[Videoproctography in the study of rectal intussusception. The authors' own experience]

Videoproctography has proved to be a useful diagnostic technique to investigate anorectal disorders; it can provide morphological and functional information which no other diagnostic method yields. From a series of 898 videoproctographs, the findings of 117 patients with rectal intussusception were retrospectively reviewed. The most common symptoms were an incomplete emptying feeling (93% of cases), obstructed defecation (78%), and a feeling of upright rectal weighting (71%). Of the three known types of rectal intussusception, the most common type was distal intussusception (44%), followed by the rectoanal type (38%) and finally by the proximal type (19%). The three types of intussusception were frequently (42%) associated with other disorders of rectal ampulla and especially with rectocele (15%), mucosal prolapse (8%), and descending perineum syndrome (12%); they had different clinical correlations and proctographic patterns and could be recognized in different defecation phases. In our personal experience, proctography with videorecording was a useful diagnostic tool in the dynamic assessment of this morphofunctional disorder which represents one of its major indications.