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Gender-based violence is recognized as a public health problem worldwide. Nevertheless, in Italy, there are no official\ud epidemiological studies about it. We therefore thought that it was important to conduct a study to describe and quantify the\ud problem in Ferrara. This is one of the first systematic studies to be performed by a regional health service authority. The\ud sample examined was taken from patients presenting to the emergency departments of the Sant’Anna University Hospital in the period from January 1, 2008, to December 31, 2013. The final sample comprised 1,359 patients. Data were collected and analyzed using the following software: (1) SAP, acronym for Systems, Applications and Products in data processing, a management software developed by SAP AG; (2) SAS, acronym for ‘‘statistical analysis system,’’ a set of integrated software products enabling work on the database and specific operations such as data input, search, and management; and (3) Excel. The total number of women patients exposed to violence was 1,359, constituting an average of 225 per year.\ud Sixty-one percent of victims of violence and/or abuse were of Italian nationality, followed by women from Central and\ud Eastern Europe, Nigeria, and Morocco. Percentages related to nationalities refer to the three-year period 2010–2013 since\ud before then this indicator was not available. Therefore, the total number of patients was 897. Where violence was\ud perpetrated by an intimate partner, in 98% of the cases the perpetrator was the husband/live-in partner, and in the remaining 2% of cases a boyfriend. Since most women in our sample came within the central age group, that is, aged between 26 and 45, women appear to be most exposed to violence and/or abuse in these years when the stabilization of intimate relationships usually takes place. Patients who experienced violence and/or abuse were mostly of Italian nationality. In our sample, husbands/live-in intimate partners are the main abusers

Introduction: Pseudo-Meigs’ syndrome is a rare condition characterized by female genital cancer, ascites, hydrothorax and tumors other than benign ovarian tumors. Case report: A 30-year-old woman arrived at our clinic with pelvic pain and dyspnea. She underwent an exploratory laparotomy for a large pelvic mass complicated by ascites and hydrothorax. Cytological examination of the effusions was negative for malignant cells. Histological analysis of the tumor mass revealed a uterine epithelioid leiomyosarcoma. After surgery, we observed resolution of the effusions. Conclusion: Uterine leiomyosarcoma and pseudo-Meigs’ syndrome are two rare entities. To our knowledge, there are no similar reports in the literature, and therefore we present this new clinical condition due to its high scientific evidence.

Around 50% of recurrent spontaneous abortions (RSA) remain unexplained. Immunological etiology has been proposed, supported by evidence of lower count of natural killer (NK) cells in peripheral blood of RSA women compared to women with normal delivery history. However, studies concerning the cytotoxic activity of NK cells in women with RSA are still controversial. We performed an observational casecontrol study assaying peripheral blood NK (pNK) cells cytotoxic activity in nonpregnant RSA women compared to non-pregnant women with normal delivery history. Twelve RSA and nine control women were recruited and blood samples were drawn during the luteal phase of ovarian cycle. pNK cells were incubated with target CFSElabeled K562 cells and cytotoxicity was measured by cytofluorimetry. In non-pregnant RSA women pNK cytotoxic activity was not significantly altered compared to control women.In luteal phase of ovarian cycle the level of cytotoxic activity of pNK cells is not a marker for predicting RSA, and clinicians should not use pNK activity as a systematic recurrent pregnancy loss examination.