Gastric motility functional study based on electrical bioimpedance measurements and simultaneous electrogastrography

Abstract

For some time now, the research on gastric motility and function has fallen behind in the amount of research on gastric endocrine, exocrine secretion, and gastric morphology. In this paper, a noninvasive method to study gastric motility was developed, taking bioimpedance measurements over the gastric area simultaneously with the electrogastrography (EGG). This is based on the concept of observing and analyzing simultaneously the intrinsic electrical gastric activity (basic electric rhythm) and the mechanical gastric activity. Additionally, preliminary clinical studies of healthy subjects and subjects with functional dyspepsia (FD) and gastritis were carried out. The impedance gastric motility (IGM) measurements of the healthy and FD subjects were compared, along with the studies of the FD subjects before treatment and after one week and three weeks of treatment. We also compared IGM measurements of healthy subjects and subjects with erosive gastritis, along with the studies of the subjects with erosive gastritis before treatment and after one week of treatment. Results show that FD subjects have poor gastric motility (P<0.01). After a week of treatment, the gastric motility of FD subjects was not yet improved although the EGG had returned to normal by this time. By three weeks of treatment, the regular IGM rhythm returned in FD subjects. There was a significant difference of IGM parameters between the gastritis and healthy subjects (P<0.05). The EGG rhythm of the gastritis subjects returned to normal at one week post-treatment, while IGM parameters showed a trend to improvement (P>0.05), These results suggest the possibility of clinic application of the proposed method.