The effects of age and gender on the upper esophageal sphincter's (UES) and pharyngeal manometric parameters were investigated in 84 healthy subjects (45 men, 39 women, mean age = 44 years, range = 18-91). Manometric recordings were performed with solid-state circumferential transducers. Subjects older than 60 years (n = 23) showed a significant lower UES resting pressure. In addition, during water swallows they had a higher UES residual pressure, shorter UES relaxation interval and UES relaxation duration, and a decreased UES relaxation rate. Furthermore, pharyngeal contraction had significant higher amplitude and longer duration in subjects older than 60 years during water swallows. Some of these findings were also observed during cookie and pudding swallows. Women had a higher UES resting pressure and a longer UES relaxation interval than men. The observed changes with increasing age indicate loss of basal tone and decreased compliance of the UES. Increased pharyngeal contraction amplitude and its prolonged duration in the elderly might be compensatory to this. These physiologic effects of age and gender on UES and pharyngeal parameters should be taken into account during analysis of manometric studies.

Currently, the diagnosis of esophageal motility disorders is in part based upon a hierarchical algorithm in which abnormalities of the esophagogastric junction (EGJ) is prioritized. An important metric in evaluating the EGJ is the integrated relaxation pressure (IRP). Patients who do not have achalasia but are found to have an elevated IRP are diagnosed with EGJ outflow obstruction. It has been our observation that a subset of these patients also has a second named motility disorder and may also have abnormal bolus transit. The aim of this study is to determine the frequency of abnormal body motility and or abnormal bolus movement in patients with EGJ outflow obstruction. Further, in an effort to evaluate the potential clinical value in measuring bolus transit as a complement to esophageal manometry, specifically in patients with EGJ outflow obstruction, we analyzed the presenting symptoms of these patients. A total of 807 patients with a mean age of 53 years completed esophageal function testing with impedance monitoring and high-resolution manometry between January 2012 and October 2016. There were 74 patients with achalasia who were excluded from the study. Of the remaining 733 patients, 138 (19%) had an elevated IRP and were given a diagnosis of EGJ outflow obstruction. Among these patients, 56 (40%) were diagnosed with an abnormal motility pattern to liquids (ineffective esophageal motility = 28, distal esophageal spasm = 19, Jackhammer = 6), of which 44 (76%) had abnormal bolus transit to liquids, viscous, or both. In contrast, there were 82 patients with EGJ outflow obstruction and normal esophageal motility, of which 33 (40%) had abnormal bolus transit. Patients with preserved esophageal motility and EGJ outflow obstruction were then evaluated. Of the 733 patients, 299 (40%) had intact esophageal motility. Of the 299 patients with normal esophageal motility, 56 patients had an elevated IRP, of which 16 (28%) had abnormal bolus transit. There were 243 (33%) patients with intact esophageal motility and normal IRP. Of these, 56 (23%) patients had abnormal bolus transit. Among patients with abnormal bolus transit, the two most commonly presenting symptoms were dysphagia and heartburn. A substantial percentage of patients with EGJ outflow obstruction have abnormal esophageal body motility and or abnormal bolus transit. The clinical implications of EGJ outflow obstruction need to be further elucidated as current criteria do not allow for the description of other abnormalities in esophageal motility and bolus transit among patients who are given the diagnosis of EGJ outflow obstruction.

Distal esophageal spasm (DES) is a major motility abnormality that can be associated with dysphagia and/or non-cardiac chest pain. The Chicago Classification (CC) v3.0 defined DES when liquid swallows are followed by at least 20% of premature contractions without impairment of esophago-gastric junction (EGJ) relaxation (normal integrated relaxation pressure (IRP)). 1 With the version 3.0, the distal latency (DL) between swallow and distal contraction was introduced as a new parameter to analyze esophageal high-resolution manometry (HRM). It requires the localization of the contractile deceleration point (CDP) which is the inflexion point in the contractile front propagation velocity in the distal esophagus. 2 Premature contraction is thus defined by the DL measured as the interval from the start of relaxation of the upper esophageal sphincter (UES) to the CDP shorter than 4.5 s. 3 The proposed definition of DES is purely manometric in the CCv3.0. An international process began in 2019 to update the Chicago Classification based on new publications and the experience in using

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In this paper, we describe our two SemEval-2007 entries. Our first entry, for Task 5: Multilingual Chinese-English Lexical Sample Task, is a supervised system that decides the most appropriate English translation of a Chinese target word. This system uses a combination of Naïve Bayes, nearest neighbor cosine, decision lists, and latent semantic analysis. Our second entry, for Task 14: Affective Text, is a supervised system that annotates headlines using a predefined list of emotions. This system uses synonym expansion and matches lemmatized unigrams in the test headlines against a corpus of handannotated headlines.