• Oesophageal disorders

We read with considerable interest the comments by Waldum et al, 20101 about our paper.2 In fact we agree with the majority of their comments. As for the remaining issues we believe the thrust of our paper has been misunderstood and we hope to clarify these matters too in this correspondence.

First of all, the expression of functional CCK2 receptors has been shown previously in OE33 columnar cells of the oesophagus in vitro and native and diseased oesophagus in vivo by several other groups.3–5

Second, we agree entirely that most papers do not assess the physiological concentrations of gastrin when undertaking in vitro work. Indeed we believe …