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We read with interest the guidelines on the management of adult patients with severe chronic small intestinal dysmotility by Nightingale et al.1 Enteric myopathies can indeed manifest as jejunal diverticulosis, either acquired or congenital.2 Besides asymptomatic or acute complicated cases, chronic malabsorption due to bacterial overgrowth is a possible presentation of jejunal diverticulosis.3 As stated in the guidelines, this mechanism may lead to malnutrition or even intestinal failure.1 Although surgical options (resection, bypass or stoma formation) were discussed for pseudo-obstruction, resection of diverticula is usually not considered, as surgical outcomes of treatment-refractory cases have been rarely reported.
We report here on our experience with a small series of patients with documented and refractory malabsorption due to small bowel diverticulosis who underwent partial enterectomy at the Leuven Intestinal Failure and Transplantation Centre (Leuven, Belgium) after consent. Bacterial overgrowth, steatorrhoea and medical treatment, including home parenteral nutrition (PN), were assessed. Median (range) time to referral and surgery, …
Footnotes
Contributors LW: acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, drafting of the manuscript. MC: acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, revision of the manuscript. IJ, DM, LJC, AV, MM, NL, WN, NP, MH and JP: acquisition of data, revision of the manuscript. TV: acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, drafting of the manuscript, study supervision.
Funding LW and TV are supported by the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO Vlaanderen) through a doctoral fellowship (1190619N) and senior clinical research mandate (1830517N), respectively. MC is supported by a C3 grant (C32/18/035) from KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.