Aetiopathogenesis of functional dyspepsia

Dear Editor, I read the paper by Fang et al1 with interest. The authors reported risk factors for functional dyspepsia (FD), defined using the Rome III criteria, in a large referral population from Taiwan. They reported that these criteria performed poorly in distinguishing between organic pathology and FD, that those with FD were more likely to exhibit concomitant IBS and that there were distinct differences in risk factors between epigastric pain syndrome (EPS) and postprandial distress syndrome (PDS). The latter observation led them to conclude that these two FD subgroups have a distinct aetiopathogenesis. The Rome III criteria have been shown to be no better than previous criteria in predicting FD by other investigators,2 and the prevalence of organic disease in patients with uninvestigated dyspepsia following upper gastrointestinal endoscopy in the present study was broadly similar, although it is perhaps surprising that there were no...
Source: Gut - Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Tags: PostScript Source Type: research