Effectiveness and safety of serial endoscopic ultrasound–guided celiac plexus block for chronic pancreatitis

Background and study aims: Endoscopic ultrasound – guided celiac plexus block (EUS-CPB) is an established treatment for pain in patients with chronic pancreatitis (CP), but the effectiveness and safety of repeated procedures are unknown. Our objective is to report our experience of repeated EUS-CPB procedures within a single patient. , Patients and methods: A prospectively maintained EUS database was retrospectively analyzed to identify patients who had undergone more than one EUS-CPB procedure over a 17-year period. The main outcome measures included number of EUS-CPB procedures for each patient, self-reported pain relief, duration of pain relief, and procedure-related adverse events. , Results: A total of 248 patients underwent more than one EUS-CPB procedure and were included in our study. Patients with known or suspected CP (N = 248) underwent a mean (SD) of 3.1 (1.6) EUS-CPB procedures. In 76 % of the patients with CP, the median (range) duration of the response to the first EUS-CPB procedure was 10 (1 – 54) weeks. Lack of pain relief after the initial EUS-CPB was associated with failure of the next EUS-CPB (OR 0.17, 95 %CI 0.06 – 0.54). Older age at first EUS-CPB and pain relief after the first EUS-CPB were significantly associated with pain relief after subsequent blocks (P = 0.026 and P = 0.002, respectively). Adverse events included peri-procedural hypoxia (n = 2) and hypotension (n = 1) and post-procedural orthostasis (n = 2) and diarrhea (n = 4). No major adverse events occurred., Conclusions: Repeated EUS-CPB procedures in a single patient appear to be safe. Response to the first EUS-CPB is associated with response to subsequent blocks

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

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Search for single production of a heavy vector-like T quark decaying to a Higgs boson and a top quark with a lepton and jets in the final state

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