Improved symptomatic, functional, and fluoroscopic outcomes following serial “series of three” double-balloon dilation for cricopharyngeus muscle dysfunction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cricopharyngeus muscle dysfunction (CPMD) is a common cause of dysphagia. We employ a progressive series of three double-balloon dilations separated by 4-6 weeks between procedures as a primary treatment option. The purpose of this study was to evaluate subjective, functional and objective improvement in swallowing after three serial dilations for CPMD. METHODS: We retrospectively evaluated patients between June 1, 2014, and June 30, 2016, who underwent a series of three double-balloon dilations for CPMD. Pre- and post-dilation Eating Assessment Tool-10 (EAT-10), Functional Oral Intake Scale (FOIS), pharyngeal constriction ratio, pharyngeal area, and pharyngoesophageal segment (PES) opening were compared. RESULTS: Seventeen patients with CPMD underwent serial double-balloon dilation procedures separated by one month. Mean age of the cohort was 73.5 (SD ± 13.3) years, and 53% were female. The mean EAT-10 improved from 24.7 (SD ± 7.8) to 15.9 (SD ± 10.2) [p = 0.0021]. Mean FOIS improved from 5.4 (SD ± 1.4) pre- to 6.3 (SD ± 0.9) post-treatment (p = 0.017). Mean UES opening increased from 1.05 (SD ± 0.34) cm to 1.48 (SD ± 0.41) cm (p = 0.0003) in the anteroposterior fluoroscopic view and from 0.58 (SD ± 0.18) to 0.76 (SD ± 0.30) cm (p = 0.018) in the lateral view. Pharyngeal constriction ratio (PCR), a surrogate measure of pharyngeal strength, improved from 0.49 (SD ± 0.37) to 0.24 (SD ± 0.15) (p = 0.015), however pharyngeal area (PA) was unchanged. CONCLUSIONS: A progressive series of three double-balloon dilations for cricopharyngeus muscle dysfunction resulted in improved patient reported dysphagia symptom scores and objective fluoroscopic swallowing parameters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".