Cricopharyngeal bar and dermatomyositis: A cause of rapidly progressive dysphagia.

Background: Idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM) are immune-mediated conditions that affect striated muscle, and are frequently associated with dysphagia. Dysphagia in these cases can be due to weakness of the muscles involved in swallowing or the presence of restrictive pharyngeal defects, such as cricopharyngeal bars. Treatment of dysphagia in IIM revolves around immunosuppressive therapies, and procedures to disrupt cricopharyngeus muscle when immunosuppressive therapies are unsuccessful.

The effect of temperature on exhaled breath condensate collection.

Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) collection is an innovative method of non-invasively sampling the lung, and can detect a variety of volatile and non-volatile biomarkers, but the disadvantage is the small volume of sample collected. It was hypothesized that a collection system at a lower temperature would increase the volume collected, but may alter the relative concentration of the biomarkers of interest. EBC was collected in a cross-over study using a custom-made collection system, cooled using either wet (4 °C) or dry ice (-20 °C) in randomized order in normal non-smoking volunteers.