Adult intussusception.

In their study of adult intussusception, Sarma et al reported that, over a 6-year period, 15 patients with the disease were identified in a tertiary hospital in South India [1]. It would be of interest to know the total number of admissions or patients in the same hospital during the study period to be reported by the authors, so that estimates of the frequency rates of the disease could have been calculated. A cross-sectional study from Glasgow, UK, estimated the annual incidence of the disease to be 2-3 cases/106 population (accounted for <0.1% of hospital admissions) [2]. In a study from Switzerland, over a 17-year period, 10 adults with intussusception were recorded in three hospitals [3]. In this study, only 3 patients were diagnosed as ileocolic intussusceptions and 2 of them suffered from lymphoma. In another recently published study of 20 adult patients from Turkey, conducted over 8 years, 5 cases of jejunojejunal intussuception were identified, most of them due to Peutz-Jeghers hamartomatous polyps. In the same case-series study, rectal bleeding was reported only in 1 patient (5%) and acute symptoms (<4 days) in 6 patients (30%) [4]. These numbers are slightly different than those reported by Sarma et al and may indicate the diversity of the disease in different source populations. Finally, in the study of Sarma et al, no case of small bowel adenocarcinoma was diagnosed in 12 patients who underwent laparotomy, indicating the rarity of this type of tumor in the adult intussusception population. This finding is in accordance with the results of another retrospective review of 41 cases from China [5].