Plasma lipid profiles discriminate bacterial from viral infection in febrile children

Fever is the most common reason that children present to Emergency Departments. Clinical signs and symptoms suggestive of bacterial infection are often non-specific, and there is no definitive test for the accurate diagnosis of infection. The 'omics' approaches to identifying biomarkers from the host-response to bacterial infection are promising. In this study, lipidomic analysis was carried out with plasma samples obtained from febrile children with confirmed bacterial infection (n = 20) and confirmed viral infection (n = 20). We show for the first time that bacterial and viral infection produces distinct profile in the host lipidome. Some species of glycerophosphoinositol, sphingomyelin, lysophosphatidylcholine and cholesterol sulfate were higher in the confirmed virus infected group, while some species of fatty acids, glycerophosphocholine, glycerophosphoserine, lactosylceramide and bilirubin were lower in the confirmed virus infected group when compared with confirmed bacterial infected group. A combination of three lipids achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.911 (95% CI 0.81 to 0.98). This pilot study demonstrates the potential of metabolic biomarkers to assist clinicians in distinguishing bacterial from viral infection in febrile children, to facilitate effective clinical management and to the limit inappropriate use of antibiotics

Model-independent data reductions of elastic proton–proton scattering

New developments in empirical analyses of the proton-proton differential cross section data at high energies are reported. Making use of an unconstrained model-independent parametrization for the scattering amplitude and two different fit procedures, all the experimental data in the center-of-mass energy interval 19.4 - 62.5 GeV are quite well described (optical point and data above the region of Coulomb-nuclear interference). The contributions from the real and imaginary parts of the amplitude beyond the forward direction are discussed and compared with the results from previous analyses and phenomenological models. Extracted overlap functions (impact parameter space) are outlined and a critical discussion on model-independent analyses and results are also presented.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, typos corrected, published versio