J. Interdiscip. Res. Appl. Med., Volume 3, Issue 2 (12 2019) – 5 articles

Overweight and obesity in paediatric population are becoming serious public health problems, reaching epidemic proportions in the world and being recognized as the “new pandemic of the twenty first century”. Food choices and nutritional habits are strictly linked to the cultural dimension of communities and symbolic representations of food. Even in Italy, young generations are moving away from the culture of Mediterranean Diet (MD) – rec-ognized as Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO – being at risk of losing both their identity and the health benefits associated with MD. In this frame, health pedagogy (i.e. nutritional education) can play a funda-mental role in promoting the adoption of healthy eating behaviours since childhood, addressing at the same time such crucial binomials as food-health and environment-sustainability. In the last decades, a huge variety of school-based obesity prevention programs have been introduced. Among those, according to scientific evidence, narrative-based strategies may be helpful in promoting healthy nutritional habits among schoolchildren. Actually, narration is a useful tool in didactic practice, impacting on the emotional and motivational dimension of learning, thus represent-ing a valuable vehicle of health contents. On these bases, as DREAM Laboratory of Health Peda-gogy, we have proposed to the Department of Prevention of the Local Health Authority ASL Lecce – specifi-cally involving the Food Hygiene and Nutrition Service (SIAN) – to implement a research protocol aimed at as-sessing if narrative-based strategies could be more effective than other educational approaches in promoting the adoption of healthy eating behaviours among schoolchildren. Full article

The health sector is being studied as an object of individual interest with that of society, in order to pursue equity without sacrificing efficiency, citizens of different Italian regions can access services that are equal in quantity and quality. In health care, the problem from the economic point of view is relevant as the health needs are infinite, while resources are limited and scarce. In the field of health, the objectives have evolved, passing from the elimination of infectious diseases to the ex-tension of life. The World Health Organization defines health as a right to be counted among other fun-damental rights that belong to people. The analysis of the work carried out focuses on the concept of healthcare seen through the eyes of economists, of how to deal with the fundamental economic questions of what, how and for whom to produce dictated by the distance between need and resources that drives the search for greater productivity and fair re source allocation systems; discussing the need and expectations for public health intervention. The Italian Health Service has founded its origins on the recognition of health as an individual right linked to cit-izenship and as a collective asset to be protected. The financing is based on the principle of the welfare state, which connects the payment to the contribution capacity and the use of services to anyone who manifests a need within the Italian territory. Since the beginning of the 1990s, a process of reorganization of the health system was initiated, which was main-ly oriented towards the research and improvement of tools for assessing the quality perceived by the user. The search for tools that can reduce as much as possible the inconvenience that the citizen may encounter in contact with highly bureaucratic systems and structures such as health care tend to be. The socio-demographic evolution of the population and the need to balance the available resources with the quality of the healthcare provided, require the definition of new ways of providing health services. In the field of public health, a growing demand for quality in the provision of care and assistance services has intensified in re-cent years. The increase in interfaces between telematic networks and health and social services is part of the general transformation process of world society due to the progressive increase in the degree of use of ICT ser vices. The improvement of the quality of health services concerns the management of total quality understood as the management process aimed at establishing the organizational activities that allow the improvement of overall performance. The success of the organization lies in the continuous and careful communication of the needs related to health by users caused by bad lifestyles, therefore prevention and socio-health policies should reduce the probability of citizens getting sick. From the analysis carried out, the proposal that is made is that the mission assigned to hospitals on the basis of their classification allows users to be "empowered" to health-related problems without compromising the princi-ples of effectiveness, legal efficiency and health law. If the goal of our communities is to improve the health level of the population, it is important to promote health policies not only in terms of health services, but also aimed at removing or in any case reducing the impact of a series of risk factors. Therefore, it is hoped that future health policies will increasingly target individual and social risk factors, with health interventions also in sectors such as education, working conditions, transport and nutrition. Full article

Mounier Kuhn syndrome or tracheobronchomegaly is characterized by a marked dilatation of the trachea and main bronchi that can extend to the periphery of the lungs. Dilation is due to an alteration of the cartilaginous and membranous structure of the trachea and bronchi. It is a pathology much more frequent in men. The ae-tiology is unclear. The clinical case in question concerns a 67-year-old man who has reported recurrent epi-sodes of bronchopulmonary infections and hemoptysis, after undergoing instrumental investigations (fi-brobroncoscopy and chest CT), the diagnosis of Tracheobroncomegalia or Mounier Kuhn syndrome was formu-lated. Full article

The production of speech requires the interplay of a number of cognitive and motoric activities, which make it an interesting object of study from both a linguistic and a medical point of view. In this paper, we discuss, first, the features and domain of application of the most used technologies in linguistic research on speech produc-tion, focusing on those that have been applied to medicine. Second, we offer an insight into the main results that have been obtained so far in studying dysarthria in Italian Parkinson’s Disease, as an example of the interdiscipli-nary, experimental research at the border between linguistics and medicine. Full article

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is the most common respiratory disorder in Western societies: according to a first recent worldwide epidemiological study, it was estimated that 936 million patients aged 30-69 years with mild to moderate OSA and 425 million patients aged 30-69 years with severe OSA requiring CPAP treatment. Recently, the Centre for Research on Health and Social Care Management (CERGAS) at the Bocconi University of Milan has estimated that in Italy, the prevalence of moderate to severe OSA occurs in the 27% of the general population, with an overall prevalence of mild to medium-severe OSA of more than 24 million people aged be-tween 15 and 74 years (54% of the adult population), while from a practical point of view, Italian doctors diag-nosed only 460.000 moderate-severe patients (4 per cent of the estimated prevalence) and 230,000 patients were treated (2 per cent of the estimated prevalence), highlighting a substantial gap between diagnosis and treatment. In addition, OSA patients are often obese and the close correlation between the two conditions suggests that the prevalence of OSA will increase in the short term as obesity increases. At the individual level, OSA leads to a significant decrease in quality of life (HRQoL) and intellectual and mechanical/functional capacities with reduced physical activity, as well as a marked increase in sudden death and risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Emerging epidemiological data also suggest that the severity of OSA associated with the severity of chronic noc-turnal hypoxemia (CIH) correlates with an increased risk of diabetes mellitus, metabolic syndrome (MS) and can-cer. OSA is also an important risk factor for high blood pressure, acute and chronic atrial fibrillation (FAC), chronic coronary artery disease (CAD) and stroke. It is therefore intuitive that at the social level, OSA also leads to a decline in economic productivity. This article addresses OSA from a new epidemiological perspective, according to the latest prevalence studies, and addresses emerging problems related to the diagnosis. Full article