Rome III criteria for functional gastrointestinal disorders: too much overlap to be useful?

Functional gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms are common. The Rome III classification of these symptoms into mutually exclusive disorders attempts to improve the homogeneity of patients recruited into clinical trials from secondary and tertiary care. Previous investigators have reported significant degrees of overlap between some of these conditions, but no study has examined this issue in its entirety. This was a cross-sectional survey of …