The psycho-social effects of COVID-19 on Italian adolescents' attitudes and behaviors.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 is an emerging issue that has significant consequences on psycho-social well-being. METHODS: In this regard, a survey was conducted on a large group of adolescents in Italy. The survey investigated four items: concerns and fears, information on the pandemic, provisions of public authorities (e.g., lockdown), and impact on everyday life. RESULTS: Adolescents actively participated in the survey. COVID-19 affected emotions and lifestyle. COVID-19 influenced relationships with peers and parents. There were regional differences. CONCLUSIONS: The current research highlighted the remarkable, healthy, and certainly unexpected, emotional balance of the new generations in the face of a sudden, unpredictable phenomenon capable of jeopardizing life itself. While understanding the gravity of the phenomenon and willingly adapting to all the necessary precautions, the adolescents still seemed to express an excellent ability to manage situations of insecurity and to deal with unfavorable and adverse conditions by adapting to the new routine and finding alternative and innovative means of meeting their social and psychological needs.

Clinical characteristics of headache in Italian adolescents aged 11-16 years: a cross-sectional questionnaire school-based study.

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to determine headache characteristics, impact on daily activities and medication attitudes among a large sample of adolescents in Italy. METHODS: Secondary school classes were randomly selected from a national stratified multistage sampling. Data regarding socio-familial factors, headache characteristics, impact on daily activities and medication use were recorded with an anonymous multiple-choice questionnaire. RESULTS: The survey involved 2064 adolescents. 1950 questionnaires were considered for analysis. Study population included 944 males (48.4%) and 1006 females (51.6%), aged between 11 and 16 years (mean 13.5 ± 1.87). Headache prevalence was 65.9%. Mean age at headache onset was 8.33 years. 9.8% suffered from headache > 1/week, 14.3% > 1/month, 24.2% monthly and 17.7% less than monthly. The mean duration of a headache episode was less than 30 min in 32.9%, 1 hour in 28.1%, 2 hours in 19.3% and several hours in 19.5%. Pain intensity was moderate in 52.2% and severe in 9.5%. School represented the main trigger factor (67%). Impact on daily activities was noted in 57.5%. 69.2% of adolescents reported the use of pain relievers. Up to 5.7% declared self-medication, while only 20.6% followed a physician's prescription. Female adolescents experienced headache more frequently (70.2% vs 60%) and more intensely than male peers. Girls had a higher family history of headache, could more frequently identify a trigger factor, and were more affected into their daily activities than boys. CONCLUSIONS: Population-based studies of headache disorders are important, as they inform needs assessment and underpin service policy for a disease that is a public-health priority. Headache has a high prevalence among adolescents and carries a significant burden in terms of impact on daily activities and use of medication. Furthermore, underdiagnose is common, while trigger factors are often detectable. Special consideration should be given to female adolescents and self-medication attitudes.

FIRE: fractal indexing with robust extensions for image databases.

As already documented in the literature, fractal image encoding is a family of techniques that achieves a good compromise between compression and perceived quality by exploiting the self-similarities present in an image. Furthermore, because of its compactness and stability, the fractal approach can be used to produce a unique signature, thus obtaining a practical image indexing system. Since fractal-based indexing systems are able to deal with the images in compressed form, they are suitable for use with large databases. We propose a system called FIRE, which is then proven to be invariant under three classes of pixel intensity transformations and under geometrical isometries such as rotations by multiples of /spl pi//2 and reflections. This property makes the system robust with respect to a large class of image transformations that can happen in practical applications: the images can be retrieved even in the presence of illumination and/or color alterations. Additionally, the experimental results show the effectiveness of FIRE in terms of both compression and retrieval accuracy.