BackgroundPositive psychosocial factors can play an important role in the development of cardiovascular disease. Among them, psychological resilience is defined as the capacity of responding positively to stressful events. Our aim was to assess whether PR is associated with CVD or metabolic disturbances through a systematic review.MethodsWe gathered articles from PubMed, Web of Science, PsycInfo, and Google Scholar up to October 28, 2021. We included articles that were in English, were observational, and had PR examined as exposure. The CVD outcomes (...) were either clinical or metabolic outcomes.ResultsOur literature search identified 3,800 studies, of which 17 met the inclusion criteria. Of them, seven were longitudinal and 10 cross-sectional, and 13 were on adults and four on children. The exposure assessment was heterogeneous, i.e., 12 studies used different kinds of self-administered questionnaires and five used interviews with a psychologist. Regarding outcomes, five studies investigated CVD, seven obesity, one metabolic syndrome, two hypertension, four dyslipidemia, and four diabetes. In longitudinal studies, PR was found to have an inverse association with included outcomes in five studies from the Swedish military conscription cohort but had no association with CVD in a study on African-American women and was associated with slower progression of diabetes in a general population. The cross-sectional studies showed that the prevalence of disease was not associated with PR in many cases but the progression of disease was associated with PR.ConclusionPR seems to have a possibly favorable association with CVD and metabolic disturbances that differs according to the type of outcome and population. Our study limitations are given by the small number of studies available and the heterogeneity in PR measurement.Systematic Review Registration[https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.php?RecordID=237109], identifier [CRD42021237109]. (shrink)

_Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice_ aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here, authored (...) by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature, such as _causation_, _explanation_, _modeling_, and _scientific inference_. These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical science: _basic research_, _translational_ and _clinical research_, and _clinical practice_. (shrink)

Lives on the Fringes: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Incarceration Editors: Caterina Benelli, Giovanni Cogliandro, Giovanna Costanzo.

The authors propose some methodological considerations on thanatochronological estimations. They first consider the problem of the definition of death, and then they deal with the issue of the estimations of death time, that is, with the Post-Mortem Interval (PMI). As regards the first question, they note that it does not concern only the definition of death, but also the choice of a particular kind of definition of 'definition'. With reference to the second question, the authors suggest a causal model showing (...) that the presence of many causal chains must be taken into consideration. Finally they discuss what 'most convenient and reliable causal chain' means for a thanatochronologist. (shrink)

In this commentary, I focus on Jones' suggestion of a close connection between the domain of space and that of kinship. I expand on that suggestion by introducing the concept of frame of reference and show how it can possibly participate to the generation of kinship systems.

Esse artigo visa demonstrar como o psicanalista francês Jacques Lacan delineou e reformulou o conceito freudiano de pulsão de morte no interior dos três registros da experiência humana. Dito isso, iremos inicialmente compreender de forma geral como o conceito de pulsão de morte aparece na obra lacaniana, de maneira a demonstrarmos como ela é reformulada pelo autor francês. Depois, iremos delinear como esse conceito aparece no interior dos registros do Imaginário, Simbólico e Real; desse modo, estaremos envoltos com o Estágio (...) do Espelho desenvolvido por Lacan no decorrer dos anos 1930 e 1940, a teoria do significante fundada por nosso autor mais atentamente nos anos 1950 e por último o registro do Real, o qual foi introduzido com mais atenção a partir dos anos 1960 em diante. (shrink)

In this article I point out that rather than two, as is commonly thought, or indeed one, which is an old idea recently revived by some scholars, Aquinas in fact presents three main senses of being: (A1) being as actus essendi or esse or ‘present actuality’; (A2) being as (real) form or essence; (B) being as the reply to the an sit? (is there…?) question or anitas or ‘there is’ sense. Regarding the relations among these three senses of being I (...) show that: (i) the same logical treatment holds for the form (B) and (A2), since both can and need to be re-written in the form: something is so-and-so (whereas the same process cannot be applied to the A1 sense of being); (ii) the relation between the A1 and A2 senses of being is not a mere relation between distinct elements, but rather a relation among different stages of a single process, namely that between first and second actuality; (iii) the relation between the A (1 and 2) and B senses of being seems to be one of grounding, since the ‘there is’ sense seems to Aquinas to be grounded on the present actuality sense of being as an effect to its cause. (shrink)

We discuss the meaning of “being alive” and “being dead.” Our primary aim is to pave the way for a sound and accurate ethical debate concerning these two concepts. In particular, we analyze a metabolic approach and a genetic one and discuss the reasons for their failure to constitute a good starting point for successive debates. We argue that any ethical or social discussion of topics involving life and death must introduce cultural constructs such as, on the one hand, the (...) concept of clinical death and, on the other hand, the concept of existence. We argue that these two cultural constructs, although consistent with biomedical knowledge, cannot be ontologically grounded in it. To conclude, we apply our findings to the case of human embryos. (shrink)

The aetio-pathogenetic sequences and the physio-pathological patterns of diabetes, emphysema, cholera, circulatory shock and thrombosis have been analysed with respect to an evolutionary interpretation. The diseases, although reflecting alterations of processes that can always be described in physico-chemical language, occur only at the level of biological systems which reflects the decodification of genomic project: the teleonomic projects that have been developed during evolution. The concepts of evolutionary emergence and of downward causation have been used to discuss the relationship between the (...) molecular events responsible for the initiation of the disease, and the subsequent events responsible for the aetio-pathogenesis, for the systemic disarrangement and for the additional alterations of tissues and cells independent of the initial molecular events. In diabetes the systemic disarrangement, glycosuria and hyperglycemia, reflect the evolutionary emergence of the processes regulating carbohydrate metabolism, whereas the cardiovascular and neurological alterations are effects of the systemic disarrangement by a mechanism of downward causation. The complexity of the aetio-pathogenesis and of the physio-pathological patterns of diseases is due to the generation of information during the evolution of multi-hierarchical entities. The evolutionary epistemology approach is useful to explain the behaviour of complex systems. (shrink)

The author investigates the origin and development of the concept of liberty and its special meaning in the Republican tradition of political thought. The origin of the Western concept of liberty lies in ancient Greece, in the opposition between liberty and slavery conceived after the liberation of Athens from tyranny and the victory over the Persian empire. The author then investigates the Republican notion of liberty that originates in ancient Rome and reaches its peak with Cicero. This conception of liberty (...) emphasizes self-government and partecipation in common deliberation and runs through Western political thought up to Rousseau, Tocqueville and the authors of the Federalist Papers. (shrink)

Riassunto: Questo lavoro sviluppa due elementi, apparentemente lontani, ma per alcuni aspetti non secondari, convergenti. Per un verso l’attenzione è rivolta all’origine delle regole che disciplinano il comportamento sociale umano, oltrepassando le regole di matrice istituzionale e convenzionale, che sono spesso considerate le più nobili e le più umane, nel tentativo di far affiorare le regole più remote del nostro agire, legate al patrimonio genetico degli individui della nostra specie, al parlamento dei nostri istinti, sviluppatisi durante l’evoluzione filogenetica. Lungo questo (...) primo tratto del percorso l’articolo fa riferimento in particolare al pensiero di Konrad Lorenz e della sua scuola. Per altro verso, si seguono le tracce del pensiero etico di Lévinas, soffermandosi su alcuni punti fondamentali: il volto dell’altro, la passività, la responsabilità, al fine di porre in evidenza come tra il filosofo e l’etologo, pur nelle evidenti differenze di linguaggio, di approccio e di orizzonti, siano ravvisabili tratti e conclusioni comuni. Parole chiave: Alterità; Relazione; Istinto; Etica; Responsabilità Autrui: Ethics and anthropology in Lévinas: This paper moves along two seemingly distant paths, that turn out to converge in some significant ways. The first path leads us to the origin of what are often considered the most noble and essentially human principles that regulate our social behaviour, going beyond institutional and conventional norms. This allows us to highlight the deepest and most evolutionarily remote rules of human behaviour, related to our genetic code and instincts, which developed over phylogenetic evolution. As we move along this first path, we pay special attention to the work of Konrad Lorenz and his school. The second path follows the traces of Lévinas’ ethical thought, dwelling on some fundamental issues: the face of the other, passivity, and responsibility, and helps us shed light on some ideas and conclusions that are common to the philosopher and the ethologist, despite their clear differences in language, approach, and horizons. We hope this will show how the insights of each can be used to support of the theories of the other. Keywords: Otherness: relationship; Instinct; Ethics; Responsibility. (shrink)

This article investigates the nature of entangled correlations in algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT). We define a notion of local disentanglement, expressing the possibility of destroying entanglement by means of local operations. Contrary to the case of ordinary quantum mechanics, local disentanglement cannot be achieved in general in relativistic quantum field theory. However, we show that if the split property holds, there exists a local operation that can destroy entanglement between spacelike-separated quantum field systems.