Use of Anti-Inflammatory Drugs and Lower Esophageal Sphincter-Relaxing Drugs and Risk of Esophageal and Gastric Cancers

Background & Aims: The incidence of esophageal and gastric cardia adenocarcinoma has increased in Western countries in recent decades for largely unknown reasons. We investigated whether use of LES-relaxing drugs was related to an increased risk of esophageal and gastric cardia adenocarcinoma, and whether use of NSAIDs was related to a reduced risk of esophageal and gastric cancers. Methods: We examined these associations by using administrative databases in a case-control study in 2 integrated health care delivery systems. Cases were incident esophageal adenocarcinomas (n = 163) and squamous cell carcinomas (n = 114) and gastric cardia (n = 176) and non-cardia adenocarcinomas (n = 320), diagnosed between 1980-2002 in one health system and between 1993-2002 in the other. Matched controls (n = 3996) were selected. Complete prescription information was available for the study period. Results: Prescription of corticosteroids was associated with a decreased risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma (odds ratio [OR], 0.6; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.4-0.9), esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OR, 0.4; 95% CI, 0.2-0.6), and gastric non-cardia carcinoma (OR, 0.4, 95% CI, 0.3-0.6). Ever use of pharmacy-purchased aspirin was associated with 30%-60% decreased risks of the studied cancers. As a group, LES-relaxing drugs showed little evidence of association with increased risk of any esophageal or gastric cancer. Conclusions: Corticosteroid and aspirin use were associated with significantly decreased risks of esophageal and gastric cancer. LES-relaxing drugs as a group did not affect these risks, although we had limited power to assess individual drugs. The possibility that corticosteroids and aspirin might reduce esophageal cancer risk warrants further consideration

Search for a W' boson decaying to a bottom quark and a top quark in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

Results are presented from a search for a W' boson using a dataset corresponding to 5.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity collected during 2011 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The W' boson is modeled as a heavy W boson, but different scenarios for the couplings to fermions are considered, involving both left-handed and right-handed chiral projections of the fermions, as well as an arbitrary mixture of the two. The search is performed in the decay channel W' to t b, leading to a final state signature with a single lepton (e, mu), missing transverse energy, and jets, at least one of which is tagged as a b-jet. A W' boson that couples to fermions with the same coupling constant as the W, but to the right-handed rather than left-handed chiral projections, is excluded for masses below 1.85 TeV at the 95% confidence level. For the first time using LHC data, constraints on the W' gauge coupling for a set of left- and right-handed coupling combinations have been placed. These results represent a significant improvement over previously published limits.Comment: Submitted to Physics Letters B. Replaced with version publishe

Search for new physics in events with opposite-sign leptons, jets, and missing transverse energy in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search is presented for physics beyond the standard model (BSM) in final states with a pair of opposite-sign isolated leptons accompanied by jets and missing transverse energy. The search uses LHC data recorded at a center-of-mass energy sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the CMS detector, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 5 inverse femtobarns. Two complementary search strategies are employed. The first probes models with a specific dilepton production mechanism that leads to a characteristic kinematic edge in the dilepton mass distribution. The second strategy probes models of dilepton production with heavy, colored objects that decay to final states including invisible particles, leading to very large hadronic activity and missing transverse energy. No evidence for an event yield in excess of the standard model expectations is found. Upper limits on the BSM contributions to the signal regions are deduced from the results, which are used to exclude a region of the parameter space of the constrained minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model. Additional information related to detector efficiencies and response is provided to allow testing specific models of BSM physics not considered in this paper.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Identification of independent association signals and putative functional variants for breast cancer risk through fine-scale mapping of the 12p11 locus.

BACKGROUND: Multiple recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs10771399, at 12p11 that is associated with breast cancer risk. METHOD: We performed a fine-scale mapping study of a 700 kb region including 441 genotyped and more than 1300 imputed genetic variants in 48,155 cases and 43,612 controls of European descent, 6269 cases and 6624 controls of East Asian descent and 1116 cases and 932 controls of African descent in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC; http://bcac.ccge.medschl.cam.ac.uk/ ), and in 15,252 BRCA1 mutation carriers in the Consortium of Investigators of Modifiers of BRCA1/2 (CIMBA). Stepwise regression analyses were performed to identify independent association signals. Data from the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project (ENCODE) and the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) were used for functional annotation. RESULTS: Analysis of data from European descendants found evidence for four independent association signals at 12p11, represented by rs7297051 (odds ratio (OR) = 1.09, 95 % confidence interval (CI) = 1.06-1.12; P = 3 × 10(-9)), rs805510 (OR = 1.08, 95 % CI = 1.04-1.12, P = 2 × 10(-5)), and rs1871152 (OR = 1.04, 95 % CI = 1.02-1.06; P = 2 × 10(-4)) identified in the general populations, and rs113824616 (P = 7 × 10(-5)) identified in the meta-analysis of BCAC ER-negative cases and BRCA1 mutation carriers. SNPs rs7297051, rs805510 and rs113824616 were also associated with breast cancer risk at P < 0.05 in East Asians, but none of the associations were statistically significant in African descendants. Multiple candidate functional variants are located in putative enhancer sequences. Chromatin interaction data suggested that PTHLH was the likely target gene of these enhancers. Of the six variants with the strongest evidence of potential functionality, rs11049453 was statistically significantly associated with the expression of PTHLH and its nearby gene CCDC91 at P < 0.05. CONCLUSION: This study identified four independent association signals at 12p11 and revealed potentially functional variants, providing additional insights into the underlying biological mechanism(s) for the association observed between variants at 12p11 and breast cancer risk.UK funding includes Cancer Research UK and NIH.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from BioMed Central via http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13058-016-0718-

Search for leptophobic Z ' bosons decaying into four-lepton final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe

Search for black holes and other new phenomena in high-multiplicity final states in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe

Measurements of differential production cross sections for a Z boson in association with jets in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

Peer reviewe

Search for high-mass diphoton resonances in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV and combination with 8 TeV search

Peer reviewe

Search for heavy resonances decaying into a vector boson and a Higgs boson in final states with charged leptons, neutrinos, and b quarks

Peer reviewe

Measurement of the Z boson differential cross section in transverse momentum and rapidity in proton-proton collisions at 8 TeV

We present a measurement of the Z boson differential cross section in rapidity and transverse momentum using a data sample of pp collision events at a centre-of-mass energy s=8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb-1. The Z boson is identified via its decay to a pair of muons. The measurement provides a precision test of quantum chromodynamics over a large region of phase space. In addition, due to the small experimental uncertainties in the measurement the data has the potential to constrain the gluon parton distribution function in the kinematic regime important for Higgs boson production via gluon fusion. The results agree with the next-to-next-to-leading-order predictions computed with the fewz program. The results are also compared to the commonly used leading-order MadGraph and next-to-leading-order powheg generators. © 2015 CERN for the benefit of the CMS Collaboration