The Developmental Pathways of Preschool Children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: Communicative and Social Sequelae One Year after Treatment

Early childhood is considered to be a period of rapid development, with the acquisition of abilities predicting future positive school competences. Motor, cognitive, and social difficulties related to cancer therapies heavily impact the development of children with cancer. This study focused on two main aims: To assess the developmental pathways of preschool children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia one year post-treatment and to compare these abilities both with those of a control group of healthy peers and with Italian norms. Forty-four children and their families, recruited through the Hematology-Oncologic Clinic of the Department of Child and Woman Health (University of Padua), agreed to participate in this study. The children’s mean age was 4.52 years (SD = 0.94, range = 2.5–6 years), equally distributed by gender, all diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Matched healthy peers were recruited through pediatricians’ ambulatories. Each family was interviewed adopting the Vineland adaptive behavior scales. Paired sample Wilcoxon tests revealed that children were reported to have significantly more developmental difficulties than their healthy peers. When compared with Italian norms, they scored particularly low in verbal competence, social, and coping skills. No significant association was found between treatment variables and developmental abilities. These findings suggest that the creation of specialized interventions, both for parents and children, may fill the possible delays in children’s development probably due to stress, lack of adequate stimulation, or difficult adaptation.

The Developmental Pathways of Preschool Children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: Communicative and Social Sequelae One Year after Treatment

Early childhood is considered to be a period of rapid development, with the acquisition of abilities predicting future positive school competences. Motor, cognitive and social difficulties related to cancer therapies heavily impact the development of children with cancer. This study focused on two main aims: to assess the developmental pathways of preschool children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia one year post-treatment and to compare these abilities both with those of a control group of healthy peers and with Italian norms. Forty-four children and their families, recruited through the Haematology-Oncologic Clinic of the Department of Child and Woman Health (University of Padua), agreed to participate to this study. The children’s mean age was 4.52 years (SD = 0.94, range = 2.5-6 years), equally distributed by gender, all diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. Matched healthy peers were recruited through paediatricians’ ambulatories. Each family was interviewed adopting the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales. Paired sample Wilcoxon tests revealed that children were reported to have significantly more developmental difficulties than their healthy peers. When compared with Italian norms they scored particularly low in verbal competence, social and coping skills. No significant association were found between treatment variables and developmental abilities. These findings suggest that the creation of specialized interventions both for parents and children may fill the possible delays in children’s development probably due to stress, lack of adequate stimulation or difficult adaptation.

Italian norms and naming latencies for 357 high quality color images

In the domain of cognitive studies on the lexico-semantic representational system, one of the most important means of ensuring well-suited experimental designs is using ecological stimulus sets accompanied by normative data on the most relevant variables affecting the processing of their items. In the context of image sets, color photographs are particularly suited for this aim as they reduce the difficulty of visual decoding processes that may emerge with traditional image sets of line drawings, especially in clinical populations. We provide Italian norms for a set of 357 high quality image-items belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Data from several variables affecting image processing: age of acquisition, familiarity, lexical frequency, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity; were collected from a sample of 255 Italian-speaking participants. Lexical frequency data were derived from the CoLFIS corpus. Furthermore, we collected data with on image naming latencies aimed at exploring how much of the variance in these latencies could be explained by the above mentioned critical variables. Multiple regression analyses on the naming latencies show classical psycholinguistic phenomena, such as the effects of age of acquisition and name agreement. In addition, manipulability is also a significant predictor. The described Italian normative data and naming latencies are available for download as supplementary material.

Diritto a una tutela giurisdizionale effettiva e revisione dei processi penali: la Corte costituzionale e il caso Dorigo

- The work is a critical comment to the judgment of the Italian Constitutional Court of 30 April 2008, n. 129, on the reopening of the criminal proceedings requested by the European Court of Human Rights. The work begins dealing deeply with the problem of the customary nature in international law of the right to a fair trial and the consequent possibility to invoke, in the framework of the Italian national system, Article 10, paragraph 1, of the Constitution. The authors suddenly stress the relevance of other constitutional norms in order to recognize a constitutional or quasi-constitutional rank to the norms of the European Convention on Human Rights, demonstrating that the Italian Constitution offers several possibilities on the matter. A very recent judgment of the Court of Cassation, adopted on 11 December 2008, confirms this opinion interpreting the Italian norms on the reopening of the criminal proceeding on the basis of Articles 111 and 117 of the Constitution.