Axonal degeneration and inflammation in acute optic neuritis

Aims: To investigate whether plasma biomarkers for axonal injury and inflammation are related to loss and recovery of visual function in acute optic neuritis (ON).Methods: Eighteen patients with ON and 14 controls were investigated in a longitudinal, prospective study. Plasma phosphorylated neurofilament heavy chain ( NfH(SMI35); a surrogate marker of axonal injury), nitric oxide metabolites (NOx), and citrulline ( surrogate markers of inflammation) were measured.Results: Patients with ON had higher median plasma NfH(SMI35) values than controls (0.17 versus 0.005 ng/ml; p< 0.05) and higher NOx values (49 versus 35.5 mu M; p< 0.001). Plasma NfH(SMI35) values correlated inversely with visual acuity at presentation ( R = -0.67; p = 0.01). NfH(SMI35) was higher in patients with poor recovery of visual acuity than in those with good recovery (0.25 ng/ml versus 0.09 ng/ml; p< 0.05). Three of four patients with high NfH(SMI35) and high NOx values experienced a poor recovery as opposed to only one of five with high NOx but normal NfH(SMI35) values.Conclusions: NfH(SMI35), a surrogate marker for axonal damage, is a prognostic indicator and should be considered in the design of neuroprotective treatment strategies

Strings from geometric tachyon in Rindler space and black hole thermodynamics

The dynamics of a probe particle or wrapped brane moving in the two-dimensional Rindler space can be described by a time-dependent tachyon field theory. Using knowledge of tachyon condensation, we learn that the infalling brane gets thermalised and produces open string pairs at the Hagedorn temperature when entering into the near-horizon Rindler wedge. It is shown that the Hagedorn temperature of the infalling brane is equal to the Hawking temperature of the host black hole detected in the same time coordinate. The infalling brane will decay completely into closed strings, mainly massive modes, when it reaches the horizon in infinitely long time as observed by observers at spatial infinity. Preliminary estimates indicate that the degeneracy of states of the closed strings emitted from the infalling brane should be responsible for the increased entropy in the host black hole due to absorption of the brane.Comment: 12 page

The diagnostic and prognostic value of neurofilament heavy chain levels in immune-mediated optic neuropathies

Background. Loss of visual function differs between immune-mediated optic neuropathies and is related to axonal loss in the optic nerve. This study investigated the diagnostic and prognostic value of a biomarker for neurodegeneration, the neurofilament heavy chain (NfH) in three immune-mediated optic neuropathies. Methods. A prospective, longitudinal study including patients with optic neuritis due to multiple sclerosis (MSON, n = 20), chronic relapsing inflammatory optic neuritis (CRION, n = 19), neuromyelitis optica (NMO, n = 9), and healthy controls (n = 28). Serum NfH-SMI35 levels were quantified by ELISA. Findings. Serum NfH-SMI35 levels were highest in patients with NMO (mean 0.79 ± 1.51 ng/mL) compared to patients with CRION (0.13 ± 0.16 ng/mL, P = 0.007), MSON (0.09 ± 0.09, P = 0.008), and healthy controls (0.01 ± 0.02 ng/mL, P = 0.001). High serum NfH-SMI35 levels were related to poor visual outcome. Conclusions. Blood NfH-SMI35 levels are of moderate diagnostic and more important prognostic value in immune-mediated optic neuropathies. We speculate that longitudinal blood NfH levels may help to identify particular disabling events in relapsing conditions

Inclusive double-quarkonium production at the Large Hadron Collider

Based on the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization formalism, we investigate inclusive productions of two spin-triplet S-wave quarkonia pp->2J/psi+X, 2Upsilon+X, and J/psi+Upsilon+X at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The total production rates integrated over the rapidity (y) and transverse-momentum (p_T) ranges |y|<2.4 and p_T<50 GGeV are predicted to be sigma[pp->2J/psi+X] = 22 (35) nb, sigma[pp->2Upsilon+X] = 24 (49) pb, and sigma[pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X] = 7 (13) pb at the center-of-momentum energy sqrt{s} = 7 (14) TeV. In order to provide predictions that can be useful in both small- and large-p_T regions, we do not employ the fragmentation approximation and we include the spin-triplet S-wave color-singlet and color-octet channels for each quarkonium final state at leading order in the strong coupling. The p_T distributions of pp->2J/psi+X and 2Upsilon+X in the low-p_T region are dominated by the color-singlet contributions. At leading order in the strong coupling, the color-singlet channel is absent for pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X. Therefore, the process pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X may provide a useful probe to the color-octet mechanism of NRQCD.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables, version published in JHE

Linear Superiorization for Infeasible Linear Programming

Linear superiorization (abbreviated: LinSup) considers linear programming (LP) problems wherein the constraints as well as the objective function are linear. It allows to steer the iterates of a feasibility-seeking iterative process toward feasible points that have lower (not necessarily minimal) values of the objective function than points that would have been reached by the same feasiblity-seeking iterative process without superiorization. Using a feasibility-seeking iterative process that converges even if the linear feasible set is empty, LinSup generates an iterative sequence that converges to a point that minimizes a proximity function which measures the linear constraints violation. In addition, due to LinSup's repeated objective function reduction steps such a point will most probably have a reduced objective function value. We present an exploratory experimental result that illustrates the behavior of LinSup on an infeasible LP problem.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1612.0653

Is Hostility Dancing Along with Conversion and Dissociation?

Background.Hysterical symptoms frequently accompany a variety of neurotic and even psychotic psychiatric syndromes and illnesses. Methods.The presence and course of these symptoms was investigated in the present study in 73 psychiatric patients. The relationship of conversion symptoms and dissociative symptoms, both two broad dimensions of hysterical symptomatology, with self-reported hostility was examined in particular. Results.It was found that changes in dissociative symptoms showed highly significant correlations with the changes of externally directed hostility but no significant association with those of internally directed hostility. There was no significant association between changes in hostility and changes in conversion symptoms. Conclusions.In patients recovering from mental illnesses (acute or relapses), as the dissociative symptoms became less marked so the patients expressed less extrapunitive forms of hostility. Changes in dissociative symptoms correlate significantly with changes in total hostility, as well. Conversion symptoms, on the other hand, do not correlate significantly with changes in these scales. It is also of interest that no significant correlations have been shown between the score changes of the intropunitive subscales with either conversion or dissociative symptoms

More Depressive: More Hostile. Less Depressive: Not, Necessarily, Less Hostile...

Background. Purpose of this study was the investigation of the relationships between depressive symptoms and features of hostility in psychiatric patients with the passage of time. Methods. In two groups of psychiatric patients (DI and DII) two successive measurements, with a time interval of 4-6 weeks, were carried out with the Hostility and Dishyrection of Hostility Questionnaire (HDHQ) and the state of Depression (sD) subscale of the Delusions Symptoms States Inventory (DSSI). The DI group (N=39) consisted of patients who reported lower scores on the (sD) subscale at the second measurement. The DII group (N=20) consisted of patients who reported higher scores on the (sD) subscale at the second measurement. Results. In the DI group, the significant decrease of sD scores was accompanied by an analogously significant drop of the scores of all HDHQ subscales. In the DII group the significant increase of the sD scores was not followed by significant increase of hostility levels, with the exception of Criticism of Others and Paranoid Hostility. In the subscale of Guilt the scores actually were dropped, though non-significantly. Conclusions. These findings may suggest that although depressive symptoms are related to cershytain hostility factors, this relationship is not stable but changes according to the course of depression, in the sense that it is strong when depression decreases, but not so significant when depression increases.nbs

Black Hole Hair Removal: Non-linear Analysis

BMPV black holes in flat transverse space and in Taub-NUT space have identical near horizon geometries but different microscopic degeneracies. It has been proposed that this difference can be accounted for by different contribution to the degeneracies of these black holes from hair modes, -- degrees of freedom living outside the horizon. In this paper we explicitly construct the hair modes of these two black holes as finite bosonic and fermionic deformations of the black hole solution satisfying the full non-linear equations of motion of supergravity and preserving the supersymmetry of the original solutions. Special care is taken to ensure that these solutions do not have any curvature singularity at the future horizon when viewed as the full ten dimensional geometry. We show that after removing the contribution due to the hair degrees of freedom from the microscopic partition function, the partition functions of the two black holes agree.Comment: 40 pages, LaTe

Momentum relaxation from the fluid/gravity correspondence

We provide a hydrodynamical description of a holographic theory with broken translation invariance. We use the fluid/gravity correspondence to systematically obtain both the constitutive relations for the currents and the Ward identity for momentum relaxation in a derivative expansion. Beyond leading order in the strength of momentum relaxation, our results differ from a model previously proposed by Hartnoll et al. As an application of these techniques we consider charge and heat transport in the boundary theory. We derive the low frequency thermoelectric transport coefficients of the holographic theory from the linearised hydrodynamics.Comment: 19 pages + appendix, v2: references added, typos corrected, v3: version published in JHE