of human Metapneumovirus (hMPV) and human Bocavirus (hBoV) identified the etiological causes of several cases of acute respiratory tract infections in children. This report describes the molecular epidemiology of hMPV and hBoV infections observed following viral surveillance of children hospitalized for acute respiratory tract infections in Milan, Italy. Pharyngeal swabs were collected from 240 children ≤3 years of age (130 males, 110 females; median age, 5.0 months; IQR, 2.0-12.5 months) and tested for respiratory viruses, including hMPV and hBoV, by molecular methods. hMPV-RNA and hBoV-DNA positive samples were characterized molecularly and a phylogenetical analysis was performed. PCR analysis identified 131/240 (54.6%) samples positive for at least one virus. The frequency of hMPV and hBoV infections was similar (8.3% and 12.1%, respectively). Both infections were associated with lower respiratory tract infections: hMPV was present as a single infectious agent in 7.2% of children with bronchiolitis, hBoV was associated with 18.5% of pediatric pneumonias and identified frequently as a single etiological agent. Genetically distinct hMPV and hBoV strains were identified in children examined with respiratory tract infections. Phylogenetic analysis showed an increased prevalence of hMPV genotype A (A2b sublineage) compared to genotype B (80% vs. 20%, respectively) and of the hBoV genotype St2 compared to genotype St1 (71.4% vs. 28.6%, respectively). Interestingly, a shift in hMPV infections resulting from A2 strains has been observed in recent years. In addition, the occurrence of recombination events between two hBoV strains with a breakpoint located in the VP1/VP2 region was identified., (© 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.)

International adoption is a phenomenon in constant growth, involving over one hundred countries. In Italy there are approximately two thousand adoptions of foreign minors per year. The needs demonstrated by the families adopting these children, sometimes bearing complex problems, have led to the offer of a combined medical and psychological intervention oriented towards a global and integrated approach to the needs of a family that is changing with the arrival of a new member. Therefore, a clinical evaluation of the health status of the child recently arrived in Italy, targeted at identifying the presence of medical or psychological conditions, is performed during the day spent at the day hospital. The authors present data and considerations emerging from their ongoing experience, which has already involved 113 children and 89 families. The majority of the children evaluated so far show acute physical conditions, requiring major attention and support from their parents. The authors believe that in order to organize an adequate intervention it is useful to consider the parents of these children as caregivers. The function of caregiver is identified at three levels: the care of the child as son/daughter (typical of the parental function), the care of the problems deriving from the specific preadoption experience that accompany the child in the new family, and the care of the sick child. The authors deem that the combined medical and psychological intervention adopted at present with these families constitutes a useful support to the caregiver function.