Body surface measurements and their correlation with manometrically determined oesophageal length

Background: Oesophageal disease can lead to shortening of the oesophagus. It would be helpful if there was an easily measured anatomical length, which correlated strongly with oesophageal length in the undiseased state. Aim: To determine correlations between different body surface measurement with manometric oesophageal length.
Subjects: We recruited individuals with no symptoms of oesophageal disease and who had not undergone any surgical intervention on the stomach or oesophagus. Methods: The manometric length (length between the mid points of upper and lower oesophageal sphincters) of oesophagus was measured. The height, weight and age of the subjects along with body measurements between lower incisor teeth to xiphoid process, suprasternal notch to xiphoid process, suprasternal notch to pubic symphysis, xiphoid process to pubic symphysis and from elbow to tip of the middle finger were noted. Results and discussion: So far we have studied 16 subjects. There were 11 males and 5 female subjects with the age range of 18 to 74 yrs (mean age 37.1 yrs). The preliminary results suggest a strong relation between oesophageal length and height (P=0.007), suprasternal notch to pubic symphysis (P=0.0019) and lower incisor to xiphoid process (P=0.0073) measurements. However the rest of the parameters were not found to correlate with the length of oesophagus. In order to increase the power of the study we are recruiting more subjects, in the hope that when there is a discrepancy between predicted and actual oesophageal length. This may alert us to possible operative problems, which can occur in patients with a shortened oesophagus