Monthly Archives: November 2017

Question: A 54-year-old woman with no known past medical history presented to our hospital with a 2-week history of left flank pain radiating to her left leg. The pain was sharp in nature, constant, and it was exacerbated by any movement. The patient h… Continue reading →

Question: A 52-year-old woman presented to our department with a 1-month history of progressive dysphagia for solids and weight loss (<10% of total weight). Her past medical history included cigarette smoking (15 pack-years) without medication, alcohol, or drug consumption, nor familiar risk factors. The patient denied other symptoms like anorexia, nausea, heartburn, retrosternal chest pain, abdominal pain, and gastrointestinal bleeding. On physical examination, she presented with a global decrease of the breath sounds. Continue reading →

We read with interest the article by Singh et al1 evaluating the incidence, risk factors, and outcomes after Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) in a population-based cohort of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and laboratory confirmati… Continue reading →

We read the systematic review and meta-analysis by Hooi et al1 with great interest. Their efforts should be commended for updating and expanding on global prevalence data on Helicobacter pylori infection that were published a few years ago.2 However, … Continue reading →

Liver biopsy used to be a common procedure for the evaluation of abnormal liver chemistries. The goal was to obtain an adequate tissue specimen, and the diagnosis and staging of many liver disorders was based on histopathologic analysis. Today, the dia… Continue reading →

We thank Dai et al for their interest in our article. It seems that that they have misunderstood several aspects of our article, and we are writing to clarify as many as we can in a brief letter. For example, they assert our reported time trends of Cl… Continue reading →

Gallbladder carcinoma (GBC) is the most common malignancy of the biliary tract and the third most common gastrointestinal tract malignancy. About 178,100 new cases were diagnosed around the world in 2012, but the number of deaths from the disease was… Continue reading →

We appreciate your insightful comments and thank you for sharing your recent publication in BMJ Open. This is an important addition to the literature, which demonstrated a decreasing trend in the prevalence of Helicobacter pylori in Japan in more recen… Continue reading →