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OBJECTIVES:

Changing patterns in medical practice may contribute to temporal changes in the incidence of upper and lower gastrointestinal (GI) complications. There are limited data on the incidence of lower GI complications in clinical practice and most studies that have been done have serious methodological limitations to inferring the actual burden of this problem. The aims of this study were to analyze time trends of hospitalizations resulting from GI complications originating both from the upper and lower GI tract in the general population, and to determine the risk factors, severity, and clinical impact of these GI events.

METHODS:

This was a population-based study of patients hospitalized because of GI complications in 10 general hospitals between 1996 and 2005 in Spain. We report the age-and gender-specific rates, estimate the regression coefficients of the upper and lower GI event trends, and evaluate the …