Digestive diseases and sciences
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The etiology of upper digestive complaints in uremic patients, which frequently cause morbidity, is unclear. By means of ultrasonography we studied the emptying of the gastric antrum in 15 patients suffering from end-stage renal disease and in 15 controls. In addition, we tested for autonomic neuropathy in the chronic renal failure (CRF) patients using cardiovascular tests. ⋯ The CRF subgroup with exclusively parasympathetic neuropathy (5/15) had antral emptying similar to the controls. The symptom score as assessed by a standardized questionnaire of the CRF group with autonomic neuropathy (11/15) correlated significantly both with the fasting antral cross-sectional area and inversely with antral expansion immediately after finishing the test meal. Antral emptying showed a trend towards an inverse relationship to the symptom score, which reached statistical significance only in the CRF subgroup with sympathetic plus parasympathetic autonomic damage.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)