Medical Knowledge versus Perception of Patients with Abdominal Gas in a Tertiary Level Hospital of Bangladesh

Every human being has gas in abdomen. But patients try to correlate varieties of symptoms with abdominal gas. So this cross sectional symptom based study was designed to see the patients view regarding abdominal gas and its relation with medically explained symptoms at the out patient department of North East Medical College, Sylhet from January 2017 to December 2019. Consecutive patients presenting with complain of abdominal gas were included in this study. Their demographic information and explanation of symptoms resulting from abdominal gas were recorded on a pre-designed data sheet. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS 20.0 version. Total 346 patients, male 239(69.1%), female 107(30.9%), age varying from 17-83 years (mean 38.27) were enrolled. Common symptoms were bloating (fullness) of abdomen (194, 56.1%), abdominal pain (164, 47.41%), belching or eructation (149, 43.1%), heart burn (137, 39.6%), anorexia (124, 35.8%), nausea (120, 34.7%), noisy bowel (88, 25.4%), chest pain (79, 22.8%), headache (56, 16.2%), whole body pain (58, 16.8%), incomplete bowel evacuation (185, 53.5%), excess flatus (76, 22.4%), movement of gas to different part of body including head 87(25.1%) and expulsion of hot air from ear, nose and head in 69(19.9%) patients. Among them 107(30.9%) patients believed abdominal gas to be a curable disease with treatment and 222(64.2%) believed it to be a relapsing disease even after treatment. And 307(88.7%) patients were taking proton pump inhibitor (PPI) as its remedy regularly. Most of the symptoms of patients can be explained by abdominal gas. Again some patients have a misperception regarding some symptoms like heart burn, noisy bowel and sense of incomplete bowel evacuations are also related with abdominal gas. But in some instances causal relations with patients' symptoms and abdominal gas could not be explained by medical knowledge. These differences in perceptions might be related to their personal thinking and social, cultural, educational, economic condition.