Functional bowel disease : a challenging frontier in gastroenterology

Abstract

The last 30 years have seen incredible advances in the science and practice of gastroenterology and hepatology. In the 1970s, the fiberoptic endoscopic revolution facilitated the visualization of the mucosa of a large segment of the gastrointestinal tract and afforded the opportunity for specialized studies using histological and biochemical analyses. The impact of fiberoptic endoscopy on surveillance or screening for cancer of the colon will be more apparent in the next millennium. Novel pharmacological approaches have had a dramatic impact on gastroenterology.