Motor correlates of functional gastrointestinal symptoms

Functional gastrointestinal symptoms, although frequently encountered in practice, are difficult to manage because their aetiologies and pathophysiologies are unknown. Usually empirical drug therapy is prescribed, but this results in partial, temporary or unpredictable improvement. More often, functional symptoms are discounted or attributed entirely to psychosomatic illness. These unsatisfactory results are explicable, in part, by the inability to relate functional symptoms to a specific pathophysiology. However, recent evaluation of dysmotility gives some hope for the future. Thus, motor events such as retrograde giant contractions and GMCs hold promise as perhaps being the motor correlates of some of the gastrointestinal functional symptoms. With their better characterization by physiological studies it may be possible to inhibit these contractions selectively.