When physiology meets technology: redefining colonic mass movements

摘要

Despite coloproctology being one of the first medical subspe-cialties to be established (20), it is surprising that our knowledge of pan-colonic motor activity in humans remained limited for a long time and mostly confined to the anorectal area (2). At the beginning of 1900, pioneer radiologists demonstrated the presence of infrequent, vigorous contractions able to transport contents over long tracts of the large bowel (11, 13). These events were subsequently confirmed by manometric investigations and called mass movements (12). Combined radiological/ manometric studies in colostomized subjects then showed that the motility counterpart of radiological mass movements was represented by propagated contractions of high amplitude (19). In 1987, by means of prolonged (24 h) motility recordings, we described the presence of high-amplitude propagated contractions in the intact human colon of healthy subjects and labeled them as HAPC (16), an acronym subsequently adopted for their definition and terminology in human colonic motility (7).