Functional dyspepsia: recent pathophysiological advances.

Functional dyspepsia is a clinical syndrome defined by upper abdominal symptoms, without identifiable cause by conventional diagnostic evaluation. New diagnostic tests, such as gastrointestinal manometry and gastric emptying, may help in a better characterization of these patients by demonstrating specific motor abnormalities, such as postprandial antral hypomotility and delayed gastric emptying of solids, or less frequently, intestinal dysmotility patterns indicating a visceral neuropathy. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of dyspeptic patients have normal motility patterns. Interestingly, recent studies have shown that a gastric hypersensitivity to distension may be the cause of the postprandial symptoms in functional dyspepsia. These data indicate that functional dyspepsia may include an heterogeneous group of patients with different underlying disturbances.