[Prognosis of acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding before and after the introduction of emergency endoscopy (author's transl)].

A total of 416 patients had been admitted to hospital for acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding, about half of them before the introduction of endoscopy. There was a highly significant decrease in total mortality rate by 18 percent since the introduction of endoscopy. The reason for this is probably largely the much higher number of correct identification or localisation of bleeding points by endoscopy (98 percent) when compared with conventional radiological examination.