Use of skin thermometer to diagnose acute appendicitis.

explained by the fact that even severely dysphagic people do not always volunteer symptoms, as shown by the six subjects in our study who had never consulted a doctor for their daily discomfort during meals. The tendency for elderlv people to accept their problems as an inevitable manifestation of old age is probably the cause of this failure to seek help,' resulting in underreporting of symptoms so that the actual prevalence of dysphagia may be even higher than our findings suggest. Moreover, by selecting subjects living in the community we may have excluded less healthy people, thus further underestimating the prevalence of dysphagia. The relative extent to which dysphagia is caused by either aging or specific diseases is unknown. Our findings show a high correlation between dysphagia and diseases of the central nervous system and oesophagus. The cause of dysphagia in people not reporting specific diseases, however, remains uncertain, so aging as a cause of senile dysphagia cannot be excluded.