We would like to thank Dr Chandrasoma for his attentive reading and kind comments on our work published in Gut. He has also provided the readers with an admirable synthesis of the most recent research on the development of the different mucosal types in the gastro-oesophageal junction region. By means of this letter, we want to reflect on some of his comments.

The quintessence of Dr Chandrasoma’s vision on cardiac mucosa (CM) is that it is not a normal structure but develops through metaplasia in the context of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease. The presence of a small length of CM in many “normal” adults could be the …