Ricerc@Sapienza

Aim: The most frequent cause of lower respiratory tract infection in infants is bronchiolitis. Up to now there is no agreement on the upper limit age of bronchiolitis. Our aim was to identify if there are clinical differences in infants hospitalized for bronchiolitis between 0–6 months and 6–12 months of age. A secondary aim was to establish whether there was differences in terms of recurrent wheezing at 12, 24, and 36 months of follow-up.

Objective/Background: Massive changes in brain morphology and function in the first years of life reveal a
postero-anterior trajectory of cortical maturation accompanied by regional modifications of NREM sleep.
One of the most sensible marker of this maturation process is represented by electroencephalographic
(EEG) activity within the frequency range of sleep spindles. However, direct evidence that these changes
actually reflect maturational modifications of fast and slow spindles still lacks.
Our study aimed at answering the following questions:

This retrospective study aims at helping physicians select babies considered at risk for fatal events during sleep. It does so by describing the clinical features and outcome of worrying infants’ behaviour during sleep, with the activation of an emergency medical service and/or emergency department, subsequently referred to the Centre for Paediatric Sleep Medicine and sudden infant death syndrome, Regina Margherita Children’s Hospital, Turin, Italy.

In the last twenty years, despite high vaccination coverage, epidemics of pertussis are occurring in both developing and developed countries. Many reasons could explain the pertussis resurgence: the increasing awareness of the disease, the availability of new diagnostic tests with higher sensitivity, the emergence of new Bordetella pertussis (B. pertussis) strains different from those contained in the current vaccines, the asymptomatic transmission of B. pertussis in adolescents and adults and the shorter duration of protection given by the acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine.

Background: Inguinal hernia repair (IHR) is a common operation in preterm and term infants. Recently, spinal anesthesia (SA) has been proposed as an alternative to avoid exposure to general anesthesia (GA) during early life. The aim of this study was to compare surgical outcomes of open IHR performed under SA versus GA in neonates and infants, and to detect criteria to predict the success or failure of SA. Materials and methods: This is a 6-year, single center, nonrandomized interventional study (2013–2019). SA was performed with 0.5% bupivacaine.

We aimed to study respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) genotype distribution, clinical presentation, and disease severity in infants with bronchiolitis from RSV subtypes and new RSV genotypes. Methods: We prospectively enrolled previously healthy term infants less than one year old hospitalized for bronchiolitis in an Italian University hospital over 12 epidemic seasons. In 312 nasopharyngeal washings positive to RSV, we sequenced the viral genotype and analysed it according to patient data. Strain-specific RSV loads were quantified for 300 specimens.