This is the first nationwide extensive series of CTX reported in Spain. The higher number of cases in some areas suggests a possible founder effect. Spinal forms had a less severe prognosis. A delayed diagnosis could contribute to the lack of significant response to treatment.

Survivors to COVID-19 have described long-term symptoms after acute disease. These signs constitute a heterogeneous group named long COVID or persistent COVID. The aim of this study is to describe persisting symptoms 6 months after COVID-19 diagnosis in a prospective cohort in the Northwest Spain. This is a prospective cohort study performed in the COHVID-GS. This cohort includes patients in clinical follow-up in a health area of 569,534 inhabitants after SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 diagnosis. Clinical and epidemiological characteristics were collected during the follow up. A total of 248 patients completed 6 months follow-up, 176 (69.4%) required hospitalization and 29 (10.2%) of them needed critical care. At 6 months, 119 (48.0%) patients described one or more persisting symptoms. The most prevalent were: extra-thoracic symptoms (39.1%), chest symptoms (27%), dyspnoea (20.6%), and fatigue (16.1%). These symptoms were more common in hospitalized patients (52.3% vs. 38.2%) and in women (59.0% vs. 40.5%). The multivariate analysis identified COPD, women gender and tobacco consumption as risk factors for long COVID. Persisting symptoms are common after COVID-19 especially in hospitalized patients compared to outpatients (52.3% vs. 38.2%). Based on these findings, special attention and clinical follow-up after acute SARS-CoV-2 infection should be provided for hospitalized patients with previous lung diseases, tobacco consumption, and women.

Our results support the notion that the occurrence of incomplete PVD in RD is a significant risk factor for preoperative and postoperative PVR.

Current knowledge of the modulation of maternal-fetal transfer of metabolites is reviewed and new data on the actual placental transport of D-glucose, L-alanine and glycerol in the rat are presented. Twenty-one day pregnant rats were infused with the ¹⁴C-labelled substrates throughout the left uterine artery. Radioactivity appearing in fetuses was corrected by the specific dilution of the tracer at maternal arterial plasma and the uterine artery blood flow to estimate placental transfer. This parameter appeared to be 127 μmol·kg^––1 fetal b.w.·min^––1 for D-glucose, 23 for L-alanine, and 1 for glycerol – values which are much higher than those described for larger species. There is a parallelism between the magnitude of transfer to fetus and arterial concentration in mother for each studied metabolite and actually variations in their plasmatic levels affect this transport process. This is clearly seen in the case of glucose where placental transfer is reduced during fasting hypoglycemia and greatly increased in diabetes. Placental transfer of L-alanine and blood flow to the placenta were reduced in both 48-hour starved and streptozotocin-induced diabetic late pregnant rats. Results show the main role of maternal nutrient concentration as a modulator of their transfer to fetus, the deleterious effect of reductions of uterine blood flow on placental transport of amino acids as well as the small placental transfer of glycerol as compared to either glucose or alanine.

No abstract