Radionuclear transit to assess sites of delay in large bowel transit in children with chronic idiopathic constipation
Section snippets
Patient characteristics
A retrospective review of 101 consecutive nuclear transit studies performed on children with severe constipation over a 2-year period was undertaken. All patients were seen by the senior author (JMH) or a gastroenterologist/pediatrician working in a continence clinic. All patients had symptoms of severe chronic constipation and/or encopresis that had not responded to at least 6 months of medical therapy with laxatives, dietary alterations, and behavior modification. Children with an obviously
Results
Between October 1997 and October 1999, 101 consecutive patients (62 boys and 39 girls) were retrospectively included in the study. The mean age at investigation was 7.3 ± 3.7 (mean ± SD) years.
Discussion
These results suggest that scintigraphy can be used in the investigation of chronic constipation in children and that the proposed advantages of scintigraphy over radio-opaque marker studies in the investigation of adults with chronic constipation also apply to children. Visual assessment of the images acquired at 6, 24, 30, and 48 hours allows patients to be categorized as having normal transit (n = 24), slow transit (n = 50), and FFR (n = 22). This categorization is clinically important
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This study was supported in part by a Royal Children's Hospital (Melbourne, Australia) grant.