The T.O.S.C.A. Project: Research, Education and Care

Despite recent and exponential improvements in diagnostic- therapeutic pathways, an existing “GAP” has been revealed between the “real world care” and the “optimal care” of patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). We present the T.O.S.CA. Project (Trattamento Ormonale dello Scompenso CArdiaco), an Italian multicenter initiative involving different health care professionals and services aiming to explore the CHF “metabolic pathophysiological model” and to improve the quality of care of HF patients through research and continuing medical education

Iron Accumulation with Age, Oxidative Stress and Functional Decline

Identification of biological mediators in sarcopenia is pertinent to the development of targeted interventions to alleviate this condition. Iron is recognized as a potent pro-oxidant and a catalyst for the formation of reactive oxygen species in biological systems. It is well accepted that iron accumulates with senescence in several organs, but little is known about iron accumulation in muscle and how it may affect muscle function. In addition, it is unclear if interventions which reduced age-related loss of muscle quality, such as calorie restriction, impact iron accumulation. We investigated non-heme iron concentration, oxidative stress to nucleic acids in gastrocnemius muscle and key indices of sarcopenia (muscle mass and grip strength) in male Fischer 344 X Brown Norway rats fed ad libitum (AL) or a calorie restricted diet (60% of ad libitum food intake starting at 4 months of age) at 8, 18, 29 and 37 months of age. Total non-heme iron levels in the gastrocnemius muscle of AL rats increased progressively with age. Between 29 and 37 months of age, the non-heme iron concentration increased by approximately 200% in AL-fed rats. Most importantly, the levels of oxidized RNA in gastrocnemius muscle of AL rats were significantly increased as well. The striking age-associated increase in non-heme iron and oxidized RNA levels and decrease in sarcopenia indices were all attenuated in the calorie restriction (CR) rats. These findings strongly suggest that the age-related iron accumulation in muscle contributes to increased oxidative damage and sarcopenia, and that CR effectively attenuates these negative effects

Identifying Security Risks of Digital Transformation - An Engineering Perspective

Technological advancements continue to disrupt how organizations compete and create value in almost every industry and society. The recent digital transformation movement has expanded the reliance of companies and organizations in software technologies, such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, internet-of-things, and also increase the risk associated with software usage. This work aims at identifying security risks associated with these technologies from an engineering management perspective. We conducted two focused groups and a literature review to gather and discuss the list of security risks. The findings have implications for both practitioners to manage software security risks and future research work

Differential computation analysis : hiding your white-box designs is not enough

Although all current scientific white-box approaches of standardized cryptographic primitives are broken, there is still a large number of companies which sell "secure" white-box products. In this paper a new approach to assess the security of white-box implementations is presented which requires neither knowledge about the look-up tables used nor any reverse engineering effort. This differential computation analysis (DCA) attack is the software counterpart of the differential power analysis attack as applied by the cryptographic hardware community. We developed plugins to widely available dynamic binary instrumentation frameworks to produce software execution traces which contain information about the memory addresses being accessed. We show how DCA can extract the secret key from all publicly (non-commercial) available white-box programs implementing standardized cryptography by analyzing these traces to identify secret-key dependent correlations