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This is a personal, informal and non-sponsored commentary on papers recently published by the Italian biomedical research community.
The purpose is to draw attention not only to good Italian research,
but also to examples of good scientific reporting and publishing practices.
The selection of articles is purely subjective, but your suggestions are most welcome. Write to me, Valerie Matarese, Ph.D. at vmatarese @ uptoit.org (copies of non-OA papers are welcome).
This is a free, occasional service of Up To it!
Up To it! Home > Italian biomedical research highlights > October 2008
The highlight of October, I believe, is a randomized controlled trial of diagnostic methods for deep vein thrombosis (DVT), published in JAMA (PMID: 18840838). This multicenter study was carried out in 14 Italian centers and was coordinated by clinicians working here in Treviso (Dr. E. Bernardi) and in Padua (Dr. G. Camporese). The researchers tested
the hypothesis that two ultrasonographic techniques were equivalent in the diagnosis and management of patients with suspected DVT. In particular, they compared whole-leg color Doppler ultrasonography (US) to a combined strategy of 2-point US and D-dimer testing; the first technique requires modern US equipment and specifically trained operators, while the second method is readily available in most hospitals. In the study, more than 2000 symptomatic patients were screened with one or the other technique: patients with abnormal findings received treatment and were excluded from futher study, while those with normal US findings received no treatment but were followed for 3 months for venous thromboembolism. In this follow-up period, there were similar rates of thromboembolism in the two groups (whole leg vs. 2-point US), indicating that the US modalities are equivalent in their ability to diagnose DVT, thereby saving patients with normal findings from unnecessary anticoagulation treatment.
Other Italian studies of note are a report entitled "TMEM16A, a membrane protein associated with calcium-dependent chloride channel activity" published in Science (PMID: 18772398) by researchers from Genoa, and a letter in Nature (PMID: 18784653) on
eukaryotic initiation factor 6 from Dr. S. Biffo and colleagues (Milan, Alessandria and Chicago). Here, I've focused on research that was predominantly Italian, even though there were many other important
multicenter studies with Italian first authors. Posted 31 October 2008
To start out, I wondered how much Italian research is being indexed in PubMed. In October 2008, researchers in Italy wrote more than 2200 articles for PubMed-indexed journals, including 1305 articles published in print and 1009 articles indexed in October (but not necessarily printed that month). There were 98 articles published in the "core clinical journals", 27 reviews and only 136 papers (<6%) available for free (open access). Cancer was a major research topic, with almost 650 articles in this subset. Posted 30 October 2008
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