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The objective of our study was to estimate the prevalence of not-diagnosed hypertension and to determine 10-year risk of coronary heart disease in a random sample of individuals in ASL 3 of Lagonegro (PZ). The sample was based on the whole population assisted by 21 General Practitioners. All General Practitioners filled a form for each patient containing social-demographic, anthropometric and clinical data. The study included only patients aged 35 to 74 years, without a previous diagnosis of myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure and that were not taking antihypertensive drugs (N=335). The directly standardized prevalence of prehypertension was 0.54 (IC95%: 0.47-0.59) and that of hypertension was 0.33 (IC95%: 0.28-0.38). The prevalence of both, prehypertension and hypertension was higher in males than in females, as well as in old compared to young adults. Cardiovascular risk factors as Body Mass Index (BMI), diabetes, a family history of dyslipidemia and diabetes were more frequent among prehypertensive and hypertensive individuals, than in normotensive ones. We also estimated the risk of an acute coronary event in patients whit blood pressure higher than 140/90 mmHg. The calculation, carried out through Framingham algorithm, showed that 1 out of 10 hypertensive subject had a 10-years risk of developing coronary heart disease and that males had a higher risk compared to females. Our study highlights the fundamental role of General Practitioners may play in earlier diagnosis prehypertension and hypertension in the general population, thus adopting practices oriented to healthy promotion and prevention.

We report on an ab initio study of the structural and electronic properties of B and P doped Si nanocrystals (Si-nc). The formation energies (FE) scale with the radius, the activation energies with the inverse radius. The effects of B and P co-doping show that the FE are always smaller than that for the corresponding single-doped cases and that is possible to engineer the photoluminescence properties of Si-nc.

The study investigated the use of, attitudes towards, and adherence to motorcycle helmets in a group of adolescents. A random sample of 412 adoles- cents (14-19 years old) attending randomly selected public secondary classes in Catanzaro (Italy) received a questionnaire consisting of questions on socio-demo- graphics, patterns of motorcycle use, frequency of hel- met use, helmet use by adult family members and close friends who are motorcyclists, attitudes towards helmet use and number of traffic-related motorcycle accidents in the last year. A total of 387 adolescents participated. The frequency of self-reported helmet use as a driver of the motorcycle or as the passenger was 34.7% and 33.7% respectively. Routine helmet use was greater for adolescents from households in which at least one family member wore a helmet, for youths who agreed that helmet use should be mandatory, and for those who did not experience an accident in the past year. Regression analysis of the attitude models indicated that the youn- ger the age, the more willing an adolescent would be to believe that helmet use reduced the risk of head injuries and the positive attitude that helmet use should be mandatory was higher in younger adolescents and in those who had no road accident within the past year. A total of 17% reported that they had an accident during the last 12 months of the study period and 30 of them presented motorcycle-related injuries. Conclusion: The development of programmes on helmet use starting as early as primary school is strongly needed.

The quantum confinement for a conduction-band electron within a spherical quantum dot is investigated in the framework of the effective-mass approximation. The conduction-band effective-mass anisotropy is fully taken into account. The exact solution for the electronic spectrum is provided, showing how the 'isotropic' mass levels map into the new spectrum which accounts for the anisotropy. The removal of degeneracies typical of the spherical dot, as well as its effects on the infrared transition energies, are discussed.

Objective. The objective of this study was to measure inappropriateness of admission and inpatient days in pediatric hospital wards in Catanzaro, Italy, and the effect of different variables on such inappropriateness.Design. A retrospective application was made using the Pediatric Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol list of criteria. For each patient, there were recorded data on: sociodemographic characteristics; distance from home to hospital; date, day of the week, ward, and type of admission; overall and pre-index day length of hospital stay; and location within the stay of the day reviewed.Results. A total of 656 children were reviewed. Overall, 30% of the hospital admissions and 55.5% of days of stay were judged to be inappropriate; for about one third of those admitted inappropriately, the hospital stay was judged to be appropriate. Multiple logistic regression analysis indicated that the inappropriate admission was significantly higher if the admission occurred during the daytime. The inappropriate number of days of hospitalization was significantly higher if the patient was female, if the admission was urgent, in medical wards, for patients who were inappropriately admitted, and for those sampled close to discharge. The main reasons for inappropriate use were hospital organization and an over-cautious physician in the management of a patient.Conclusions. The high degree of inappropriate admission or days of stay in pediatric wards and the reasons for such unnecessary hospital use suggest the need for a more vigilant interaction between hospital and community-based services to mitigate such inappropriateness and for a continuing education system to define standardized guidelines.

An integrated computational approach built on quantum mechanical (QM) methods, purposely tailored inter- and intra-molecular force fields and continuum solvent models combined with time-independent and time- dependent schemes to account for nuclear motion effects is applied to the spectroscopic investigation of pyrimidine in the gas phase as well as in aqueous and CCl4 solutions. Accurate post-Hartree–Fock methodologies are employed to compute molecular structure, harmonic vibrational frequencies, energies and oscillator strengths for electronic transitions in order to validate the accuracy of approaches rooted into density functional theory with emphasis also on hybrid QM/QM0 models. Within the time-independent approaches, IR spectra are computed including anharmonicities through perturbative corrections while UV–vis line-shapes are simulated accounting for the vibrational structure; in both cases, the environmental effects are described by continuum models. The effects of conformational flexibility, including solvent dynamics, are described through time-dependent models based on purposely DFT-tailored force fields applied to molecular dynamics simulations and on QM computations of spectroscopic properties. Such procedures are exploited to simulate IR and UV–vis spectra of pyrimidine in the gas phase and in solutions, leading in all cases to good agreement with experimental observations and allowing to dissect different effects underlying spectral phenomena.