Abstract
Approximately 50 years ago, Apley and Naish described children who presented with repeated episodes of abdominal pain for at least 3 months without any identifiable cause under the term recurrent abdominal pain (Apley and Naish 1958). Later studies showed that this term was a “waste basket” encompassing functional and organic conditions. More recent symptom-based criteria, known as Rome criteria, exclusively define those gastrointestinal conditions thought to be of functional origin and without clinical evidence of anatomical or structural abnormalities. The third edition of the Rome criteria (Rasquin 2006), classifies pain-predominant functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) in four different conditions.
