Talk:Barrett's esophagus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at the doctor's mess.
Start	This page has been rated as start-Class on the quality assessment scale
Mid	This article has been rated as mid-importance on the importance assessment scale

This article had a Microsoft "smart quote" in its title. To Microsoft users, "smart quotes" look like apostrophes, but to users of normal (i.e., Unix) software, they look like question marks, so that what I saw was "Barrett?s esophagus" as the title of the article. One of the references to "Barrett's esophagus within the article had a question mark instead of an apostrophe, and the other had an apostrophe. I have fixed the problem. I have also set the first occurence of the title within the article in bold.

But there is a technical problem. When you use "move this page" to try to move "Barrett?s esophagous" to "Barrett's esophagus", or any other article with an SM smart quote that looks like a question mark, it doesn't work! You have to edit manually. Michael Hardy 01:38 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Spelling

The spelling of "esophagus" was inconsistent; sometimes it was "esophagus" and sometimes "oesophagus". Since the article itself was titled "esophagus", I chose that spelling. -- Dominus 02:39, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Oesophagus is the British spelling. -- Carlo Maley 16:27, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I know. Wikipedia guidelines in such cases are to use a consistent spelling throughout. -- Dominus 18:30, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other

I have deleted the comment regarding a proposal by O.A. Stiennon that Barrett's esophagus is not actually a unique disease, but a subset of hiatus hernia . This comment was posted by Stiennon himself (or a relative), and the referenced website was promoting sales of his book on this subject. This idea is not a generally accepted opinion among medical professionals, and including it here is not suitable for an encyclopedic article.Sssuuuzzzaaannn 18:47, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I also deleted a recently added comment about steatorrhoea and "Barrett's Anus." No reference is given or could be found, and this would not be relevant to Barrett's esophagus in any case.Sssuuuzzzaaannn 11:00, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cancer risk

doi:10.1111/j.1365-2036.2007.03528.x meta-analyses the data, and concludes that short-segment Barrett's is less likely to become malignant. Over time, BE has become less likely to lead to cancer (?reflecting treatment with PPI) JFW | T@lk 17:52, 25 November 2007 (UTC)