Assessment of nutritional status and therapy in emergency Medicine settings.

Hospital malnutrition is becoming a clinical concern. Our aim was to determine the prevalence of hospital malnutrition through Nutritional Risk Screening 2002 (NRS) and to evaluate nutritional risk through a prospective study. Nutritional status was assessed collecting anthropometric parameters together with the data relating to the diseases in the medical records of patients admitted to the Department of Emergency Medicine of the "Sant'Eugenio" Hospital. One hundred and sixty patients were retrospectively enrolled during a 3-month observational period. The risk of malnutrition was detected in 52% of patients (of whom 38% at risk and 62% at serious risk). The NRS score was positively correlated with patient age, days between hospital admission and nutritional assessment, disease severity, length of hospital stay and catabolism (p less than 0.05); Basal Energy Expenditure (BEE) and mean arm circumference (MUAC) were negatively correlated with positive outcome (p less than 0.05). No correlations were found in the NRS score, gender, height, weight, Body Mass Index (BMI) and Total Energetic Expenditure (TEE) (p=n.s). A high prevalence of the risk of malnutrition may be detected in the emergency medicine setting, particularly in the geriatric population. The NRS score is not strictly related to BMI, but rather is an excellent tool for disease prognosis, as well as nutritional screening.

Integral relations for three-body continuum states with the adiabatic expansion.

The application of the hyperspherical adiabatic expansion to describe three-body scattering states suffers from the problem of very slow convergence. Contrary to what happens for bound states, a huge number of hyper-radial equations has to be solved, and even if done, the extraction of the scattering amplitude is problematic. In this Letter we show how to obtain accurate scattering phase shifts using the hyperspherical adiabatic expansion. To this aim two integral relations, derived from the Kohn variational principle, are used. The convergence of this procedure is as fast as for bound states.

Sympathetic cooling by collisions with ultracold rare gas atoms, and recent progress in optical Stark deceleration.

We propose a general scheme for sympathetic cooling of molecules to microK temperatures on a timescale of seconds. Experimental parameters have been estimated from theory, which indicate the viability of the scheme. This method, which is particularly suited to optical Stark deceleration, utilises ultracold, laser cooled metastable rare gas atoms quenched to their ground state as collision partners to co-trapped molecular species within a deep optical trap (150 mK). We also describe the measurement of the role of laser-induced molecular alignment on the dipole force in optical Stark deceleration and outline progress towards the realisation of chirped optical Stark deceleration for producing slow molecular beams with mK energy spreads.

Subclinical coeliac disease.

The prevalence of coeliac disease (CD) was investigated in an epidemiological study of school children from a district of Rome. Mass screening of IgA-AGA levels (anti-gliadin antibody) were determined in blood samples from the study group and the results were positive in 19 children. Eighteen of these agreed to undergo endoscopic biopsy. Histological study of the duodenal specimens revealed villous atrophy in twelve children none of whom had the characteristic symptoms of CD. The most frequent complaints were abdominal pain, aphtous stomatitis, and atopic dermatitis. The high prevalence of CD in this study suggests the necessity for the widest range of epidemiological research.