Acquired equivalence (AE) is a form of feedback-based associative learning where the subject learns that two or more stimuli are equivalent in terms of being mapped onto the same outcomes or responses. While several studies dealt with how various neurological and psychiatric conditions affect performance on AE tasks (typically with small populations), studies dealing with AE in healthy subjects are rare, and no study has ever made an attempt to plot the development of this form of learning from the childhood through adulthood. In a cross-sectional study, we assessed the AE performance of 265 healthy subjects aged 3 to 52 years with the computer-based Rutgers Equivalence Test (Fish-Face Test, FFT). The test assesses three main aspects of AE: the efficiency of pair learning, the efficiency of the retrieval of acquired pairs, and the ability to generalise previous knowledge to a new stimulus that partially overlaps with the previous ones. It has been demonstrated in imaging studies that the initial, pair learning phase of this specific test is dependent on the basal ganglia, while its generalization phase requires the hippocampi. We found that both pair learning and retrieval exhibited development well into adulthood, but generalisation did not, after having reached its adult-like level by the age of 6. We propose that these findings might be explained by the integrative encoding theory that focuses on the parallel dopaminergic mid-brain-striatum/midbrain-hippocampus connections.

Although national and international guidelines on the management of childhood and adolescent fever are available, some inadequate practices persist, both from parents and healthcare professionals. The main goal of bringing children’s temperature back to normal can lead to the choice of inappropriate drugs or non-necessary combination/alternation of antipyretic treatments. This behavior has been described in the last 35 years with the concept of fever-phobia, caused also by the dissemination of unscientific information and social media. It is therefore increasingly important that pediatricians continue to provide adequate information to parents in order to assess the onset of signs of a possible condition of the child’s discomfort rather than focusing only on temperature. In fact, there is no clear and unambiguous definition of discomfort in literature. Clarifying the extent of the feverish child’s discomfort and the tools that could be used to evaluate it would therefore help recommend that antipyretic treatment is appropriate only if fever is associated with discomfort.

BackgroundDespite the steady growth of the immigrant population in Italy, data on the health status of immigrants are scarce. Our main goals were to measure Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL), Self-Rated Health (SRH) and morbidity among immigrants in Genoa. We aimed to assess the relative contribution of some social, structural and behavioral determinants to “within-group” health disparities.MethodsWe enrolled 502 subjects by means of snowball sampling. The SF-12 questionnaire, integrated with socio-demographic and health-related items, was used. Multivariate logistic and Poisson regression models were applied in order to identify characteristics associated with poor SRH, lower SF-12 scores and prevalence of self-reported morbidities.ResultsSubjects showed relatively moderate levels of HRQoL (median physical and mental scores of 51.6 and 47.3, respectively) and about 15% of them rated their health as fair or poor. Lower scores in the physical dimension of HRQoL were associated with the presence of morbidities and immigration for work and religious reasons, while those who had migrated for religious and family reasons displayed a lower probability of lower scores in the mental dimension of HRQoL. Poor SRH was associated with female gender, overweight/obesity and presence of morbidities. Moreover, compared with immigrants from countries with a low human development index, immigrants from highly developed societies showed significantly lower odds of reporting poor SRH. About one-third of respondents reported at least one medical condition, while the prevalence of multi-morbidity was 10%. Females, over 45-year-olds, overweight and long-term immigrants had a higher prevalence of medical conditions.ConclusionsOur study confirms the presence of health inequalities within a heterogeneous immigrant population. HRQoL, SRH and morbidity are valid, relatively rapid and cheap tools for measuring health inequalities, though they do so in different ways. These indicators should be used with caution and, if possible, simultaneously, as they could help to identify and to monitor more vulnerable subjects among immigrants.

In this study, a series of tests exploring long-term verbal memory (the Short Story Test), attention (a modified version of Attentional Matrices and the Trail Making Test) and frontal functions (a modified version of the Frontal Assessment Battery) have been standardised on an Italian population of 283 children aged 5-14. Raw scores for each test have been adjusted for a series of variables (child's age, years of parents' education, handedness, gender) and transformed in equivalent scores enabling direct comparison across measures. This study was promoted by LICE (the Italian League Against Epilepsy) in order to provide Italian instruments standardised on the developmental age population and to study some of the most frequently impaired cognitive functions in epilepsy.