Esophageal multichannel intraluminal impedance and pH-testing in the study of apparent life threatening episode incidents in infants

Introduction: The conventional 24-hour pH monitoring is the gold standard for the diagnosis of gastro-esophageal reflux (GER), a possible cause of Apparent Life Threatening Episodes (ALTE). However, multichannel intraluminal impedance (MII) may provide advantages. Objectives: Comparison of the results of MII and pH monitoring in patients undergoing MII-pH monitoring in the 3-year study period because of having suffered from ALTE. Material and methods: Prospective study of MII-pH monitoring performed in our unit to infants < 12 months of age admitted for ALTE for a 3-year period. Results: Thirty nine patients studied. 2,692 pH monitoring episodes, with median of 24 (IQ: 15-44) episodes/patient, 1.30 (IQ: 0.80-2.60) reflux/hour, 1 (IQ: 0-4) reflux episode &gt; 5 min per patient and clearance of 1.20 (IQ: 0.70-2.20) min/reflux. With pH monitoring analysis, 14 children (35.9 %) could have been diagnosed as GER (8 mild, 4 moderate and 2 severe) based on the classical criteria. MII identified a total of 8,895 events; only 3,219 among them were refluxes, with a median of 75 (IQ: 54-111) per patient, 1.30 (IQ: 1.3-2.6) episodes/hour). With MII-pH monitoring combination there were 21.60 (SD 15.21) acid reflux episodes, 67.33 weekly acid (SD 32.09) and 3.34 (SD 7.23) non-acid, being finally diagnosed 33 patients as GER. Conclusions: The association of pH monitoring and MII provides additional information that improves GER diagnostic performance without posing any additional risk to the infant patient. The non-acid/weekly acid refluxes, not detected by pH monitoring, account for a high percentage of episodes, this may have diagnostic and therapeutic significance, especially in infants. Further studies are needed to assess the normality of MMI in pediatric patients.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Blasco-Alonso,Javier, Yun-Castilla,Cristina, Girón-Fernández-Crehuet,Francisco, Peláez-Cantero,Mª José, Serrano-Nieto,Juliana, Navas-López,Víctor Manuel, Sierra-Salinas,Carlos
Format: Digital revista
Language:English
Published: Sociedad Española de Patología Digestiva 2014
Online Access:http://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1130-01082014000300002
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