Gastropanel: a useful screening test in pediatric populations.

Aim. Ascertain the role of GastroPanel (GP) in screening children for gastric inflammation. Patients. 195 children (101 F, 94 M; mean age 7 yrs) underwent EGDS for chronic abdominal pain. At endoscopy 105 had no evident lesions, 43 antral erythema, 15 diffuse gastritis, 4 duodenitis, 11 esophagitis, 10 micronodular gastritis, 7 mosaic duodenal mucosa. H. pylori (HP) was histologically diagnosed in 17.6% of cases. In fasting sera pepsinogen A (PGA), pepsinogen C (PGC), gastrin- 17 (G17), anti-HP Ab were assayedand analysed by the GastroSoft for Excel (Biohit®, Helsinki, Finland). Results. 108/195 children had an histologically normal mucosa; 68 had gastric inflammation and 19 had extragastric lesions. PGC and anti-HP were significantly correlated with HP infection (t=4.22, p<0.001 and t=5.28, p<0.001). The GastroSoft provided 5 categories: normal, antral gastritis, antral atrophy, antral+body atrophy, body atrophy. GP sensitivity in identifying children with gastric inflammation was 29.4%, the specificity towards extragastric diseases was 68.4% while that towards controls was 95.4% (PPV 83.9%; PNV 70.7%). None of the single parameters discriminated gastric inflammation (under ROC curves areas: 0.60 for PGA, 0.63 for PGC, 0.57 for G-17, 0.72 for anti-HP). 6/7 children with mosaic duodenal mucosa were biochemically classified as Having corpus Htrophy. 2 had autoimmune gastritis and 4 celiac disease. Conclusion. GP might be an useful non invasive test for screening gastric inflammation in children. This test seems able to indicate also in children the presence of corpus atrophy which has probably to be histologically searched especially in subjects with celiac disease.