Chronic respiratory diseases and allergic diseases have doubled in the last 25 years and living in a urban area is a risk factors for these diseases. Few epidemiological surveys on general population samples estimated changes in prevalence of respiratory symptoms/diseases over a long time interval. A study performed by the Pulmonary Environmental Epidemiology Unit, Institute of Clinical Physiology, CNR, Pisa, along with the Institute of Biomedicine and Molecular Immunology, CNR, Palermo, the ...

L'Unità di Oncogenomica della Dott.ssa Poliseno ha sede ad IFC ed è parte del Core Research Laboratory dell'ITT (http://www.ittumori.it/). L'Unità è stata costituita tramite un finanziamento start up erogato dall'ITT nel 2012 e si occupa di studiare il ruolo svolto dai microRNA, piccole molecole di RNA a singolo filamento, come effettori e come regolatori del pathway delle MAP chinasi. Tale pathway, composto dalle proteine RAS, RAF, MEK e ERK, è quello più frequentemente alterato in ...

Systems medicine is a flourishing discipline that stimulates widespread research interests. The highlighted map in Fig.1 presents a health ecosystem, which is a connected community of living and non-living elements whose cooperation forms a complex space of relations, decisions and actions. The wealth of health- and disease-related data from biomedical, environmental, clinical and social studies is the product of such ecosystem, which continues to generate new challenges together with ...

Cardiovascular disease is the foremost cause of premature death and the most common cause of hospital admission in western countries. At the same time, the death rate for cardiovascular disease has been falling in the last few years. Strategies for reducing risk factors have unequivocally played an important role in reducing mortality and morbidity, especially in people with recognized cardiovascular disease. Attention has particularly focused on discovering new, potentially important risk ...

Ultrasound Lung Comets are a novel chest echographic sign of subpleural septa of increased thickness, due to reversibile water accumulation (as it happens in cardiogenic pulmonary edema) and/or irreversible fibrosis tissue in lung disease (as it happens in the interstitial syndrome of pulmonary fibrosis). In heart failure patients, the presence, site and number of ultrasound lung comets allows detection, location and quantification of extra-vascular lung water. With chest sonography, the normal ...

According to the classical model of cardiovascular physiology, the control of coronary vascular tone is tuned to guarantee the continuous adjustment of flow to tissue requirements (metabolic control) and its independence from variations in aortic pressure (autoregulation or myogenic control). However, this model does not encompass the control of capillary pressure within optimal values of Starling equilibria and even obstacles it to some extent. During ischemia, in particular, this model assumes ...

Clinical and experimental evidences have shown the important role of the endocrine function in the homeostasis of cardiovascular system. In particular, triiodothyronine (T3), the biologically active thyroid hormone, plays a critical role in modulating heart rate and cardiac contractility as well as arterial peripheral resistances. A typical pattern of an altered thyroid hormone metabolism characterized by low-T3 circulating levels (Low -T3 syndrome) has been described in patients with ...

In the vascular endothelium, nitric oxide (NO) is constitutively produced from L-arginine by the enzyme endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase (eNOS). NO plays a key role in the relaxation of vascular smooth muscle, inhibits platelets and leukocytes adhesion to the endothelium, reduces vascular smooth muscle cells migration and proliferation and limits the oxidation of atherogenic low-density lipoproteins. Because of these multiple actions, NO plays a central role in maintaining normal ...