Clinical and anorectal motility features in chronically constipated children.

Constipation is a common problem in children. It can be a symptom of functional disorder in majority of cases, but sometimes a serious organic disease is a cause of constipation. Anorectal manometry plays an important role in the diagnostic procedure. It can be presumed that some values of manometric parameters could be very useful in treatment plan. The aim of this study was to confirm or exclude such limits in manometric finding, to make a plan of the therapy more accurate. Therefore the group of 81 constipated children was investigated. There were 58 patients suffering from functional constipation and 23 with organic disorders. The age of the patients was 3 to 15 years. Scoring system was applied to estimate severity of constipation and anorectal manometry was performed. Our results did not show significant correlation between clinical symptoms and signs and the values that we obtained using anorectal manometry. But, we recommend anorectal manometry because it is a safe method and contributes to clarify the diagnosis, which is very important for treatment plan.