Ricerc@Sapienza

Introduction: Available preventive drug treatments for migraine lack complete efficacy and often have unpleasant adverse effects. Hence, their clinical utility and therapeutic adherence are limited. Noninvasive neurostimulation methods applied over various peripheral sites (forehead, mastoid, upper arm, cervical vagus nerve) have raised great interest because of their excellent efficacy/tolerance profile. Among them external trigeminal nerve stimulation (eTNS) was first to obtain FDA approval for migraine therapy.

Pain is one of the most common symptoms among patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), and is often under recognized and not adequately managed in hemodialysis (HD) patients. Barriers to adequate pain management include poor awareness of the problem, insufficient medical education, fears of possible drug-related side effects, and common misconceptions about the inevitability of pain in elderly and HD patients. Caregivers working in HD should be aware of the possible consequences of inadequate pain assessment and management.

SIR, We report a case of a woman with a biopsy-proven IgG4-related ulcerative lesion of the superior lip, extended to the nasal cavities, and serum positivity for pANCA assay.

Commentary

Migraine is ranked as the third most prevalent disorder, the eight
most burdensome disease and the seventh cause of disability
worldwide [1]. Although its prevalence decreases after the age of
60, it still affects 7% of women and 3% of men over 65. A successful
treatment of a late-life migraine is particularly important due to the
association with increased risk of ischemic stroke, white matter
lesions and other transient neurological phenomena (migraine
accompaniments) responsive to prophylactic medications

Field independence (FI) has been found to correlate with a wide range of cognitive processes requiring cognitive restructuring. Cognitive restructuring, that is going beyond the information given by the setting, is pivotal in creating stable mental representations of the environment,the so-called "cognitive maps," and it affects visuo-spatial abilities underpinning environmental navigation. Here we evaluated whether FI, by fostering cognitive restructuring of environmental cues on the basis of an internal frame of reference, affects the learning and retrieval of a novel environment.

Field independence refers to the ability to perceive details from the surrounding context as a whole and to represent the environment by relying on an internal reference frame. Conversely, field dependence individuals tend to focus their attention on single environmental features analysing them individually. This cognitive style affects several visuo-spatial abilities including spatial memory. This study assesses both the effect of field independence and field dependence on performance displayed on virtual environments of different complexity.

Background Oral rehydration therapy is the recommended treatment for acute childhood gastroenteritis. The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy and safety of gelatin tannate plus oral rehydration compared with oral rehydration alone.

Prenatal exposure to the antiepileptic and mood stabilizer valproic acid (VPA) is an environmental risk factor for autism spectrum disorders (ASD), although recent epidemiological studies show that the public awareness of this association is still limited. Based on the clinical findings, prenatal VPA exposure in rodents is a widely used preclinical model of ASD. However, there is limited information about the precise biochemical mechanisms underlying the link between ASD and VPA.

Pain, particularly chronic pain, is still an unsolved medical condition. Central goals in pain control are to provide analgesia of adequate efficacy and to reduce complications associated with the currently available drugs. Opioids are the mainstay for the treatment of moderate to severe pain. However, opioid pain medications also cause detrimental side effects, thus highlighting the need of innovative and safer analgesics. Opioids mediate their actions via the activation of opioid receptors, with the mu-opioid receptor as the primary target for analgesia, but also for side effects.