Screening for bile acid diarrhoea in suspected irritable bowel syndrome

We read the paper by Bajor et al with interest.1 The authors demonstrated that 18% of patients who meet criteria for IBS may have underlying bile acid diarrhoea (BAD), using 23-seleno-25-homo-tauro-cholic acid (SeHCAT) scanning. This issue has been the subject of a previous systematic review and meta-analysis2 which reported that up to 30% of individuals with IBS had evidence of idiopathic BAD. However, many of the included studies were retrospective, and few used accepted symptom-based criteria to define the presence of IBS, underlining the importance of the data from Bajor et al1 who recruited a well characterised and rigorously defined cohort of patients meeting the Rome II criteria for IBS. We therefore congratulate the authors on conducting this study. The concept that underlying organic GI disease may explain symptoms compatible with IBS is not novel. The current gold standard for diagnosing IBS, the...
Source: Gut - Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Tags: PostScript Source Type: research