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BackgroundDespite effective treatments, more than 30% of patients with diabetes will present with diabetic kidney disease (DKD) at some point. Patients with DKD are among the most complex as their care is multifactorial and involves different groups of health care providers. Suboptimal adherence to polypharmacy is frequent and contributes to poor outcomes. As self-management is one of the keys to clinical success, structured medication adherence programs are crucial. The PANDIA-IRIS (patients diabétiques et insuffisants rénaux: un programme interdisciplinaire de soutien à l’adhésion thérapeutique) study is based on a routine medication adherence program led by pharmacists. ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to define the impact of the duration of this medication adherence program on long-term adherence and clinical outcomes in patients with DKD. MethodsThis monocentric adherence program consists of short, repeated motivational interviews focused on patients’ medication behaviors combined with the use of electronic monitors containing patients’ medications. When patients open the electronic monitor cap to take their medication, the date and hour at each opening are registered. In total, 73 patients are randomized as 1:1 in 2 parallel groups; the adherence program will last 6 months in the first group versus 12 months in the second group. After the intervention phases, patients continue using their electronic monitors for a total of 24 months but without receiving feedback. Electronic monitors and pill counts are used to assess medication adherence. Persistence and implementation will be described using Kaplan-Meier curves and generalized estimating equation multimodeling, respectively. Longitudinal adherence will be presented as the product of persistence and implementation and modelized by generalized estimating equation multimodeling. The evolution of the ADVANCE (Action in Diabetes and Vascular disease: Preterax and Diamicron Modified-Release Controlled Evaluation) and UKPDS (United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study) clinical scores based on medication adherence will be analyzed with generalized estimating equation multimodeling. Patients’ satisfaction with this study will be assessed through qualitative interviews, which will be transcribed verbatim, coded, and analyzed for the main themes. ResultsThis study was approved by the local ethics committee (Vaud, Switzerland) in November 2015. Since then, 2 amendments to the protocol have been approved in June 2017 and October 2019. Patients’ recruitment began in April 2016 and ended in October 2020. This study was introduced to all consecutive eligible patients (n=275). Among them, 73 accepted to participate (26.5%) and 202 (73.5%) refused. Data collection is ongoing and data analysis is planned for 2022. ConclusionsThe PANDIA-IRIS study will provide crucial information about the impact of the medication adherence program on the adherence and clinical outcomes of patients with DKD. Monitoring medication adherence during the postintervention phase is innovative and will shed light on the duration of the intervention on medication adherence. Trial RegistrationClinicaltrials.gov NCT04190251_PANDIA IRIS; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04190251 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)DERR1-10.2196/25966

According to New Zealand government statistics, there is a consistent male-female divide within technology education in secondary schools, resulting in an ongoing underrepresentation of male students in fashion and textiles and female students in computer science and resistant materials learning areas. This underrepresentation is concerning as it contradicts the inclusion promoted in the New Zealand Curriculum and may contribute to reduced opportunities for a talented and diverse workforce. A large body of literature is dedicated to the underrepresentation of female students in STEM fields and has predominantly focused on female students in mathematics and science. However, minimal research focuses on the technology curriculum within the Aotearoa New Zealand context. This qualitative exploratory study investigated students' perceptions of gender-typing and gender stereotypes within technology education and the experiences of students engaged in technology subjects in which they are gender minorities. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. The findings from the thematic analysis revealed that peers and the need for social connection impacted the experiences of gender minority students in their class and influenced their subject selection.

ABSTRACTThe rapid surge in large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) has been triggered by the convergence of food, financial and environmental crises in the late 2000s. Since the 2008 commodity price spike, several Asian countries have become preferential targets for LSLAs carried out by foreign companies and governments. The rising interest in Asian farmlands and natural resources arose in a complex set of political transitions and socioeconomic dynamics that have shaped the whole continent in the last decades. This study relies on a dataset built on different data sources, from 2003 to 2021 for a total of 14,724 million hectares involved in LSLAs in Asia. The southeastern region is the most targeted one, with Indonesia and the Philippines as the principal host countries. The main investors are intraregional and, especially in private or stock-exchange listed companies, are from China and Malaysia, who intend to produce palm oil or rubber. Results partially confirm the initial hypothesis, showing that the endowment of land and water resources in host countries is positively related to the amount of land acquired. Findings also show that investors are looking for free market areas, with low trade barriers and low fiscal pressure, where the protection of workers’ rights is lower than that in their homeland.

The parents of 413 children with typical development (TD) or special educational needs (SEN) filled in an online survey to investigate the associations between the restrictions introduced to face COVID-19 and parenting stress and parental disciplinary practices. The parents of children with SEN showed a significantly higher stress level than TD children's parents. However, they showed a lower inclination to overreact. In both groups, the parents who feel less supported, feel their needs threatened, and report having a child with more difficulties were more likely to exhibit parenting stress. Data on the associations between COVID-19 restrictions and the stress perceived by parents could help to focus the attention of the public health system on their parents' needs, leading to practices aimed to prevent parenting stress and burnout.

Across development, experience has a strong impact on the way we think and adapt. School experience affects academic and social-emotional outcomes, yet whether differences in pedagogical experience modulate underlying brain network development is still unknown. In this study, we compared the brain network dynamics of students with different pedagogical backgrounds. Specifically, we characterized the diversity and stability of brain activity at rest by combining both resting-state fMRI and diffusion-weighted structural imaging data of 87 4-18 years old students experiencing either the Montessori pedagogy (i.e., student-led, trial-and-error pedagogy) or the traditional pedagogy (i.e., teacher-led, test-based pedagogy). Our results revealed spatiotemporal brain dynamics differences between students as a function of schooling experience at the whole-brain level. Students from Montessori schools showed overall higher functional integration (higher system diversity) and neural stability (lower spatiotemporal diversity) compared to traditionally schooled students. Higher integration was explained mainly through the cerebellar (CBL) functional network. In contrast, higher temporal stability was observed in the ventral attention, dorsal attention, somatomotor, frontoparietal, and CBL functional networks. This study suggests a form of experience-dependent dynamic functional connectivity plasticity, in learning-related networks.

Background: Maternal input plays an important role in influencing linguistic development during the first years of life, and it is evident that mothers adapt their language according to their child's characteristics. Recently, it was demonstrated that maternal input addressed to children with sex chromosome trisomies (SCTs) at 8 months of age is prosodically and functionally different from that addressed to typically developing (TD) peers. Aims: The study aimed at analysing maternal input at 24 months when the presence of a language delay could be more evident than during the preverbal stage. We were interested in examining if maternal input was influenced by a diagnosis of SCT (by comparing children with SCT and TD children) or by children's linguistic level (by comparing children with weak lexical ability versus children with typical lexical ability regardless of the presence of genetic diagnosis). Methods and Procedures: Forty-four mother--child dyads in which the children had an SCT and 20 mother--child dyads in which the children were TD participated in the study. Of these 64 dyads, 23 children (21 with SCTs and two TD children) formed the group of children with weak lexical ability (children with a vocabulary size lower than 50 words at 24 months). Maternal utterances were collected during one video-recorded play session and were then coded considering both the linguistic and functional features of the input. Outcomes and Results: The results showed that the input addressed to 24-month-old children with SCTs is as rich and complex as that addressed to TD peers. Moreover, no significant differences in the functions expressed by maternal input were found (all ps > 0.05). Comparing the children with weak lexical ability and the children with typical lexical ability in our sample, having a poor vocabulary at 24 months of age showed a significant influence on the maternal input features: the input addressed to children with weak lexical ability was characterised by a higher presence of attention getters (U = 217.00, p = 0.007) and a lower proportion of questions (U = 236.00, p = 0.017) than that of mothers of typically-talking children. Conclusions and Implications: At 24 months of age, it seems that the presence of a language delay and not belonging to the clinical group of children with SCTs influences the functional characteristics of the maternal input. It is important to support the parents of children with SCTs during the communication process and later during their child's development, leading them to observe their children's manifested skills rather than looking for possible predicted difficulties.

Abstract Sodium-glucose cotransporter (SGLT) 2 inhibition is a well-known target for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, renal disease and chronic heart failure. The protein SGLT2 is encoded by SLC5A2 (Solute Carrier Family 5 Member 2), which is highly expressed in renal cortex, but also in the testes where glucose uptake may be essential for spermatogenesis and androgen synthesis. We postulated that in healthy males, SGLT2 inhibitor therapy may affect gonadal function. We examined the impact on gonadal and steroid hormones in a post-hoc analysis of a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled research including 26 healthy males who were given either placebo or empagliflozin 10 mg once daily for four weeks. After one month of empagliflozin, there were no discernible changes in androgen, pituitary gonadotropin hormones, or inhibin B. Regardless of BMI category, the administration of empagliflozin, a highly selective SGLT2 inhibitor, did not alter serum androgen levels in men without diabetes. While SGLT2 is present in the testes, its inhibition does not seem to affect testosterone production in Leydig cells nor inhibin B secretion by the Sertoli cells.

Objective Automated machine learning (autoML) platforms allow health care professionals to play an active role in the development of machine learning (ML) algorithms according to scientific or clinical needs. The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate such a model for automated detection and grading of distal hand osteoarthritis (OA). Methods A total of 13,690 hand radiographs from 2,863 patients within the Swiss Cohort of Quality Management (SCQM) and an external control data set of 346 non‐SCQM patients were collected and scored for distal interphalangeal OA (DIP‐OA) using the modified Kellgren/Lawrence (K/L) score. Giotto (Learn to Forecast [L2F]) was used as an autoML platform for training two convolutional neural networks for DIP joint extraction and subsequent classification according to the K/L scores. A total of 48,892 DIP joints were extracted and then used to train the classification model. Heatmaps were generated independently of the platform. User experience of a web application as a provisional user interface was investigated by rheumatologists and radiologists. Results The sensitivity and specificity of this model for detecting DIP‐OA were 79% and 86%, respectively. The accuracy for grading the correct K/L score was 75%, with a κ score of 0.76. The accuracy per DIP‐OA class differed, with 86% for no OA (defined as K/L scores 0 and 1), 71% for a K/L score of 2, 46% for a K/L score of 3, and 67% for a K/L score of 4. Similar values were obtained in an independent external test set. Qualitative and quantitative user experience testing of the web application revealed a moderate to high demand for automated DIP‐OA scoring among rheumatologists. Conversely, radiologists expressed a low demand, except for the use of heatmaps. Conclusion AutoML platforms are an opportunity to develop clinical end‐to‐end ML algorithms. Here, automated radiographic DIP‐OA detection is both feasible and usable, whereas grading among individual K/L scores (eg, for clinical trials) remains challenging.

Abstract Background Increased arterial tortuosity has been associated with various cardiovascular complications. However, the extent and role of arterial tortuosity in non-atherosclerotic vascular diseases remain to be fully elucidated. This study aimed to assess arterial tortuosity index (ATI) in patients with non-atherosclerotic vascular diseases and the associated factors. Methods This is a retrospective analysis of patients with non-atherosclerotic vascular diseases referred to the Malformation and Rare Vascular Disease Center at the University Hospital in Lausanne (Switzerland). Computed tomography angiography (CTA) images performed between October 2010 and April 2022 were retrieved and the aortic tortuosity index (ATI) was calculated. Patients were classified based on diagnosis into the following groups: arterial dissection & aneurysm, arteritis & autoimmune disease, hereditary connective tissue diseases, and fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD). Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to determine potentially relevant predictors of aortic tortuosity. Results The mean age upon computed tomography angiography (CTA) was 46.8 (standard deviation [SD] 14.6) years and 59.1% of the patients were female. Mean ATI was higher in patients over 60 years old (1.27), in those with arterial aneurysms (mean: 1.11), and in those diagnosed with hypertension (mean: 1.13). When only patients over 60 years old were considered, those diagnosed with connective tissue diseases had the highest ATI. At multivariate regression analysis, increasing age (p

Abstract The Early Permian in the present-day Europe area was a time when a major tectonic shift occurred, leading from the tectonic collapse of the Variscan orogeny to the crustal extension and thinning that characterized the Early Permian times. Crustal extension was associated with extensive magmatism at different crustal levels: from gabbro in the lower crust or at the mantle/crust transition to subaerial high-SiO2 volcanic activity. In the whole Southalpine Domain, the Early Permian intrusive bodies occur from the west (e.g. Ivrea-Verbano Complex and “Graniti dei Laghi”) to the east (Ifinger, Brixen and Cima d’Asta intrusive complexes). Among these, in the central Southern Alps (comprised between the Giudicarie Belt and the Lake Como), minor intrusive complexes also occur. The Val Biandino Intrusive Suite consists of two magmatic units: the Val Biandino Quartz-Diorite (VBQD) and the Valle di San Biagio Granite (VSBG). The first of them consists of gabbro-diorite to granodiorite bodies associated with leucocratic cordierite-bearing granitic dikes that intruded the pre-Permian basement. To the west, a W-dipping normal fault of Permian age represents the boundary between this unit and the Valle di San Biagio porphyric granite. All rock varieties of the Val Biandino Intrusive Suite display a high-K calc-alkaline affinity with metaluminous to peraluminous character. Field crosscutting relationships point to a late generation of the cordierite granites of the Val Biandino Quartz-Diorite unit with respect to the more mafic types. SHRIMP U–Pb zircon dating provided an age of 285.2 ± 1.9 Ma for a cordierite granite of the Val Biandino Quartz-Diorite unit and 283.2 ± 1.9 Ma for the porphyric Valle di San Biagio Granite. Geochemical data suggest that gabbro-diorite, quartz-diorite, granodiorite and leucogranite are not co-magmatic. The existing gaps in term of SiO2 wt% and the higher HREE contents in mafic and intermediate rocks with respect to granite coupled with similar LREE in all rocks support this hypothesis. The high Rb/Sr ratios (> 1) in leucogranite, together with the occurrence of white mica and cordierite point to a significant contribution of crustal partial melting in their genesis. The Val Biandino Intrusive Suite was likely formed through the interaction of magma genesis at the mantle/crust transition and partial melting of the heterogeneous pre-Permian basement of the Southalpine Domain. This scenario explains the strong heterogeneity displayed by the relatively small intrusive complex and the strong crustal signature exhibited by all the magmatic types of the Val Biandino Intrusive Suite.

Background The acquisition and development of prosodic aspects of vocal intonation are of special interest within the larger context of language acquisition. Method The present study explored the developmental trajectories of infant prosodic abilities from 4 to 16 months of life with an intensive time points assessment. Several aspects were considered: an acoustic analysis of infant vocal productions with specific software, the analyses of all the prosodic variables associated with the fundamental frequency (F0 mean, F0 range, and F0 final contours), the individual variability and the complexity of the vocal productions of the infants. Results The multi-level analysis evidenced specific prosodic developmental trajectories that differ for the different kind of vocal productions since the first months of life. Conclusions The findings suggest that in the second half of the first year of life infants show an intonational repertoire that may help manage interactions with their caregiver and that individual variability has to be taken in consideration when assessing infants’ prosody.

Acutely decompensated heart failure is one of the leading causes of hospitalisation worldwide, with a significant majority of these cases attributed to congestion. Although congestion is commonly mistaken for volume overload, evidence suggests that decompensation can occur without significant water accumulation, being attributed to volume redistribution. Yet, the distinction between intravascular and extravascular congestion in heart failure often blurs, as patients frequently exhibit overlapping features of both, and as patients may transition between phenotypes over time. Considering that differentiation between intravascular and extravascular congestion can lead to different management strategies, the aim of this review was to delineate the pathophysiological nuances between the two, as well as their correlation with clinical, biochemical and imaging indices.

Ecosystem services (ES) assessment is crucial in ecology, with numerous studies seeking to evaluate them. Despite the abundance of methods and indicators, standardization is lacking, hindering comparability and progress in ES understanding and monitoring. This paper reviews indicators used in scientific literature to evaluate mountain ES and then examined whether the most used indicators are also the best. Using ISI Web of Knowledge we searched papers published between 2015 and 2020 containing “ecosystem services” AND “mountains” and we selected 400 papers effectively applying at least one indicator to evaluate ES. For each article, we extracted the following information: type of ES evaluated; indicator(s) used; input data used; type of value-domain (ecological, economic or social); scale of analysis; country; mapping; and management suggestions. From the literature, we extracted a list of 130 most frequently used indicators. The results indicated that regulating services were the most frequently assessed ES, followed by provisioning, cultural, and lastly supporting. The scale of analysis was mainly regional (51%) and local (40%), while studies at national scale were less frequent (9%) and only 2 studies were at global scale. Mountain areas most studied were in Europe (50%) and Asia (31%). Ecological value-domain was the most frequent used (55%), followed by social (26%) and economic (18%). 84% of studies considered only one dimension of the value and few studies combined multiple value-domains (15%). Almost half of studies mapped ES and around one third provided management suggestions. We examined the quality of indicators based on six criteria evaluated by experts in the field: significance, simplicity, cost, replicability, ease of interpretation and policy relevance. Indicators used exhibit significant diversity, and there is no clarity in nomenclature. There are cases where the indicators used represent inadequately the ecological parameters to be measured. Although many indicators score high in some of the properties evaluated, only 13 indicators perform well in all properties. These indicators have a universal value both in terms of semantics, but also in terms of properties and should be promoted for standardization among ES assessments. We envisage the necessity to condense the array of indicators commonly used down to a small set of standardized high-quality metrics.

Plasmodium parasites cause Malaria disease, which remains a significant threat to global health, affecting 200 million people and causing 400,000 deaths yearly. Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax remain the two main malaria species affecting humans. Identifying the malaria disease in blood smears requires years of expertise, even for highly trained specialists. Literature studies have been coping with the automatic identification and classification of malaria. However, several points must be addressed and investigated so these automatic methods can be used clinically in a Computer-aided Diagnosis (CAD) scenario. In this work, we assess the transfer learning approach by using well-known pre-trained deep learning architectures. We considered a database with 6222 Region of Interest (ROI), of which 6002 are from the Broad Bioimage Benchmark Collection (BBBC), and 220 were acquired locally by us at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (FIOCRUZ) in Porto Velho Velho, Rondônia-Brazil, which is part of the legal Amazon. We exhaustively cross-validated the dataset using 100 distinct partitions with 80% train and 20% test for each considering circular ROIs (rough segmentation). Our experimental results show that DenseNet201 has a potential to identify Plasmodium parasites in ROIs (infected or uninfected) of microscopic images, achieving 99.41% AUC with a fast processing time. We further validated our results, showing that DenseNet201 was significantly better (99% confidence interval) than the other networks considered in the experiment. Our results support claiming that transfer learning with texture features potentially differentiates subjects with malaria, spotting those with Plasmodium even in Leukocytes images, which is a challenge. In Future work, we intend scale our approach by adding more data and developing a friendly user interface for CAD use. We aim at aiding the worldwide population and our local natives living nearby the legal Amazon's rivers.

A construção de um Programa formativo teórico-prático na perspectiva da formação continuada docente intitulado “Práticas Baseadas em Evidências uma Abordagem Integrativa da Deficiência Intelectual” foi realizada junto aos professores da educação especial, sabe-se que o processo de formação continuada é fundamental para integração de conceitos e informações atualizadas de acordo com as perspectivas e pesquisas mais atuais. Este estudo buscou apresentar os resultados coletados com base nas Atividades teóricas realizadas pelos/as Docentes da educação especial de forma que utilizou-se da avaliação pré e pós-teste da intervenção. Participaram 10 professores da educação especial do Estado do Paraná, Brasil. Os resultados mostraram por meio dos dados coletados que os professores participantes apresentaram gradativamente maior aprendizagem dos conhecimentos adquiridos, e aponta para necessidade de formações continuadas online que busquem auxiliar na aprendizagem dos professores para sua atuação junto a jovens e adultos com deficiência intelectual.

The prevalence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens has become a major threat to public health, requiring swift initiatives for discovering new strategies to control bacterial infections. Hence, antibiotic stewardship and rapid diagnostics, but also the development, and prudent use, of novel effective antimicrobial agents are paramount. Ideally, these agents should be less likely to select for resistance in pathogens than currently available conventional antimicrobials. The usage of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), key components of the innate immune response, and combination therapies, have been proposed as strategies to diminish the emergence of resistance. Herein, we investigated whether newly developed random antimicrobial peptide mixtures (RPMs) can significantly reduce the risk of resistance evolution in vitro to that of single sequence AMPs, using the ESKAPE pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) as a model gram-negative bacterium. Infections of this pathogen are difficult to treat due the inherent resistance to many drug classes, enhanced by the capacity to form biofilms. P. aeruginosa was experimentally evolved in the presence of AMPs or RPMs, subsequentially assessing the extent of resistance evolution and cross-resistance/collateral sensitivity between treatments. Furthermore, the fitness costs of resistance on bacterial growth were studied and whole-genome sequencing used to investigate which mutations could be candidates for causing resistant phenotypes. Lastly, changes in the pharmacodynamics of the evolved bacterial strains were examined. Our findings suggest that using RPMs bears a much lower risk of resistance evolution compared to AMPs and mostly prevents cross-resistance development to other treatments, while maintaining (or even improving) drug sensitivity. This strengthens the case for using random cocktails of AMPs in favour of single AMPs, against which resistance evolved in vitro, providing an alternative to classic antibiotics worth pursuing.

For animals to locate resources and stay safe, navigation is an essential cognitive skill. Blind people use different navigational strategies to encode the environment. Path integration significantly influences spatial navigation, which is the ongoing update of position and orientation during self-motion. This study examines two separate things: (i) how guided and non-guided strategies affect blind individuals in encoding and mentally representing a trajectory and (ii) the sensory preferences for potential navigational aids through questionnaire-based research. This study first highlights the significant role that the absence of vision plays in understanding body centered and proprioceptive cues. Furthermore, it also underscores the urgent need to develop navigation-assistive technologies customized to meet the specific needs of users.

Abstract The disease coronavirus COVID-19 has been the cause of millions of deaths worldwide. Among the proteins of SARS-CoV-2, non-structural protein 12 (NSP12) plays a key role during COVID infection and is part of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase complex. The monitoring of NSP12 polymorphisms is extremely important for the design of new antiviral drugs and monitoring of viral evolution. This study analyzed the NSP12 mutations detected in circulating SARS-CoV-2 during the years 2020 to 2022 in the population of the city of Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil. The most frequent mutations found were P323L and G671S. Reports in the literature indicate that these mutations are related to transmissibility efficiency, which may have contributed to the extremely high numbers of cases in this location. In addition, two mutations described here (E796D and R914K) are close and have RMSD that is similar to the mutations M794V and N911K, which have been described in the literature as influential on the performance of the NSP12 enzyme. These data demonstrate the need to monitor the emergence of new mutations in NSP12 in order to better understand their consequences for the treatments currently used and in the design of new drugs.

BackgroundMutations in the GCK gene cause Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young (GCK-MODY) by impairing glucose-sensing in pancreatic beta cells. During pregnancy, managing this type of diabetes varies based on fetal genotype. Fetuses carrying a GCK mutation can derive benefit from moderate maternal hyperglycemia, stimulating insulin secretion in fetal islets, whereas this may cause macrosomia in wild-type fetuses. Modulating maternal glycemia can thus be viewed as a form of personalized prenatal therapy, highly beneficial but not justifying the risk of invasive testing. We therefore developed a monogenic non-invasive prenatal diagnostic (NIPD-M) test to reliably detect the transmission of a known maternal GCK mutation to the fetus.MethodsA small amount of fetal circulating cell-free DNA is present in maternal plasma but cannot be distinguished from maternal cell-free DNA. Determining transmission of a maternal mutation to the fetus thus implies sequencing adjacent polymorphisms to determine the balance of maternal haplotypes, the transmitted haplotype being over-represented in maternal plasma.ResultsHere we present a series of such tests in which fetal genotype was successfully determined and show that it can be used to guide therapeutic decisions during pregnancy and improve the outcome for the offspring. We discuss several potential hurdles inherent to the technique, and strategies to overcome these.ConclusionOur NIPD-M test allows reliable determination of the presence of a maternal GCK mutation in the fetus, thereby allowing personalized in utero therapy by modulating maternal glycemia, without incurring the risk of miscarriage inherent to invasive testing.

The neuropsychological profile associated with sex chromosome trisomies (SCT) is frequently characterised by delays or deficits in linguistic development. Although maternal input could have an important role in influencing and shaping the linguistic development of children with SCT, there is a lack of studies in the literature that have investigated its prosodic characteristics. The study aims to analyse the prosodic features of the maternal input addressed to a group of 8-month-old children with SCT and a group of typically developing (TD) peers. Nineteen mother-child dyads with children with SCT and 19 mother-child dyads with TD children participated in the study. Maternal utterances were collected during video-recorded play sessions, and for each dyad, 50 maternal utterances were selected and analysed using the software Praat. The results showed that the maternal input produced by the mothers in the SCT group was characterised by a significantly lower pitch, less marked and modulated melodic contours, and a shorter final syllable duration than the input addressed to TD children. The prosodic features found in the maternal input addressed to children with SCT were not those expected in the maternal input addressed to children at this developmental stage and could create a non-optimal linguistic environment.