'Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed'.

摘要

We read with great interest the recent paper by Lapalus et al.(1) report- ing the results of a French multicenter study assessing the diagnostic accuracy of esopha-geal capsule endoscopy (ECE) as compared with esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD) for the evaluation of portal hypertension. In this study, they observed, after proper exclusion of patients with criteria suspect for failure of ECE, that this examination was still not feasible in 6% of their patient population. Furthermore, taking into account patients who underwent both ECE and EGD, they observed that ECE had a missing rate for esophageal varices (EVs) of 20% (14/71 patients), and that in the whole cohort ECE was not able to correctly identify 15% of the patients with indication to prophylaxis of first bleeding (EV grade >1 and/or red signs).