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Masked hypertension (MHT) is a clinical condition characterized by normal blood pressure (BP) levels during clinical consultation and above normal out-of-office BP values. MHT is associated to an increased risk of developing hypertension-mediated organ damage (HMOD) and major cardiovascular (CV) outcomes, such as myocardial infarction, stroke, and hospitalizations due to CV causes, as well as to metabolic abnormalities and diabetes, thus further promoting the development and progression of atherosclerotic disease. Previous studies showed contrasting data on prevalence and clinical impact of MHT, due to not uniform diagnostic criteria (including either home or 24-h ambulatory BP measurements, or both) and background antihypertensive treatment. Whatever the case, over the last few years the widespread diffusion of validated devices for home BP monitoring has promoted a better diagnostic assessment and proper identification of individuals with MHT in a setting of clinical practice, thus resulting in increased prevalence of this clinical condition with potential clinical and socio-economic consequences. Several other items, in fact, remain unclear and debated, particularly regarding the therapeutic approach to MHT. The aim of this narrative review is to illustrate the clinical definition of MHT, to analyze the diagnostic algorithm, and to discuss the potential pharmacological approaches to be adopted in this clinical condition, in the light of the recommendations of the recent European hypertension guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of remote-sensing images is becoming common practice in the fight against environmental crimes. However, the challenge of exploiting the complementary information provided by radar and optical data, and by more conventional sources encoded in geographic information systems, is still open. In this work, we propose a new workflow for the detection of potentially hazardous cattle-breeding facilities, exploiting both synthetic aperture radar and optical multitemporal data together with geospatial analyses in the geographic information system environment. The data fusion is performed at a feature-based level. Experiments on data available for the area of Caserta, in southern Italy, show that the proposed technique provides very high detection capability, up to 95%, with a very low false alarm rate. A fast and easy-to-use system has been realized based on this approach, which is a useful tool in the hand of agencies engaged in the protection of territory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI), radial access should be favoured over femoral access as it reduces the risk of vascular complications and bleeding. Furthermore, a preventive role of radial access in the occurrence of acute kidney injury (AKI), mainly mediated by the reduction of bleeding and cholesterol crystal embolization into renal circulation, has been investigated in several studies, yielding conflicting results. Methods: we designed a retrospective study to appraise the effect of the use of a vascular access site on the occurrence of AKI in a cohort of 633 patients with acute myocardial infarction treated by PCI at our centre from 2018 to 2020. Results: after propensity score adjustment, radial access was associated with a reduced, albeit statistically not significant, incidence of AKI (14.7% vs. 21.0%; p = 0.06) and major bleeding (12.5% vs. 18.7%; p = 0.04) as compared to femoral access. At multivariate analysis, femoral access was an independent predictor of AKI, together with in-hospital occurrence of BARC 3–5 bleeding, Killip class >1 at presentation, female gender, baseline eGFR <60 mL/min, and baseline haemoglobin <12 g/dL. Conclusions: although limited by the observational design, our study supports the hypothesis that radial access may exert a protective role on the occurrence of AKI in patients with acute myocardial infarction undergoing PCI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]