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BACKGROUND Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct described as "a lack of words to express emotions" that includes difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings and a concrete, externally oriented cognitive style. Among patients with food allergy (FA) alexithymia has been found higher than in general population and associated with dysfunctional coping strategies. Childhood traumatic experiences and/or dysfunctional parent-child relationship can contribute to alexithymia. The study aimed to explore possible associations between child alexithymia and mother alexithymia and anxiety, as well as previous anaphylaxis. METHODS Sixty-five mother-child pairs have been recruited. Children had a medical diagnosis of FA. The Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 was used to assess alexithymia in participants. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was used to assess trait anxiety in mothers. Statistical analysis was performed to investigate the influence of variables sex, previous anaphylaxis, and adrenaline auto-injector prescription on child and mother's alexithymia and to explore possible association between maternal and child alexithymia. RESULTS A substantial percentage of children were alexithymic (21.5%) or borderline (33.8%), while mothers' frequencies were lower and in line with prevalence in general population. Child alexithymia was positively associated with previous anaphylaxis and mothers' trait anxiety (p

Background Food allergy is a common immunological disease that includes potentially fatal reactions. It impacts considerably on patients’ social life including close interpersonal relationships. Attachment theory provides a theoretical framework to evaluate the quality of close interpersonal relationships in chronic disorders. Attachment insecurity, mainly characterized by attachment avoidance, has been found in a variety of health conditions, but still needs to be investigated in food allergy. The study aimed to investigate attachment, as attitude to close interpersonal relationships, among food-allergic young patients, compared to healthy controls. Methods This is a cross-sectional study involving patients suffering from IgE-mediated food allergy sequentially recruited and matched to healthy controls for age and gender. The Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) was used to assess five factors and two attachment dimensions (Anxiety-Avoidance). Associations with anaphylaxis and adrenaline prescription were explored among patients. Results 174 participants were assessed (female=45%; Mean age=17.51; SD=4.26). Food-allergic patients reported significantly higher levels of Discomfort with closeness (p

Background Despite a relatively high risk for allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, schools are not sufficiently trained and confident in handling children suffering from food allergy. This study aimed to measure the improvement of school personnel's self-efficacy in managing food allergy and anaphylaxis at school after a specific multidisciplinary training course. Methods A total of 592 teachers and school caretakers completed the School Personnel Self-Efficacy-Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Questionnaire (S.PER.SE-FAAQ) before and after the course. The median difference, along with I quartile and III quartile, in scores between baseline and post-intervention assessment was calculated. A conditional regression tree was fitted for each outcome measured after the educational intervention. Results At baseline, school personnel reported low self-efficacy in anaphylaxis management (AM), especially in recognizing anaphylaxis symptoms and administering proper drugs. After the specific multidisciplinary training course, all scores improved. AM scores particularly showed a significant increase. School personnel's post-training self-efficacy was found to be related to initial levels. Some indicative threshold values emerged. Remarkably, participants with a low self-efficacy at baseline seemed to particularly benefit from the training. Conclusions Results highlighted the effectiveness of specific multidisciplinary training courses in improving teachers' and school caretakers' self-efficacy in managing food allergy and anaphylaxis. The S.PER.SE-FAAQ is confirmed to be an easy and helpful tool to assess the level of food allergy and anaphylaxis management in the school staff and training effectiveness.

To enable reliable crowdsourcing applications, it is of great importance to develop algorithms that can automatically discover the truths from possibly noisy and conflicting claims provided by various information sources. In order to handle crowdsourcing applications involving big or streaming data, a desirable truth discovery algorithm should not only be effective , but also be scalable . However, with respect to quantitative crowdsourcing applications such as object counting and percentage annotation, existing truth discovery algorithms are not simultaneously effective and scalable. They either address truth discovery in categorical crowdsourcing or perform batch processing that does not scale. In this paper, we propose new parallel and streaming truth discovery algorithms for quantitative crowdsourcing applications. Through extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that 1) both of them are quite effective, 2) the parallel algorithm can efficiently perform truth discovery on large datasets, and 3) the streaming algorithm processes data incrementally, and it can efficiently perform truth discovery both on large datasets and in data streams.

Truth discovery is an important technique for enabling reliable crowdsourcing applications. It aims to automatically discover the truths from possibly conflicting crowdsourced claims. Most existing truth discovery approaches focus on categorical applications, such as image classification. They use the accuracy, i.e., rate of exactly correct claims, to capture the reliability of participants. As a consequence, they are not effective for truth discovery in quantitative applications, such as percentage annotation and object counting, where similarity rather than exact matching between crowdsourced claims and latent truths should be considered. In this paper, we propose two unsupervised Quantitative Truth Finders (QTFs) for truth discovery in quantitative crowdsourcing applications. One QTF explores an additive model and the other explores a multiplicative model to capture different relationships between crowdsourced claims and latent truths in different classes of quantitative tasks. These QTFs naturally incorporate the similarity between variables. Moreover, they use the bias and the confidence instead of the accuracy to capture participants’ abilities in quantity estimation. These QTFs are thus capable of accurately discovering quantitative truths in particular domains. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that these QTFs outperform other state-of-the-art approaches for truth discovery in quantitative crowdsourcing applications and they are also quite efficient.

Collaborative design is an iterative process of selecting and evaluating solutions in the presence of several potentially conflicting requirements dictated by different professional expertise and preferences, a concept central to Building Information Modelling (BIM) implementation. In previous research, we showed that the core decision process can be better understood using argumentation-based models of practical reasoning. This allows the identification of the rationale and the relationships between conflicting issues, thus providing clarity and transparency for decisions achieved. This paper aims to take one step further in modelling this process, and suggests a novel methodological approach that translates collaborative, conceptual and perceptual activities related to design processes undertaken by design and construction professionals to correspondent argumentative dialogue types such as information seeking, deliberation and negotiation. Computational models of dialogue identify protocols for collaboration establishing reasons and evidence of claims made and joint identification of goals and solutions. Therefore, the proposed argumentative dialogue permits the formalisation of collaboration analysis, design decision steps can be monitored and the dependency relationships between professionals involved and decisions taken can be traced. Future research would develop a computational model to be employed by intelligent software agents to assist professionals in analysing complex collaborative decisions.

Maternal stress in fetal and early life has been associated with the development of respiratory allergies, but no studies exist about food allergy. Stressful events and the quality of caregiving provided, as they affect the emotional and physiologic regulation of the infant, could alter the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal and immune system, facilitating an increased allergic response. This study aimed to investigate the influence of perinatal stress, as perceived by mothers, on developing food allergy in childhood. A survey on pregnancy and the first three months after giving birth was submitted to 59 Italian mothers of at least one child suffering from severe food allergy and one completely healthy child, for a total of 118 children examined. The presence of stressful events and the quality of perinatal period for each child were assessed retrospectively. The food allergic children's data were compared to siblings' data through inferential statistics. The results showed a significantly higher number of stressful events occurred during patients' perinatal period, compared to siblings, in particular bereavements in pregnancy and parenting difficulties in postpartum. Mothers reported harder pregnancies and more stressful, harder, and, in general, worse postpartum when referring to their food-allergic children, in comparison with their siblings (p

Aim/hypothesis: Monocytes/macrophages play important roles in adipose and vascular tissues and can be polarised as inflammatory M1 or anti inflammatory M2. We sought to analyse monocyte polarisation status in type 2 diabetes which is characterised by chronic inflammation. Methods: We enrolled 60 individuals without diabetes and 53 patients with type 2 diabetes. We quantified standard monocyte subsets defined by cluster of differentiation (CD)14 and CD16. In addition based on the phenotype of polarised macrophages in vitro we characterised and quantified more definite M1 (CD68+CCR2+) and M2 (CX3CR1+CD206+/CD163+) monocytes. We also analysed bone marrow (BM) samples and the effects of granulocyte colony stimulating factor (G CSF) stimulation in diabetic and control individuals. Results: We found no alterations in standard monocyte subsets (classical intermediate and non classical) when comparing groups. For validation of M1 and M2 phenotypes we observed that M2 were enriched in non classical monocytes and had lower TNF a content higher LDL scavenging and lower transendothelial migratory capacity than M1. Diabetic patients displayed an imbalanced M1/M2 ratio compared with the control group attributable to a reduction in M2. The M1/M2 ratio was directly correlated with waist circumference and HbA 1c and among diabetic patients M2 reduction and M1/M2 increase were associated with microangiopathy. A decrease in M2 was also found in the BM from diabetic patients with a relative M2 excess compared with the bloodstream. BM stimulation with G CSF mobilised M2 macrophages in diabetic but not in healthy individuals. Conclusions/interpretation: We show that type 2 diabetes markedly reduces anti inflammatory M2 monocytes through a dysregulation in bone marrow function. This defect may have a negative impact on microangiopathy. © 2013 Springer Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Background Inappropriate dietary eliminations may impair quality of life, affect children's growth and unnecessarily impact on healthcare costs. Previous retrospective studies reported that around 25% of children continue a food-avoidance diet despite a negative oral food challenge (OFC). A definite pattern has not been found yet for patients not reintroducing the food. This study aimed to examine the role of child's nutritional attitudes and maternal anxiety in reintroducing food after a negative OFC. Methods A prospective study was conducted involving 81 mothers of children with IgE-mediated food allergy. They completed a survey on nutritional behaviour and attitudes and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory on the day of OFC and 6 months later. Results In total, 11.1% of children never or rarely ate the food after a negative OFC. Consumption of the reintroduced food is positively correlated to child's interest in tasting new foods before and after OFC and to changes in child's nutritional habits after OFC. It is negatively correlated to monotony of the diet after OFC. No correlations were found with other participants’ characteristics or maternal anxiety. State anxiety significantly decreased after the OFC. A correlation was found between trait and state anxiety and the degree of change in nutritional habits after OFC. Conclusions Evaluating child's approach towards food before the OFC is a promising approach to identify patients at risk of food reintroduction failure. Furthermore, it underlined the importance of reassessing food consumption in all patients after a negative OFC and supporting patients in the reintroduction of food.

BACKGROUND Food allergy affects up to 4-7% European schoolchildren. Studies identified important shortcomings on food allergy and anaphylaxis management in schools. In social cognitive theory, personal beliefs in own capabilities influence choices, effort levels, perseverance and performance accomplishments. This study aimed to investigate school personnel's self-efficacy in managing food allergy and anaphylaxis, providing a valid instrument to deeply understand how to support schools to effectively manage students at risk of food reactions. METHODS A total of 440 schoolteachers and caretakers from north-east Italy completed a questionnaire assessing self-efficacy in managing food allergy and anaphylaxis at school. Exploratory factor analysis was performed. Factors' internal consistency was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha. Factors' scores were estimated using Bartlett approach, and kernel density estimate of distributions was provided. Descriptive statistics explored school personnel's self-efficacy. A regression model assessed the influence of gender, school, job and previous experience. RESULTS Two factors emerged from exploratory factor analysis related to anaphylaxis management (AM) and food allergy management (FAM). The two subscales both showed good internal consistency. School personnel showed lower self-efficacy in recognizing symptoms, administering drugs and guaranteeing full participation to extra-curricular activities to food-allergic students. Participants who previously had food-allergic students showed a significantly increased self-efficacy in AM and a significantly decreased self-efficacy in FAM. CONCLUSIONS The study supports the use of self-efficacy scale to identify specific areas where teachers' confidence in their ability to care for food-allergic students is especially weak. This would empower the development of training programs specifically tailored to the needs of teachers and caregivers.

Bullying is demonstrated to be a critical issue related to food allergy (FA) in children and adolescents. We recently investigated bullying victimization in a sample of food-allergic Italian students matched to healthy controls, finding that food-allergic schoolchildren have a probability of being bullied approximately 2 times higher than healthy peers. 60% of them reported they were victims of some form of bullying at least once in the last 2 months, demonstrating that food-allergic patients should be included in the category of students at high risk of bullying. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Language: en

The early design stages are the most vital for the development of the design of a building project and the decisions taken during these steps are significant for the further progress of the project, regarding aspects like cost, performance, reliability and sustainability. Being able to trace backwards the thoughts that led to these decisions at any point of the design process provides clarity and transparency during the decision making process. Additionally, monitoring the design steps and decisions can lead to further observations on the effects of the design decisions during the early design stage, thus leading to a more sustainable and holistic design approach. This paper claims that efficient monitoring of the decision steps can be achieved employing a computational model of argumentation. Argumentation-based reasoning helps identify the rationale for a decision (i.e. arguments) and the relationships (i.e. attacks and preferences) between conflicting issues involved in making decisions. Our approach provides a method to rigorously trace the resolution of conflicts by extracting the set of acceptable arguments that led to a decision, and may eventually assist designers in analysing complex collaborative decisions within a pre-Building Information Modelling context. This paper was presented at the International Conference on Building Information Modelling (BIM) in Design, Construction and Operations, held in Bristol, 9-11 September 2015.

Information about quantitative characteristics in local businesses and services, such as the number of people waiting in line in a cafe and the number of available fitness machines in a gym, is important for informed decision, crowd management and event detection. In this paper, we investigate the potential of leveraging crowds as sensors to report such quantitative characteristics and investigate how to recover the true quantity values from noisy crowdsourced information. Through experiments, we find that crowd sensors have both bias and variance in quantity sensing, and task difficulties impact the sensing accuracy. Based on these findings, we propose an unsupervised probabilistic model to jointly assess task difficulties, ability of crowd sensors and true quantity values. Our model differs from existing categorical truth finding models as ours is specifically designed to tackle quantitative truth. In addition to devising an efficient model inference algorithm in a batch mode, we also design an even faster online version for handling streaming data. Experimental results in various scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Computational trust mechanisms aim to produce trust ratings from both direct and indirect information about agents' behaviour. Subjective Logic (SL) has been widely adopted as the core of such systems via its fusion and discount operators. In recent research we revisited the semantics of these operators to explore an alternative, geometric interpretation. In this paper we present principled desiderata for discounting and fusion operators in SL. Building upon this we present operators that satisfy these desirable properties, including a family of discount operators. We then show, through a rigorous empirical study, that specific, geometrically interpreted, operators significantly outperform standard SL operators in estimating ground truth. These novel operators offer real advantages for computational models of trust and reputation, in which they may be employed without modifying other aspects of an existing system.

The ubiquity of smartphones has led to the emergence of mobile crowdsourcing tasks such as the detection of spatial events when smartphone users move around in their daily lives. However, the credibility of those detected events can be negatively impacted by unreliable participants with low-quality data. Consequently, a major challenge in mobile crowdsourcing is truth discovery, i.e., to discover true events from diverse and noisy participants’ reports. This problem is uniquely distinct from its online counterpart in that it involves uncertainties in both participants’ mobility and reliability . Decoupling these two types of uncertainties through location tracking will raise severe privacy and energy issues, whereas simply ignoring missing reports or treating them as negative reports will significantly degrade the accuracy of truth discovery. In this paper, we propose two new unsupervised models, i.e., Truth finder for Spatial Events (TSE) and Personalized Truth finder for Spatial Events (PTSE), to tackle this problem. In TSE, we model location popularity, location visit indicators, truths of events, and three-way participant reliability in a unified framework. In PTSE, we further model personal location visit tendencies. These proposed models are capable of effectively handling various types of uncertainties and automatically discovering truths without any supervision or location tracking. Experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our proposed models outperform existing state-of-the-art truth discovery approaches in the mobile crowdsourcing environment.

Methods Among patients (pts) who attended the Food Allergy Centre in Padua in the last 16 months, 44 cow’s milk (CM) and 60 egg (E) allergic pts were recruited. Median age was 9 yrs for CM and 8 yrs for E pts. All pts had reported severe allergic reactions (anaphylaxis), were on a restricted diet for CM or E, and had been prescribed self-injectable epinephrine. All pts underwent an oral food challenge (OFC) for milk/egg before entering the study, to define the threshold of tolerated protein dose. Median CM protein dose was 0,031 g (range 0,00042-1,65); median E protein dose was 0,49 g (range 0,015-3). Up-dosing was scheduled at a 4-6 week intervals and performed in the hospital, under medical supervision. After discharge, pts were requested to daily consume the new tolerated dose for at least one month before the next up-dosing step. Any adverse event or symptom appearing at home could be reported through a 24-hour on-call service. Specific IgE were screened at recruitment: mean value 7.7 kU/L for casein, 3.8kU/L for egg white and 2,3kU/L for ovomucoid. Another blood sample has been scheduled after 12 months to evaluate a change in specific IgE levels. Specific IgG4 to milk/egg proteins will also be screened in both samples.

Methods We observed 54 children (mean age 8,2±4,5) with CMA which had at least one dietetic evaluation and received dietary support to adequately integrate their diet, and 54 children (mean age 8,4±4,7) with no dietary restrictions and no dietary intervention. The assessment of nutrient intakes (energy, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, fibre, calcium, iron) was based on a 7-day food diary. All values were compared to the Italian Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA). Children were divided by age groups: 1-5years (1), 6-10years (2), 11-18years (3). Nutritional status was assessed by measuring weight and height related to the standard for age and sex.

Computational trust mechanisms aim to produce a trust rating from both direct and indirect information about agents behaviour. Josang's Subjective Logic has been widely adopted as the core of such systems via its fusion and discount operators. Recently we proposed an operator for discounting opinions based on geometrical properties, and, continuing this line of investigation, this paper describes a new geometry based fusion operator. We evaluate this fusion operator together with our geometric discount operator in the context of a trust system, and show that our operators outperform those originally described by Josang. A core advantage of our work is that these operators can be used without modifying the remainder of the trust and reputation system.

Background Cow’s milk allergy affects about 2-3 % of general population; the prevalence of egg allergy is 1-2% among childhood. According to the literature the development of tolerance for cow’s milk and for egg is reached in early childhood, in the majority of case. In addiction it is reported that over six years of age there is a significant decrease in the resolution rate both for cow’s milk and egg allergy.

Background Avoidance of food allergens requires adapting dietetic habits, changing nutritional approach. A restriction of food choice can result in a monotonous diet and impact social life. This study investigated the impact of food allergy on nutritional behavior and attitudes of patients and their families. Methods A survey involving mothers of food allergic children aged 0–16 years was carried out. We primarily studied the variables related to the child (age, gender, clinical history, food and social events attitudes). In addition, Spielberg Trait-Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) test was applied to the mothers. We assessed separately the associations between characteristics of child-mother pairs and diet monotony, and attendance to social events, by means of proportional odds regression models. Results Nearly 10% of the 124 participants completely banned allergenic foods at home and 15.3% consumed their meals separately. More than one fourth attended parties rarely or never. Most of the participants reported a “monotonous diet”. Model results suggested significant associations between child age (p = 0.05), mother age (p = 0.05), number of excluded foods (p = 0.003) and monotony of the diet. The attendance of social events was inversely associated with the number of excluded foods (p = 0.04) and the mother’s STAI-T T-score (p = 0.04). Conclusions The results highlighted the impact of food allergy in reducing interest about food and influencing patients’ approach to social life. It is important to support families in managing allergens avoidance.

Background The incidence of food allergy is such that most schools will be attended by at least one food allergic child, obliging school personnel to cope with cases at risk of severe allergic reactions. Schools need to know about food allergy and anaphylaxis management to ensure the personal safety of an increasing number of students. The aim of this study was to investigate Italian school teachers and principals’ knowledge, perceptions and feelings concerning food allergy and anaphylaxis, to deeply understand how to effectively support schools to manage a severely allergic child. In addition a further assessment of the impact of multidisciplinary courses on participants was undertaken. Methods 1184 school teachers and principals attended courses on food allergy and anaphylaxis management at school were questioned before and after their course. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the resulting data. Results Participants tended to overestimate the prevalence of food allergy; 79.3% were able to identify the foods most likely involved and 90.8% knew the most frequent symptoms. 81.9% were familiar with the typical symptoms of anaphylaxis but, while the majority (65.4%) knew that “adrenaline” is the best medication for anaphylaxis, only 34.5% knew indications of using adrenaline in children. 48.5% thoroughly understood dietary exclusion. School personnel considered that food allergic students could have social difficulties (10.2%) and/or emotional consequences (37.2%) because of their condition. “Concern” was the emotion that most respondents (66.9%) associated with food allergy. At the end of the course, the number of correct answers to the test increased significantly. Conclusions Having adequately trained and cooperative school personnel is crucial to significantly reduce emergencies and fatal reactions. The results emphasize the need for specific educational interventions and improvements in school health policies to support schools to deal with allergic students ensuring their safety and psychological well-being.

Background A 6 year old boy came to our attention reporting two recent episodes of diffuse urticaria and eyelid and lip swelling, accompanied by a burning feeling of the oral mucosa and tingling of the throat. In the first episode symptoms appeared after ingestion of a dessert homemade by his grandma: a layer of dough (wheat flour, water and lard) filled with soft cheese and lemon juice, fried in peanut oil and covered by honey. In the second episode, again at his grandma’s, symptoms had a more rapid onset, after the very first bite of a compound made of cheese and parsley. From the age of 6 months the boy had had mild atopic dermatitis; at the age of 3 years he had undergone SPT which were positive for egg white, peanut and grass pollen. Since then he had been on a diet free of egg, peanut and tree nuts; he had recently started to eat baked products containing egg with no symptoms. The boy was commonly eating lemon juice, honey, parsley as well as cow’s milk and its derivates.

The results showed school-aged children are significantly less interested in tasting new foods (p