There is a paucity of information on the clinical course and outcome of young cats with polyneuropathy. The aim of the study was to describe the clinical features, diagnostic investigations, and outcome of a large cohort of cats with inflammatory polyneuropathy from several European countries. Seventy cats with inflammatory infiltrates in intramuscular nerves and/or peripheral nerve biopsies were retrospectively included. Information from medical records and follow up were acquired via questionnaires filled by veterinary neurologists who had submitted muscle and nerve biopsies (2011–2019). Median age at onset was 10 months (range: 4–120 months). The most common breed was British short hair (25.7%), followed by Domestic short hair (24.3%), Bengal cat (11.4%), Maine Coon (8.6%) and Persian cat (5.7%), and 14 other breeds. Male cats were predominantly affected (64.3%). Clinical signs were weakness (98.6%) and tetraparesis (75.7%) in association with decreased withdrawal reflexes (83.6%) and, less commonly, cranial nerve signs (17.1%), spinal pain/hyperesthesia (12.9%), and micturition/defecation problems (14.3%). Onset was sudden (30.1%) or insidious (69.1%), and an initial progressive phase was reported in 74.3%. Characteristic findings on electrodiagnostic examination were presence of generalized spontaneous electric muscle activity (89.6%), decreased motor nerve conduction velocity (52.3%), abnormal F-wave studies (72.4%), pattern of temporal dispersion (26.1%) and unremarkable sensory tests. The clinical course was mainly described as remittent (49.2%) or remittent-relapsing (34.9%), while stagnation, progressive course or waxing and waning were less frequently reported. Relapses were common and occurred in 35.7% of the cats' population. An overall favorable outcome was reported in 79.4% of patients. In conclusion, young age at the time of diagnosis and sudden onset of clinical signs were significantly associated with recovery (p < 0.05). Clinical and electrodiagnostic features and the remittent-relapsing clinical course resembles juvenile chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), as seen in human (children/adolescents), in many aspects.

No abstract

Thermal photons radiated in heavy-ion collisions represent an important signal for a recently discovered new state of matter, the deconfined quark-gluon plasma. However, a clean identification of this signal requires precise knowledge of the prompt photons produced simultaneously in hard collisions of quarks and gluons, mostly through their fragmentation. In this paper, we demonstrate that PHENIX data on photons produced in proton-proton collisions with low transverse momenta allow one to extract new information on this fragmentation process. While existing data do not yet convincingly favor one parameterization (BFG II) over the two other frequently used photon fragmentation functions (BFG I and GRV NLO), the data sets recorded by PHENIX and STAR at BNL RHIC in 2013 with tenfold higher statistics should allow for such an analysis.

We present a calculation of direct photon production at next-to-leading order of QCD and a matching of this calculation with parton showers using POWHEG BOX. Based on simulations with POWHEG+PYTHIA, we perform a detailed phenomenological analysis of PHENIX data on prompt photon production and photon-hadron jet correlations in pp collisions at RHIC, considerably improving the description of these data with respect to previous calculations, and we suggest additional interesting analyses.

We present a rigorous theoretical analysis of the ALICE measurement of low-p T direct-photon production in central lead-lead collisions at the LHC with a centre-of-mass energy of √ s N N = 2.76 TeV. Using NLO QCD, we compute the relative contributions to prompt-photon production from different initial and final states and the theoretical uncertainties coming from independent variations of the renormalisation and factorisation scales, the nuclear parton densities and the fragmentation functions. Based on different fits to the unsubtracted and prompt-photon subtracted ALICE data, we consistently find T = 304 ± 58 MeV and 309 ± 64 MeV for the effective temperature of the quark-gluon plasma (or hot medium) at p T ∈ [0.8; 2.2] GeV and p T ∈ [1.5; 3.5] GeV as well as a powerlaw (p −4 T ) behavior for p T > 4 GeV as predicted by QCD hard scattering.One of the goals of the physics program at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the study of deconfined, strongly interacting matter, which existed in the early universe and which can today be re-created and investigated in heavy-ion collisions. An important probe for this so-called quark-gluon plasma (QGP) are photons emitted from the deconfined partons before thermalisation, in the thermal bath, during expansion and cooling of the QGP, and finally from the thermal hadron gas. The transverse momentum distribution of these photons can be used to estimate the temperature of the system, although the exact interpretation is complicated by these different phases, the radial expansion, more generally the temporal evolution of phase space, and co-existing states of matter. Experimentally, an effective temperature is usually extracted from an exponential fit to the excess of directphoton production at low transverse momentum (p T ) above the expectation from vacuum production. In Ref. [1], the first observation of a low-p T direct-photon signal at the LHC has been reported by the ALICE collaboration. 1 There, an inverse slope parameter of T LHC = 304 ± 51 MeV has been extracted from an exponential fit to the photon spectrum in central (0-40%) lead-lead collisions at √ s N N = 2.76 TeV and low transverse momenta of p T ∈ [0.8; 2.2]GeV. The inverse slope parameter of this measurement is significantly higher than the one obtained previously by the PHENIX collaboration in 0-20% central gold-gold collisions with √ s N N = 200 GeV at RHIC, which resulted in T RHIC = 221 ± 19 ± 19 MeV [2]. The latter 1 In nuclear collision experiments, photons originating from meson decays are usually distinguished from direct photons. The latter are divided into thermal and non-thermal prompt (plus medium-induced) photons, and these again into photons produced directly in the hard collision and those coming from quark and gluon fragmentation. The double use of the word direct can sometimes lead to confusion.