Recurrent Abdominal Pain and Dietary Fiber-Reply

Abstract

In Reply .—I was pleased to see that Dr Christensen described his own study, 1 which challenged our positive results. 2 Unfortunately, Dr Christensen does not include enough information in his letter to allow me to assess the validity of his study. For example, we are not given any information about how many grams of fiber the children received and what the nature of the fiber was. It is of interest that all of his patients were hospitalized, whereas none of ours were. Few patients without serious underlying organic bowel disease or serious psychological problems are admitted to our hospital for abdominal pain. Thus, it is entirely possible that we are discussing two different patient populations, even though Dr Christensen says that children with organic causes of pain were excluded. In fact, we are not told in the letter how organic causes were excluded. On the other hand, because of