From Italian physician Hieronymus Mercurialis’s contention that the stomach was ‘the king of the belly’, to its promotion by the end of the nineteenth century to the ‘monarch of humanity’ in patent medicine, to Byron Robinson’s discovery of the enteric nervous system in 1907 (a mesh of neural connectivity that led him to dub the gut ‘the second brain’), there has historically been a longstanding awareness of the expansive reach of the gut in the functions of the body. In the (...) nineteenth century, the authority of the gut and its allyship with the brain became a focus for writers thinking about the intersections of illness and ‘modern life’. In medical texts, domestic health manuals, patent medicine, and fiction, the electric telegraph in particular became a way of envisaging what we would now call the ‘gut-brain axis’. The telegraphic metaphor enabled a view of digestion as not simply a mechanical or chemical process, but one that was understood in terms of time, space, and communication. However, such a framework also suggested problems of connection that were common to both systems, emphasising not only the healthy body’s quasi-telegraphic networks but also its vulnerability to delay, disruption, and pathological incoherence. This article will explore the use of telegraphic technologies as proxies for theorising gastric connection and more broadly the concept of ‘gastric time’ as a key conceit for understanding digestion as a process that was and is subject to the idiosyncrasies of bodily rhythms. (shrink)

Wilson argued that since for continuants such as people a predicate and a time determine a place, natural language *can* specify just, e,.g. "a is dyspeptic at t" leaving the location of a's dyspepsia unstated. From this he concludes that language *must* leave the location unstated. I query the transition from *may* to *must*.

Purpose: We aimed to find out the distributed functional connectome of white matter in patients with functional dyspepsia.Methods: 20 patients with FD and 24 age- and gender-matched healthy controls were included into the study. The functional connectome of white matter and graph theory were used to these participants. Two-sample t-test was used for the detection the abnormal graph properties in FD. Pearson correlation was used for the relationship between properties and the clinical and neuropshychological information.Results: Patients with FD and (...) healthy controls showed small-world properties in functional connectome of white matter. Compared with healthy controls, the FD group showed decreased global properties. Four pairs of fiber bundles that are connected to the frontal lobe, insula, and thalamus were affected in the FD group. Duration and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index positively correlated with the betweenness centrality of white matter regions of interest.Conclusion: FD patients turned to a non-optimized functional organization of WM brain network. Frontal lobe, insula, and thalamus were key regions in brain information exchange of FD. It provided some novel imaging evidences for the mechanism of FD. (shrink)

BackgroundThe effects of psychological interventions on symptoms and psychology of functional dyspepsia remain unclear. We aimed to comprehensively evaluate the effects of psychological interventions on symptoms and psychology of FD.MethodsWe searched the PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Embase electronic databases for randomized controlled trials evaluating the role of psychological interventions in FD patients published before July 2021. Standardized mean differences, risk ratios and 95% confidence intervals were calculated by a random effects model. Subgroup analyses and sensitivity analyses were also performed.ResultsFourteen (...) RCTs with a total of 1,434 FD patients were included. Compared with the control group, psychological interventions were significantly more likely to symptom improvement [RR = 1.74, 95% CI, p = 0.01], relieve gastrointestinal symptoms scores at follow up [SMD = −1.06, 95% CI, p < 0.0001], relieve gastrointestinal symptoms scores at end of treatment [SMD = −0.98, 95% CI, p < 0.001], decrease anxiety [SMD = −0.8, 95% CI, p = 0.006] and depression levels [SMD = −1.11, 95% CI, p < 0.001]. The results of the subgroup analysis showed that psychotherapy was more likely to symptom improvement, relieve gastrointestinal symptoms scores and decreased depression levels compared to the control.ConclusionsPsychological interventions may be effective in alleviating the symptoms and psychology of FD, but the effect appears to be limited to psychotherapy with fewer trials for other psychological interventions. More data from high-quality RCTs are needed to confirm their use in the treatment of FD. (shrink)

Hospital admission and mortality statistics suggested that peptic ulcer reached a peak prevalence in the mid-1950s. During the Second World War, against this background of serious and common pathology, an epidemic of dyspepsia afflicted both service personnel and civilians alike. In the absence of reliable diagnostic techniques, physicians struggled to distinguish between life-threatening illness and mild, temporary disorders. This article explores the context in which non-ulcer stomach conditions flourished. At a time when fear was considered defeatist and overt psychological (...) disorder attracted stigma, both soldiers and civilians exposed to frightening events may have unconsciously translated their distress into gastrointestinal disorders. While the nature of army food was initially identified as the cause of duodenal ulcer in servicemen, the pre-war idea that conscientious and anxious individuals were at high risk gathered support and fed into post-war beliefs that this was a stress-related illness. Diet continued to be employed as a means of management at a time when the nation was preoccupied by food because of the constraints imposed by rationing. The peptic ulcer phenomenon set much of the medical agenda for the war years and conflicted with the commonly held view that the British people had never been healthier. (shrink)