Introduction:

Chronic diarrhea is defined as the passage of loose or liquid stools, urgent need to evacuate or feelings of abdominal discomfort, or increased frequency of these, lasting more tan 4 weeks. In clinical practice it is useful to divide it into organic or functional causes. Colonoscopy is part of the diagnostic approach of these patients, allowing them to take samples for histological analysis.

Objective:

To evaluate the usefulness of colonoscopy with histopathological analysis in the treatment of patients with chronic diarrhea: organic vs functional.

Material and methods:

endoscopic and pathology reports were reviewed for 57 patients diagnosed with chronic diarrhea from January 2015 to June 2019.

Results:

57 patients were included in the analysis forming 2 groups with 29 patients in the organic and 28 functional groups, the endoscopic and histopathological findings were organized according to their correlation with the final diagnosis. The results were analyzed and organized with descriptive statistics, the test of U Mann Whitney was carried out to compare the averages of continuous variables in 2 independent groups obtaining an alpha of 0. 06 for a confidence level of 95%.

Conclusion:

with this level of confidence it was not possible to demonstrate that the findings in colonoscopy with biopsy in a retrospective study are more significant in patients with chronic organic diarrhea than in patients with functional diarrhea, however the results suggest that due to the narrow margin it is possible that with a better controlled prospective study it is possible to obtain different results that support our observation.