Acute cerebellitis following SARS-CoV-2 infection: A case report and review of the literature.

Novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) first described in Wuhan, China in December 2019, has rapidly spread across the world and become a global public health emergency. Literature on the neurological manifestations of COVID-19 is limited. We report a 24-year-old male, who presented with vertigo, dysarthria, and bradyphrenia 3 weeks after being diagnosed with COVID-19 on nasopharyngeal reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. The patient was diagnosed with acute cerebellitis based on magnetic resonance imaging features and showed improvement posttreatment with intravenous methylprednisone for 5 days. The scope of this article is to highlight the importance of early identification of neurological symptoms and timely management as the outcomes may be catastrophic.

Endoscopic Submucosal Tunnel Dissection as a Novel Therapeutic Technique in Patients With Barrett's Esophagus.

With the ameliorated resectability prowess of endoscopic techniques, a myriad of diseases previously treated by major ablative surgeries are now endoscopically curable. Endoscopic submucosal tunnel dissection (ESTD) is a relatively new technique that has diversified endoscopic application. Although ESTD has frequently been used for the resection of esophageal neoplastic lesions, the clinical evidence pertaining to its efficacy in the treatment of circumferential Barrett's esophagus remains sparse. In this study, we evaluated ESTD as a potential therapeutic technique in patients with Barrett's esophagus-related high-grade dysplasia. The tunneling strategy helped achieve complete en bloc resection at an increased dissection speed, without any procedural complications. This article illustrates that ESTD can be a feasible, safe, and effective treatment for dysplastic Barrett's esophagus. Future research should aim to stratify the potential risks and complications associated with this optimization of endoscopic submucosal dissection in patients with superficial esophageal lesions.

A robust and novel electrical impedance metric of pulmonary function in ALS patients.

OBJECTIVE: Pulmonary function tests (PFTs) are important for assessing respiratory function in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients. However, weakness of oral and glottal closure, due to concomitant bulbar dysfunction, may result in unreliable PFT values stemming from leakage of air around the breathing tube and through the glottis. In this study, we assessed whether standard thoracic electrical impedance tomography (EIT) could serve as a surrogate measure for PFTs. APPROACH: Thoracic EIT was performed simultaneously with standard PFTs on seven ALS patients without clinical bulbar weakness (six men and one woman, mean age of 63 years) and ten healthy volunteers (seven men and three women, mean age of 57 years). A raw impedance metric along with more standard EIT measures were computed and correlated with the normalized forced vital capacity (FVC). Additionally, test/re-test metrics and EIT images were analyzed. MAIN RESULTS: The impedance metric was found to be robust and sensitive to lung activity. We also identified qualitative EIT differences between healthy volunteers and ALS patients, with the ALS images showing greater heterogeneity. Significant correlations with FVC were found for both impedance and EIT metrics in ALS patients (r2 = 0.89) and for the impedance metric only in healthy volunteers (r2 = 0.49). SIGNIFICANCE: This suggests that EIT, using our novel impedance metric, has the potential to serve as an alternative technology to standard PFTs for assessing pulmonary function in patients with ALS, offering new metrics of disease status for those with bulbar weakness.