A MSFD complementary approach for the assessment of pressures, knowledge and data gaps in Southern European Seas: The PERSEUS experience.

PERSEUS project aims to identify the most relevant pressures exerted on the ecosystems of the Southern European Seas (SES), highlighting knowledge and data gaps that endanger the achievement of SES Good Environmental Status (GES) as mandated by the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). A complementary approach has been adopted, by a meta-analysis of existing literature on pressure/impact/knowledge gaps summarized in tables related to the MSFD descriptors, discriminating open waters from coastal areas. A comparative assessment of the Initial Assessments (IAs) for five SES countries has been also independently performed. The comparison between meta-analysis results and IAs shows similarities for coastal areas only. Major knowledge gaps have been detected for the biodiversity, marine food web, marine litter and underwater noise descriptors. The meta-analysis also allowed the identification of additional research themes targeting research topics that are requested to the achievement of GES.

Chronic neutrophilic leukemia: description of a new case with karyotypic abnormalities.

A further case of chronic neutrophilic leukemia (CNL) is reported. On karyotype analysis of the bone marrow aspirate, all of the examined cells showed trisomy of chromosome 9 and partial deletion of the long arms of chromosome 20. This anomaly has never before been reported in CNL, and it could be directly associated to the disease.

[Value of some biological variables for the diagnosis of alcoholism in a hospital population]. / Valore di alcune variabili biologiche per la diagnosi di alcoolismo in una popolazione ospedaliera.

279 male patients consecutively admitted to a medical ward were interviewed about their drinking habits using a CAGE-like questionnaire and were subdivided into teetotallers, normal-, borderline-, heavy-drinkers. The mean values of the following laboratory tests resulted significantly different in heavy drinkers compared with the others: mean cell volume, gamma-glutamyl-transpeptidase, serum urea (BUN), SGOT, SGPT, total bilirubin. No significant difference was found for triglycerides, uric acid, albumin and gamma-globulins. Sensitivity, specificity, predictive values of positive test and negative test, "goodness" were calculated for each of the 6 above-mentioned tests. Each of them had a linear correlation (inverse for BUN, direct for the others) between amount of alcohol intake and level of the test.