•Thrombosis and thrombocytopenia after SARS-CoV-2 viral vector vaccine suggests vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT).•Thrombosis in unusual sites (splenic, portal, mesenteric, ...adrenal) is typical of VITT.•Anti-PF4 antibody tests, if available, should be undertaken rapidly for diagnosis.•Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) could mask functional tests to confirm a diagnosis of VITT.•Treatment with IVIg may be associated with false-negative functional tests.
Vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT) has emerged as a rare side effect of adenoviral vector-based vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and is most frequently reported after use of the Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca) vaccine. This report describes a case of severe thrombocytopenia associated with massive pulmonary embolism and portal vein thrombosis occurring 13 days after the administration of the single-dose adenoviral vector-based vaccine Ad26.COV2.S (Janssen Vaccines). Based on early clinical suspicion, the patient quickly received treatment with corticosteroids and intravenous immunoglobulin, followed by a rapid increase in platelet count that allowed timely administration of full-dose anticoagulation. Treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin, however, could mask the ability of anti-platelet factor 4-heparin antibodies to bind and activate platelets in the presence of heparin, leading to false-negative results on the immunoassay functional test. Therefore, if VITT is suspected, blood samples for diagnostic confirmation should be collected prior to any treatment to improve diagnostic performance.
City of the Sun Campanella, Tommaso
2009, 2014, 2009-05-01
eBook
The City of the Sun is an important early utopian work by Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, written after his imprisonment for sedition and heresy. Given as the dialog between "a Grandmaster of ...the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain", The City of the Sun outlines Campanella's vision for a unified world, where property is held in common - Campanella including women and children in this one - and peacefully governed by a theocratic monarchy.
Vehicle target tracking is a sub-field of increasing and increasing interest in the vehicular networking research area, in particular for its potential application in dense urban areas with low ...associated costs, e.g., by exploiting existing monitoring infrastructures and cooperative collaboration of regular vehicles. Inspired by the concept of trap coverage area, we have originally designed and implemented an original protocol for vehicle tracking in wide-scale urban scenarios, called TCAP. TCAP is capable of achieving the needed performance while exploiting a limited number of inexpensive sensors (e.g., public-authority cameras already installed at intersections for traffic monitoring), and opportunistic vehicle collaboration, with high scalability and low overhead if compared with state-of-the-art literature. In particular, the wide set of reported results show i) the suitability of our TCAP tracking in the challenging urban conditions of high density of vehicles, ii) the very weak dependency of TCAP performance from topology changes/constraints (e.g., street lengths and speed limits), iii) the TCAP capability of self-adapting to differentiated runtime conditions.
•Accumulating evidence suggest that treatment with high-titer COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) may be effective in immunocompromised COVID-19 patients.•Recent randomized clinical trials exploring ...the effectiveness of treatment with CCP in immunocompetent individuals with COVID-19. However, a simil level of evidence in selected cohorts of patients with primary or secondary impaired immune response is lacking and might be highly warranted.•Results from this case report suggest that the host T-cell specific response to SARS-CoV-2 might not be sufficient to reduce viral load in the absence of neutralizing antibodies.•Acquired immune antibodies and/or related components passively infused with CCP might have a key role in boosting the plasma recipient response to the virus and promoting complete viral clearance.
Management of immunocompromised COVID-19 patients is the object of current debate. Accumulating evidence suggest that treatment with high-titer COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) may be effective in this characteristic clinical scenario.
A 52-years old immunocompromised female patient, previously treated with rituximab for low grade B-cell lymphoma, showed prolonged SARS-CoV-2 shedding and a long-term course of signs of severe COVID-19. A first cycle of treatment with remdesivir, a nucleotide analogue prodrug effective in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 replication, did not provide fully and sustained clinical remission. A second hospitalization was deemed necessary after 10 days from the first hospital discharge due to recrudescence of symptoms of severe COVID-19 and the evidence of bilateral interstitial pneumonia at the chest-CT scan. Clinical and radiological findings completely disappeared after CCP administration. The viral culture confirmed the absence of SARS-CoV-2-related cytopathic effect. The clinical evaluation, performed two months after hospital discharge, was unremarkable.
Findings from our case report suggest that the host T-cell specific response to SARS-CoV-2 is not sufficient to reduce viral load in the absence of neutralizing antibodies. Acquired immune antibodies and/or related components passively infused with CCP might help in boosting the plasma recipient response to the virus and promoting complete viral clearance.
Independently from negative results in immunocompetent individuals, the potential effectiveness of CCP infusion in selected cohorts of patients with primary or secondary impaired immune response should be tested. Further research about mechanisms of host response in immunocompromised patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection is required.
A contemporary of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) was a controversial philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet who was persecuted during the Inquisition and spent much ...of his adult life imprisoned because of his heterodox views. He is best known today for two works: The City of the Sun, a dialogue inspired by Plato’s Republic, in which he prophesies a vision of a unified, peaceful world governed by a theocratic monarchy; and his well-meaning Defense of Galileo, which may have done Galileo more harm than good because of Campanella’s previous conviction for heresy. But Campanella’s philosophical poems are where his most forceful and undiluted ideas reside. His poetry is where his faith in observable and experimental sciences, his astrological and occult wisdom, his ideas about deism, his anti-Aristotelianism, and his calls for religious and secular reform most put him at odds with both civil and church authorities. For this volume, Sherry Roush has selected Campanella’s best and most idiosyncratic poems, which are masterpieces of sixteenth-century Italian lyrics, displaying a questing mind of great, if unorthodox, brilliance, and showing Campanella’s passionate belief in the intrinsic harmony between the sacred and secular.
Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) je slovenskemu bralstvu znan morda poimensko in zanimiv kvečjemu aforistično kot renesančni utopist in naravoslovec de auditu. V filozofski svet enega najizvirnejših ...veleumov na pragu novega veka vstopamo skozi stranski, a ne postranski vhod bogatega korespondenčnega korpusa, ki je – tako kot glavnina avtorjevih temeljnih del – nastajal med 27-letnim prestajanjem inkvizicijske kazni, od zadnjih vzdihljajev cinquecenta do leta 1626, in ga smemo prištevati med bero velikih renesančnih epistolarijev od umotvornega Petrarke do Salutatija, Vergerija starejšega, Bracciolinija, Brunija, Barbara, Piccolominija, Ficina in Machiavellija.
Tommaso Campanella Tommaso Campanella; Jernej Šček; David Bandelj
Keria: Studia Latina et Graeca,
12/2021, Letnik:
23, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) je slovenskemu bralstvu znan morda poimensko in zanimiv kvečjemu aforistično kot renesančni utopist in naravoslovec de auditu. V filozofski svet enega najizvirnejših ...veleumov na pragu novega veka vstopamo skozi stranski, a ne postranski vhod bogatega korespondenčnega korpusa, ki je – tako kot glavnina avtorjevih temeljnih del – nastajal med 27-letnim prestajanjem inkvizicijske kazni, od zadnjih vzdihljajev cinquecenta do leta 1626, in ga smemo prištevati med bero velikih renesančnih epistolarijev od umotvornega Petrarke do Salutatija, Vergerija starejšega, Bracciolinija, Brunija, Barbara, Piccolominija, Ficina in Machiavellija.
Objective: Serum myostatin (sMSTN) is a proteic compound that regulates muscle growth and production of extracellular matrix. sMSTN also exerts profibrotic and antihypertrophic effects on smooth ...muscle cells and fibroblasts. Aortic-brachial pulse wave velocity ratio (PWVr) is a pressure-independent measure of arterial stiffness gradient between the aorta and peripheral muscular arteries, known to reflect early arterial ageing and to be associated with cardiovascular (CV) risk. We explored the association between sMSTN and arterial stiffness gradient, measured through the PWVr, in a cohort of healthy adolescents. Design and method: 128 healthy subjects (mean age 17 ± 2 years, 59% men) were randomly recruited among participants of the Metabolic And Cardiovascular Investigation at School, TErni (MACISTE) study, a cross-sectional survey conducted at the “Renato Donatelli” High School in Terni, Italy. sMSTN was measured through enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. PWV was measured by applanation tonometry (SphygmoCor) along the carotid-femoral (cf-PWV, aortic) and the carotid-radial (cr-PWV, brachial) pathways and expressed as the ratio between cf-PWV and cr-PWV. Blood pressure (BP) was recorded at the same time of PWV measurement and expressed as systolic/diastolic BP percentiles (z-score) based on age, sex and height. Results: Mean BP was 126 ± 12/68 ± 8 mmHg (z-score 1.2 ± 0.9/0.3 ± 0.7). Mean Cf-PWV was 5.1 ± 0.9 m/s, cr-PWV was 6.9 ± 0.9 m/s. PWVr was 0.75 ± 0.12. PWVr increased linearly at increasing quartiles of sMSTN (0.71 ± 0.09, 0.74 ± 0.13, 0.75 ± 0.14, 0.78 ± 0.12, p for trend = 0.03, Figure 1). Subjects with PWVr above average had higher BMI (21.7 ± 2.6 Kg/m2 vs 20.8 ± 2.3 Kg/m2, p = 0.04) and SBP (1.39 ± 0.97 vs 0.97 ± 0.91, p = 0.01), whereas they did not differ in terms of age, sex, heart rate, measures of adiposity, and other CV risk factors. In a multivariate linear model, PWVr was independently predicted by SBP and sMSTN, both if expressed as continuous variable (beta = 0.21, p = 0.018) or in quartiles (beta = 0.26, p = 0.011). Conclusions: In a cohort of healthy Italian adolescents, sMSTN was positively and independently associated to increased PWVr, a measure of arterial stiffness gradient. Our preliminary results raise the hypothesis that sMSTN might differentially interfere with structural and functional components of the arterial wall, and ultimately might contribute to the accelerated arterial ageing in adolescents.
Handgrip strength (HGS), a simple tool for the evaluation of muscular strength, is independently associated with negative prognosis in many diseases. It is unknown whether HGS is prognostically ...relevant in COVID-19. We evaluated the ability of HGS to predict clinical outcomes in people with COVID-19-related pneumonia. 118 patients (66% men, 63 ± 12 years), consecutively hospitalized to the “Santa Maria” Terni University Hospital for COVID-19-related pneumonia and respiratory failure, underwent HGS measurement (Jamar hand-dynamometer) at ward admission. HGS was normalized to weight
2/3
(nHGS) The main end-point was the first occurrence of death and/or endotracheal intubation at 14 days. Twenty-two patients reached the main end-point. In the Kaplan–Meyer analysis, the Log rank test showed significant differences between subjects with lower than mean HGS normalized to weight
2/3
(nHGS) (< 1.32 kg/Kg
2/3
) vs subjects with higher than mean nHGS. (
p
= 0.03). In a Cox-proportional hazard model, nHGS inversely predicted the main end-point (hazard ratio, HR = 1.99 each 0.5 kg/Kg
2/3
decrease,
p
= 0.03), independently from age, sex, body mass index, ratio of partial pressure arterial oxygen and fraction of inspired oxygen (PaO
2
/FiO
2
ratio), hypertension, diabetes, estimated glomerular filtration rate and history of previous cardiovascular cardiovascular disease. These two latter also showed independent association with the main end-point (HR 1.30,
p
= 0.03 and 3.89,
p
< 0.01, respectively). In conclusion, nHGS measured at hospital admission, independently and inversely predicts the risk of poor outcomes in people with COVID-19-related pneumonia. The evaluation of HGS may be useful in early stratifying the risk of adverse prognosis in COVID-19.
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