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Introduction. Cancer patients often soffer by anxiety, depression or psychological distress. Psychosocial assistance plays a key role in incurable disease. IPOS is useful for detecting psychoemotional symptoms and social needs: validated in the Italian context, it is adopted in Piacenza’s Hospice “La Casa di Iris”. Aim of this study is to describe the psychosocial condition of patients admitted in the Hospice, during the first year of utilization of the IPOS score, and to verify the need to have professionals for undertaking that condition. Methods. After approval by the ethics committee, medical records of adult cancer patients admitted to hospice between March 2018 and April 2019 were analyzed. Patients unable to complete IPOS on their own were excluded. Results. The sample consisted of 211 patients. Various physical symptoms are reported, but 22.3% of patients reports anxiety most of the time and 15.2% anxiety all the time. 19.4% reports depression most of the time and 9.5% always. 46.4% of patients does not take drugs for psychoemotional symptoms. Discussion and conclusions. Even in the last phase of the disease, physical symptoms are the most reported, but most of patients shows uncontrolled psychosocial symptoms. It seems necessary to have to turn to health professionals for the multidimensional evaluation of symptoms and for the management of psychosocial symptoms, and to palliative care services for a multidisciplinary management.

The allocation to general vs specialist palliative home care services is decided by theHome Palliative Care Unit (HPCU). The HPCU needs validated tools analyzing and stratifying the complexity and supporting good partnership working between Generalist and Specialist PCT. Methods. In order to define factors supporting the choice of Generalist versus Specialist PCT, Experts of Palliative Care Service of Emilia Romagna Region (Italy) according to Regional Health Policies Group defined a new tool to identify palliative care patient’s and family’s needs. We created a screening tool identifying terminally ill cancer metastatic patients in need of referral to a PC Generalist or Specialist PC at home than we performed a prospective, observational, no profit, multicenter study to testing it. The questionnaire compiled by the HPCU team to describe what it detected at home was reviewed by a second team (Comparison Team 2) to assess the convergent validity and inter-observer reproducibility. Results. There were 119 patients who could be evaluated. The dimensions investigated by the instrument that were most relevant in the assignment of the specialist care level were: presence of an evolutionary-unstable clinical picture, finding of limited therapeutic options for symptom control, presence of dyspnea. The convergent validity was moderate in this first phase of the study (Cohen’s Kappa 0.49); the inter-observer reproducibility in Team 2 was excellent (Cohen’s Kappa 0.94). Conclusions. The tool proved to be an easy and quick to use tool. The results of the first step are encouraging and guide the new research protocol as part of the Emilia-Romagna Year 2020 Health Research Program aimed at retesting the modified tool in the formulation of the questions, calibrated based on the results of the study.

This article deals with the touching of body in palliative care. The physical contact is a fundamental part of caregiving for all operators. The article focuses on the distinction between gnostic and pathic touch, the two different types of touch that are performed by the operators. The gnostic touch pursues a specific technical-procedural aim, while the pathic touch is a means to listen to the patient’s needs, a kind of “psychological/tactile ear”. The article describes a research carried out in two hospices in the Piacenza area: by means of the Focus Group methodology the pathic touch and its characteristics as well as its effects on the patients are analysed. The resulting data are consistent with the international literature and show that the pathic touch in palliative care may be an effective tool in the helping relationship while reducing a few psycho-physical symptoms, such as pain, nausea, sickness and anxiety disorders.

High-resolution cytogenetic analysis of a large number of women with premature ovarian failure (POF) identified six patients carrying different Xq chromosome rearrangements. The patients (one familial and five sporadic cases) were negative for Turner's stigmata and experienced a variable onset of menopause. Microsatellite analysis and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) were used to define the origin and precise extension of the Xq anomalies. All of the patients had a Xq chromosome deletion as the common chromosomal abnormality, which was the only event in three cases and was associated with partial Xp or 9p trisomies in the remaining three. Two of the Xq chromosome deletions were terminal with breakpoints at Xq26.2 and Xq21.2, and one interstitial with breakpoints at Xq23 and Xq28. In all three cases, the del(X)s retained Xp and Xq specific telomeric sequences. One patient carries a psu dic(X) with the deletion at Xq22.2 or Xq22.3; the other two [carrying (X;X) and (X;9) unbalanced translocations, respectively] showed terminal deletions with the breakpoint at Xq22 within the DIAPH2 gene. Furthermore, the rearranged X chromosomes were almost totally inactivated, and the extent of the Xq deletions did not correlate with the timing of POF. In agreement with previous results, these findings suggest that the deletion of a restricted Xq region may be responsible for the POF phenotype. Our analysis indicates that this region extends from approximately Xq26.2 (between markers DXS8074 and HIGMI) to Xq28 (between markers DXS 1113 and ALD) and covers approximately 22 Mb of DNA. These data may provide a starting point for the identification of the gene(s) responsible for ovarian development and folliculogenesis.