The contribution of abdominal ultrasound in diagnosis and evaluation of gastroesophageal reflux

Objective: To determine the role of abdominal ultrasonography in evaluation of gastroesophageal reflux (GER), to compare this method with esophageal scintigraphy and to make correlations between these investigations, GERDQ 2009 reflux questionnaire and the histologic aspects in patients with Barrett's esophagus (BE). Material and methods: 30 patients with BE were subjected to upper digestive endoscopy with biopsy, esophageal scintigraphy and abdominal ultrasound. They also filled out the GERDQ 2009 reflux questionnaire. We tried to find correlations between these data using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test in order to find the normality of distributed variables, Mann-Whitney test and Student test for comparing two groups of variables and ANOVA test, Scheffer or Kruskal-Wallis test for comparing three groups of variables. We used X2 or Fischer test for investigating the dependence between two nominal variables and Pearson and Spearman coefficient for two continuous variables. Results: Ultrasonography determined that female sex is correlated with a more severe GER (r=-0.4; p=0.02). There was a statistically significant correlation between the severity of GER estimated during scintigraphy and during ultrasonography (r=0.755; p