The appellation of „dyspepsia” comes from Greek language and accuratelly means "bad digestion" ("dys" - bad, "peptein" - to digest) and populary is understood by people as an indigestion. Dyspepsia is characterized by many various symptomes described by patients in very different ways. The most popular symptomes reported by patinets are: pain or burning in epigastrium (epigastric region), subjective feeling of early satiety (fullness), feeling of extended time of remaining food in stomach. All these symptomes can occur either under fasting conditions or after meal, sometimes during these both periods of time.

Physicinas distinguish two types of dyspepsia: organic dyspepsia and functional dyspepsia.
In patients suffering from organic dyspepsia, physicians can always find the real reason of that disease and of all these symptomes, for example lesions of mucous membrane of stomach or duodenum, stomach ulcer or chronic pancreatitis.

Functional dyspepsia is characterized by very similar symptomes, but physicians can not find the real reason of these ailments. It means that during physical examination, in laboratory test results, during X - ray and USG examinations and during endoscopy as well, there are no abberations (no deviations) that could be connected with all those symptomes.

Functional dyspepsia refers to a wider and wider group of patients and therefore it arouses a lot of interest. So far the diagnosis of functional dyspepsia has been based on subjectively perceptible symptoms and the exclusion of organic lesions of the alimentary tract, systemic and metabolic diseases. For several dozens of years the definition of functional dyspepsia has been modified many times. The researchers developed, inter alia, the Rome Criteria which characterize this disease in more detail (http://www.romecriteria.org/assets/pdf/19_RomeIII_apA_885-898.pdf).

In accordance with the valid Rome III Criteria, published in 2006, today there are distinguished only two clinical forms of functional dyspepsia:
1) PDS (postprandial distress syndrome) and
2) EPS (epigastric pain syndrome), (http://www.nature.com/ajg/journal/v105/n12/fig_tab/ajg2010266t1.html),

The pathogenesis of functional dyspepsia is still hardly recognized, especially in respect of the corticovisceral regulation. The role of Helicobacter pylori in inducing the symptoms of this disease is also controversial. It is widely known that psychoemotional factors have a strong effect on the origin and intensification of the symptoms of functional dyspepsia and all other functional diseases of the digestive tract. Nowadays, to explain the pathogenesis of functional dyspepsia great hopes are connected with understanding of gastric myoelectrical disorders which undoubtedly affect gastric motility. The gastric secretion inhibitory substances, prokinetic and antibacterial medications used so far result in improvement only in a group of patients and there is no guarantee that permanent remission will be achieved. The process of searching for new medications is continued to invent or discover such substances that would effectively regulate gastric motility, secretion and visceral sensation. Such hopes are aroused, inter alia, by medications producing an effect on serotonin receptors (5 – HT – 1, 2, 3, 4) and modifying serotonin reuptake. It becomes necessary, however, to study in more detail the pathogenesis and objective indicators of the disease in order to determine its intensification and to search for new methods of effective therapy. There is still a need for diagnostic methods that would enable to diagnose dyspepsia reliably and to differentiate its clinical forms. To this end, inter alia, such examinations as cutaneous electrogastrography (EGG) are used for the assessment of gastric myoelectrical activity (http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrogastrografia).

Electrogastrography is one of the methods for the assessment of gastric myoelectrical activity that makes its possible to draw inferences about gastric motility (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3548127/). Motility disorders are an important factor in the pathogenesis of functional dyspepsia. EGG is still, however, a disputable method and the obtained results frequently differ from one another. This is caused by a lack of consolidated examination principles regarding, inter alia, test meals and a period of examination. Some doubts and questions are raised about what parameters must be taken into account for the purposes of searching for objective indicators of functional dyspepsia (http://www.termedia.pl/Electrogastrography-in-diagnosis-of-functional-dyspepsia,41,10509,0,1.html).

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