TY - CHAP M1 - Book, Section TI - Defecatory Dysfunction A1 - Dunivan, Gena A1 - Whitehead, William A2 - Rogers, Rebecca G. A2 - Sung, Vivian W. A2 - Iglesia, Cheryl B. A2 - Thakar, Ranee PY - 2014 T2 - Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery: Clinical Practice and Surgical Atlas AB - Defecatory dysfunction is an ill-defined term that encompasses a broad range of symptoms related to infrequent or hard stools and difficult or incomplete evacuation of the rectum. Patients generally lump these together and think of them collectively as symptoms of “constipation;” when healthy young adults were asked what they mean by “constipation,” they referred, in descending order of frequency, to straining, hard stools, “want to but can’t,” infrequent stools, abdominal discomfort, and “haven’t finished.”1 Unfortunately, the symptoms reported by patients are not a reliable guide to the pathophysiologic basis of their symptoms or the choice of optimal treatment. Consequently, the Rome Foundation2 recommended a two-tiered basis for evaluating constipation: Patients are first asked how many of six commonly reported symptoms of constipation they experience at least 25% of the time, and if they endorse two or more of these symptoms and rarely experience diarrhea, they are said to have clinically significant or “functional” constipation (Table 10-1). If patients meet these symptom criteria for functional constipation and fail to respond to a trial of conservative treatment and laxatives, physiologic testing is recommended to further define the pathophysiologic basis of their constipation and to choose an appropriate treatment. SN - PB - McGraw-Hill Education CY - New York, NY Y2 - 2024/04/19 UR - obgyn.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1105830015 ER -