Assessment of outcome in dyspepsia: has progress been made?
There is a lack of consensus among researchers on how to best measure outcome in functional dyspepsia trials and more importantly a lack of validated outcome measures. If symptoms resolve completely, treatment has been successful but with partial improvement interpretation is less straightforward. It is most likely that these issues will only be resolved if unequivocally efficacious treatments emerge to which the different outcome measures can be compared. Recently, a few validated outcome measures have been developed which look promising.
Veldhuyzen van Zanten
S J O
SJ
Division of Gastroenterology, Dalhousie University, Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre, Victoria General Site, Room 928 Centennial Building, 5790 University Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 2YG, Canada. zanten@is.dal.ca
D004415:Dyspepsia / Q000628:therapy*; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006801:Humans; D011788:Quality of Life; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D016896:Treatment Outcome