Assessment of Nontechnical Skills During Resuscitation: Validation in the Italian Version of the TEAM.

SUMMARY STATEMENT: Nontechnical skills (hereinafter referred to as NTS), such as task management, leadership, situational awareness, communication, and decision making contribute to safe and efficient team performance. The importance during cardiopulmonary resuscitation is being increasingly emphasized. We carried out the intercultural adaptation of the TEAM score in Italian and to evaluate the reliability and validity of the resulting Italian version (i-TEAM). A forward-backward translation was made with the author called i-TEAM. Psychometric properties of the i-TEAM score were evaluated, including acceptability, construct validity, and interrater reliability. We divided the participants into 3 groups based on their experience, and we verified if there was a correlation between the final score NTS of i-TEAM and the groups. The Cronbach coefficient was 0.91 for the Total i-TEAM score. The descriptive statistics showed that there was no correlation between NTS score and experience (group). Our results show that i-TEAM has psychometric properties similar to the original score.

Morphological evaluation of sympathetic renal innervation in patients with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease.

Several evidences support the hypothesis that patients affected by autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ASPKD) show a sympathetic renal hyperactivity. Nevertheless, no morphological evidences are available yet. Therefore, the aim of the study was to demonstrate that an increase in sympathetic renal artery innervation was present in the ADPKD patients by using histological methods. In addition, here we correlated the sympathetic renal artery innervation with the evolutionary state of ADPKD (increase in volume of kidney, onset of chronic renal failure and hypertension). To this end, peri-adventitial innervation of renal arteries was studied using morphological methods from 49 patients in total: 29 underwent surgical nephrectomies for ADPKD and 20 non-dialysis patients (CTRL group) undergoing nephrectomy for other diseases. Nerve density (number of nerves per mm2) was evaluated in the peri-adventitial tissue in a concentric ring that was located within 2 mm from the beginning of the adventitia by using immunohistochemistry. The total nerve density was significantly increased in the ADPKD group (1.26 ± 0.82 × mm2) as compared to controls (0.78 ± 0.40 × mm2) (p = 0.02). Hypertensive patients with ADPKD showed a greater nerve density than control hypertensives. However, the increase in renal sympathetic innervation in the ADPKD patients was found to be independent of hypertension, resistance to antihypertensive therapy, age, sex and kidney volume, as demonstrated by the uni and multivariate analysis. In conclusion, our study better clarifies the effect of sympathetic hyperactivity in the progression of polycystic disease.