Mattia Sanna

Taipei Medical University | TMU · Master's Program in Global Health and Health Security

Importance For the first time, the 2020 World Health Organization guidelines on physical activity recommended reducing sedentary behaviors owing to their health consequences. Less is known on the specific association of prolonged occupational sitting with health, especially in the context of low physical activity engagement. Objective To quantify...

We examined the potential mediating roles of anxiety and loneliness on the association of concurrent food insecurity (FI) and being bullied (BB) with suicidal behavior (SB) in Eswatini, a lower-middle-income country. We used data from the Global School-based Student Health Survey (GSHS; N = 3264), which employed a two-stage cluster sampling: first,...

Background For the first time, the 2020 WHO guidelines on physical activity recommend reducing sedentary behaviors due to their health consequences. Less is known on the effect of prolonged occupational sitting, especially in the context of low physical activity engagement.This study aims at quantifying cardiovascular risk associated with prolonged...

In this chapter, Mauro Galluccio and Mattia Sanna focus their joint attention on a multidisciplinary research project conceived and directed by Mauro Galluccio on two sides of the Atlantic, the United States and the European Union (EU). The main objective is to better understand how highly trained negotiators and diplomats reason, feel, and behave...

Introduction The COVID-19 outbreak is posing an unprecedented challenge to healthcare workers. This study analyzes the geo-temporal effects on disease severity for the 1,688 Chinese healthcare workers infected with COVID-19. Methods Using the descriptive results recently reported by the Chinese CDC, we compare the percentage of infected healthcare...

: A two-year experiment was carried out in a paddy field to investigate the effects of the use of defecation lime derived from treated sewage sludge on soil total and soil phytoavailable heavy metals concentration. Heavy metals concentration was determined also in raw rice. Four treatments were arranged in a completely randomized block design: not...

Introduction In Taiwan, national tobacco use surveys show that e-cigarette use has increased since 2014 among youth, while, at the same time, conventional cigarette smoking has continuously decreased. The purpose of this study is to examine whether the increased popularity of e-cigarettes has undermined this favourable declining trend for cigarette...

Introduction The COVID 19 outbreak is posing an unprecedented challenge to healthcare workers. This study analyzes the geo temporal effects on disease severity for the 1,688 Chinese healthcare workers infected with COVID 19. Method Using the descriptive results recently reported by the Chinese CDC, we compare the percentage of infected healthcare w...

Air pollution has been labelled the ‘new smoking’, with news articles bearing titles such as ‘If You Live in a Big City You Already Smoke Every Day’ and ‘The Air Is So Bad in These Cities, You May As Well Be Smoking’. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, highlighted this attention-catching comparison, saying, ‘The world has turned t...

Objective The rapid increase in lung cancer in nonsmoking women puzzled the public. The 3.4 folds increase for age 65-69 rate in 35 years was translated into a 13-fold increase in total lung cancer cases in women in Taiwan. More than 90% came from nonsmokers. Without smoking as a cause, how they came about was a mystery, and many people blamed it o...

Objective This study compares the effect of industry vs government induced cigarette price increases on cigarette consumption in Taiwan. Methods Using governmental tax and market survey data, we analyzed the changes in cigarette retail prices, sales volume, and net revenue of the top tobacco companies in Taiwan from 2011 to 2016, when no tax incre...

Introduction This study aims to analyse the non-tax-induced price increasing strategies adopted by tobacco industry in Taiwan, a high-income country with comprehensive tobacco control policies but low tobacco taxes and a declining cigarette market. Methods Using governmental tax, price and inflation data, we analysed cigarette sales volume, afford...

A growing literature indicates that electronic cigarette use increases the risk of subsequent initiation of conventional smoking among cigarette-naïve adolescents in several Western countries. This research assesses the same relationship in an Asian country, Taiwan. The Taiwan Adolescent to Adult Longitudinal Study is a school-based survey that was...

Introduction Adult smoking prevalence in Taiwan rapidly declined from 26.5% in 2005 to 20.0% in 2015. Nevertheless, future projections on smoking-attributable deaths and current per capita consumption do not paint an equally bright picture. Methods We used SimSmoke, a tobacco control simulation model to assess the impact of tax increases and other...

The increasing popularity of e-cigarettes, especially among adolescents, has alarmed health advocates and government officials, dominating the tobacco control narrative in the past few years. According to the Global Youth Tobacco Survey, the percentage of Taiwanese teenagers reporting use of e-cigarettes in the past 30 days rose from 2.01% (95% con...

The record-breaking number of dengue cases reported in Guangdong, China in 2014 has been topic for many studies. However, the spatial and temporal characteristics of this unexpectedly explosive outbreak are still poorly understood. We adopt an integrated approach to ascertain the spatial-temporal progression of the outbreak in each city in Guangdon...

Crop growth simulation models can differ greatly in their treatment of key processes and hence in their response to environmental conditions. Here, we used an ensemble of 26 process-based wheat models applied at sites across a European transect to compare their sensitivity to changes in temperature (-2 to +9°C) and precipitation (-50 to +50%). Mode...

Urbanization is an important factor contributing to the global spread of dengue in recent decades, especially in tropical regions. However, the impact of public transportation system on local spread of dengue in urban settings remains poorly understood, due to the difficulty in collecting relevant locality, transportation and disease incidence data...

Objective: To investigate whether major dengue outbreaks in the last two decades in Kaohsiung follow a precise temporal pattern. Methods: Government daily lab-confirmed dengue case data from three major dengue outbreaks occurring during the last two decades in Kaohsiung in 2002, 2014 and 2015, is utilized to compute the corresponding weekly cumu...

This study presents results from a major grassland model intercomparison exercise, and highlights the main challenges faced in the implementation of a multi-model ensemble prediction system in grasslands. Nine, independently developed simulation models linking climate, soil, vegetation and management to grassland biogeochemical cycles and productio...

One of the major causes of land degradation and loss of fertility is the soil erosion due to water runoff. In Italy, the 77% of the territory is estimated to be threatened by accelerated erosion, because of both its natural structure and anthropic action. This leads to the need of developing modelling tools able to provide useful information for ru...

Introduction A wide variety of dynamic crop growth simulation models have been developed over the past few decades that can differ greatly in their treatment of key processes and hence in their response to environmental conditions. Here, multi-model ensemble approaches have been adopted to quantify aspects of uncertainty in simulating yield respons...

The use of a variety of metrics is advocated to assess model performance but correlated metrics may convey the same information, thus leading to redundancy. Starting from this assumption, a method was developed for selecting, from among a collection of performance indicators, one or more subsets providing the same information as the entire set. The...

This study explored the utility of the impact response surface (IRS) approach for investigating model ensemble crop yield responses under a large range of changes in climate. IRSs of spring and winter wheat Triticum aestivum yields were constructed from a 26-member ensemble of process-based crop simulation models for sites in Finland, Germany and S...

Fontanile is a Po Valley (Italy) quasi-natural lowland spring built in the middle age. This paper identifies options for the conservation of the Fontanile water dependent ecosystem, using scenarios and simulations, and exploring different policy options. Three modeling analysis have been performed: the first was carried out for estimating groundwat...

An objective of the NERø Project was to evaluate in open field “best practices” of slurry management. In particular we measured emission of ammonia and nitrogen protoxide from different organic fertilizers (manure, digestate-DIG and its liquid fraction-DLF) and urea, with different methods of distribution in spring and in summer. Emission of NH3 wa...

FACCE MACSUR Reports 2, 5, SP5-46

A field trial was carried out in 2013 maize grain growing season on two fields to compare a subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) with the surface irrigation (SI) system. For each field, two monitoring stations were installed to measure, at different depths and every 10-15 days, the soil water content by time domain reflectometry technique, the pressure...

Fontanili are quasi-natural lowland springs built in the middle age by monk for allowing the agricultural use of a large part of the Po valley. This is the the larger plan of Italy (47000 km2) and now is the main national agricultural area with intensive farming activities. Several cases of water contamination have been reported, the most frequent...

The interest in anaerobic digestion has recently increased both because biogas is an extremely useful source of renewable energy, whilst digestate is a highly valuable fertiliser. In 2011 a three-years project funded by Regione Lombardia, aiming to investigate the agronomic potentiality of the digestate derived from anaerobic digestion of pig and d...

The expected climate change will affect the maize yields in view of air temperature increase and scarce water availability. The application of biophysical models offers the chance to design a drought-resistant ideotype and to assist plant breeders and agronomists in the assessment of its suitability in future scenarios. The aim of the present work...

Impact response surfaces (IRSs) depict the response of an impact variable to changes in two explanatory variables as a plotted surface. Here, IRSs of spring and winter wheat yields were constructed from a 25-member ensemble of process-based crop simulation models. Twenty-one models were calibrated by different groups using a common set of calibrati...

ARMOSA is a dynamic simulation model which was developed to simulate crop growth and development, water and nitrogen dynamics under different pedoclimatic conditions and cropping systems in the arable land. The model is meant to be a tool for the evaluation of the impact of different crop management practices on soil nitrogen and carbon cycles and...

A critical analysis was performed to evaluate the potential risk of nitrate leaching towards groundwater in three Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs) of the Lombardia plain by applying the ARMOSA crop simulation model over a 20 years period (1988-2007). Each studied area was characterized by (i) two representative soil types, (ii) a meteorological data...

Intensive agriculture and livestock breeding represent critical factors in the environment, particularly in the Lombardy region where nitrate vulnerable zones represent 62% of Utilised Agricultural Area (UAA). The problem of reduction of nitrogen losses as leaching of nitrates into groundwater and ammonia emissions into atmosphere can be only addre...

Crop lands hold a large carbon pool which could lead to accelerated emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere if improper management is assumed. The organic matter in soil constitutes a basic component of any terrestrial ecosystem, being structurally and functionally integrated into fundamental ecosystem processes. Conservation agriculture im...

From the seventies on, many indices have been proposed for quantifying the agreement between observed and simulated data, together with new indicators for assessing model complexity, robustness and plasticity. Model evaluation is an key step in the agro-meteorology modelling process and it is one of the issues which has mostly interested the modell...

Agriculture is known as the major source of atmospheric ammonia (NH 3). The strategies to reduce the emissions of this gas have become an important focus in many countries to prevent environmental issues and to reduce the loss of nutrients and energy from cropping systems. Appropriate slurry application techniques are fundamental strategies to redu...

Po Valley (Northern Italy) is one of the major ammonia (NH3) emitting regions of Europe, where the slurry spreading causes high NH3 volatilisation, reducing its agronomic value and becoming a potential cause of environmental concerns. In autumn 2011 a field trial was conducted to estimate the NH3 losses from the application of dairy slurry at rate...

A livello comunitario, l’Italia è il principale produttore di nocciole, nel contesto mondiale si attesta al secondo posto dopo la Turchia. Il Piemonte fornisce circa il 15% della produzione nazionale, con il Cuneese a rappresentarne oltre il 10%. Negli ultimi anni si è osservata una forte espansione della corilicoltura piemontese (circa 4000 ettari...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its recent fourth assessment report predicts that, because of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, until 2100 the global mean temperature would rise between 0.6 and 4oC, in combination with changes in precipitation and an increased frequency of extreme weather events. Despite...

Climate has an important impact on grape and wine qualitative parameters. Experiments in controlled conditions have shown that the major climatic factors affecting polyphenol accumulation are radiative and thermal conditions; in particular, high temperatures inhibit anthocyanin formation and modify the composition of the anthocyanin fraction. The a...

Fusarium crown and root rot (FCRR) of tomato caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. radicislycopersici is a serious problem in agriculture today. Biological control of this disease may be an effective option to deal with this problem. Antagonistic bacteria isolated from suppressive substrates or soils were tested against FCRR in the glasshouse in a sa...

La sperimentazione ha consentito lo studio in campo degli effetti della disponibilità idrica, determinata da apporti sia meteorici sia esogeni, sull'attività vegeto-produttiva della vite in funzione della vigoria e del tipo di suolo. Ne è emerso che la distribuzione degli apporti idrici, e non solo la loro entità, ha rilevanza sulla risposta del su...