Advances in the Clinical Research of Gastro-esophageal Reflux Disease and Functional Gastrointestinal Diseases

Gastro-esophageal reflux disease(GERD) and functional gastrointestinal diseases(FGIDs) are common digestive diseases with an increasing concern. Both of them share similar pathogenesis, symptoms overlapping and merged mental psychological factors, which cause lack of standardization in diagnosis and poor response to treatment. The topics of this issue focused on the characteristics of motility dysfunction in different subtype of GERD and treatment priorities, main points of diagnosis and treatment of atypical-GERD with extra-esophageal symptoms as the primary presenting manifestation, status and characteristics of symptom overlapping between GERD and FGIDs, as well as the influence of symptom overlapping and mental psychological factors to life quality of GERD and FGIDs patients. With these advances in clinical research translating into clinical practice, it becomes promising to improve the standardization of diagnosis and to optimize the treatment of these diseases, which could lead to the change of therapeutic goal from simply alleviation of symptoms into the improvement of life quality with more concern of symptoms indicators.